Just as film, art, music and literature have the power to move people, Stefan Sagmeister's innovative work shows that graphic design, too, can cut to the emotional core. His desire is to transform stale thinking--Sagmeister Made You Look will do just that. Fully illustrated, with a red PVC slipcase, this monograph covers twenty years of his graphic design and features images from the studio archive as well as specific influences and reference points for his projects and ideas. Stefan Sagmeister, born in Austria, received his MFA in graphic design from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and, as a Fulbright scholar, a master's degree from the Pratt Institute in New York. Following stints at M&Co. in New York with Tibor Kalman and as creative director at the Hong Kong office of the advertising agency Leo Burnett, Sagmeister formed the New York-based Sagmeister Inc. in 1993. Text by Peter Hall. Designed by Sagmeister Inc., New York.
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Another self-indulgent design monograph (practically everything we have ever designed including the bad stuff) is Stefan Sagmeister's hand-scrawled subtitle for the first book about his work, Made You Look. This, and the book's clear red case and silver-gilded pages, seem contrary to the raw, handwritten style he is known for, already setting us up for a wild and very personal ride through almost the entire corpus of the 39-year-old designer's work. Sagmeister once scratched words into his skin for his own lecture poster at Cranbrook, and this is the book version--sometimes enlightening, sometimes embarrassing, always self-conscious, and ultimately touching. The story is a conversation between Peter Hall's text and Sagmeister's handwritten commentary, a perfect and believable device for an absorbing dialogue. Self-indulgent as Made You Look may be, Sagmeister lays himself open with idealism, irony, and humor, creating one of the most moving books about design. --Juliette Cezzar
