Tails of a graphic design wingman #2 - Stephan Sagmeister

In the late 90s, an Austrian designer burst onto the scene. The first impression I remember was a poster he did where he had all the info for a lecture he was giving carved into his body by his intern with an X-acto blade, which was then photographed near full frontal naked. This was so bold he immediately became the hottest designer of the day. 

In the early 2000s, Stephan was scheduled to come to SF as part of the AIGA lecture series. John and I had designed the promotions so John, knowing Stephan would be in town, invited him to lunch. Not surprisingly, it was an entertaining lunch. While Stephan was good at the design stunt, he is also one of the more thoughtful designers I’ve met. His stunts were done intentionally, and he is fully aware when his work crosses over to the art side, which is very different from design work. Throughout lunch, his conversation was always well-considered, respectful, and insightful. Watch any of the YouTube Q&A sections of his talks, and it is impressive how he handles even the most mundane audience questions.  

During lunch, we were talking about the AIGA and how ironically uncreative the organization could be. The AIGA had asked Stephan to design the poster for the 1997 national conference. In true Sagmeister form, he took full advantage of being shocking and designed the front of the poster to feature a running chicken with its head chopped off. You can imagine how this went over with the AIGA. He had good reasoning behind the chicken, which I don’t remember anymore. However, what was brilliant was he had also hand-lettered the entire poster, thereby requiring any significant design changes to incur a major delay to rework - time the AIGA didn’t have. So, after the conference committee was finally convinced to the front of the poster they moved to discuss the back. The back of the poster is rarely reproduced or remembered. It was filled with an insane amount of hand-lettered conference information, and there is one small picture. One of the AIGA reviewers noticed and asked Stephan what it was a picture of. Without skipping a beat, Stephan said, “Oh that, that’s a monkey knee.” which I’m sure after the chicken discussion seemed not surprising nor worth debating. BUT what the image really is, is a close-up of Stephan’s scrotum.