OUGD502: Stephan Sagmeister Q&A

"The James Bond of Graphic Design"

One of the highlights on Thursday afternoon of D&AD 2017 was a Q&A with Austrian Graphic Designer Stephan Sagmeister, ran by the editor of Creative Review, Patrick Burgoyne. The discussion was very inspiring about how people respond to beauty, and developed to a discussion on the concept of beauty, being a simple pleasure accessible through everything. Beauty is power in conviction and something done well, an area explored in depth by Burgoyne. The interview was fairly casual and was open to a Q&A from the floor, so I was preparing questions throughout as how often do you have the chance to ask Stephan Sagmeister a question? Not a lot.

Q&A  (27/04/2017)

Explain your interest in beauty and what prompted you to investigate it?

Well i think ultimately it might not have come out in the talk that much yes its true i saw a transparency between architecture from the medieval times to whats being built in the 60s, 70s and 8-0s, but from a much more studio related level, we actually came to beauty through function. Like we discovered whenever we took form seriously then it just seemed to work and that we keep it a number of times, and we found out how this really worked, so the goal of the client could be achieved.. And if the form, and the form related, and that played a big part in that then I just started to investigate it. Years and years ago I did a short talk about it in India that was loopy and didn't make much traction at all, then i resurrected it amongst the projects and our own studio project kind of rose and I had to shorten the talk quite bit to keep within that 45 minutes distance. Normally I have quite a few number of projects from the studio in there where I can show actual ‘this is a project where we took form and really pushed it and these were the results’. There was one which it was for a cloud company, basically its a company that wrote a very sophisticated piece of software that wrote a large number of data onto the cloud, and they wanted to show security, normally this was all done through padlocks and big metal and heavy type with bars infront of it, that sort of thing, and we came in with something completely different and the client who pulled in all the data and really reaped the reward, it was the most successful solution and it had something to do with form that nobody else did, and the interesting part is that when it was published also on design blogs it was badly reviewed by other designers, but it was also designers who said ‘yeah yeah this shit is just for Sagmeister & Walsh’s Portpholio’, but actually in real life this model works. And unbeknown to us, the scene over our client wrecked those blogs and exerted himself in the discussion, and said ‘no no you guys don't get it’, the only reason isn't that we really made it this way because we hoped it was going to work, this was a really functional piece; yes it looked pretty but it really functioned to its purpose.

  If there is a lack of ornament or experimentation with form, how much of that comes from fear? How much of that comes from putting something out there where there is lots to disagree with? A very simplified almost psudo-modernist approach is a safe bet because there is less to argue about?

Yes, absolutely. You know lets say if you do a gallery the safest thing is to do white walls, and if you’re doing a book then the safest thing is to put everything on white, and its true if you put everything on white then the chances you are going to fuck up is somehow lower, than if you use something or really insert something into it. I also feel that this has gone so unbelievably far that so much of that stuff that works in meanings when you can go through a piece infront of a client and say this thing and that thing and this thing, but it never works in real life. I mean an easy example would be airline exit cards, you know its pure its all built on the principles from the 1920s, working on a symbol syetem introduced by another Austrian, and so basically all the way until about four years ago all the airlines were doing cards like this- they were built that way for purely functional reasons, and I am on the plane maybe once a week- its a rare week when i’m not on a plane- and I have never ever seen a single person take that card out of the pocket and actually look at it. So, very clearly from a functionality point of view this is zero. This does not work. But, it didn't seem to deter any of the airlines- I have a collection of hundreds of these cards, I steal them because they say do not remove from the Airplane, and I have hundreds of them built on this idea from the 1920s, and its so interesting because if the airplane designers were to be as dull and as stupid as graphic designers are then we would all still fly the plane from the Night Brothers, this is not the 1920s, and somehow these things get there momentum on their own, some airlines must have noticed this clearly isn't working, so instead of putting it on a card lets print it on the little shift table, so you would basically have to stare at it for the duration of your flight- and that still didn’t work. And I think it really started working when either New Zealand Air or Virgin first discovered they had a video screen on their plane, and so they could make a fun video out of this stuff. And I know the Virgin video has at least 60million views on Youtube seen by people not even on planes. I feel there is a manor about the classic modernist layout, yes it looks appealing because you can read it, but it doesn't mean someone will actually read it. I mean there are so many, three are whole categories about, like if you take an architecture book, by its design it is already not readable because if you have a book that is this large and has a lot of text in it, how are you going to read it? Are you going to sit at a coffee table like this and read all long text? Likely you’re not, its just this faux intellectualism, its just an faux-interlectual ornament.

(Austerity. SS: Yes exactly)

I remember having very excited arguments about this with a UK critic who shall remain unnamed, who was a very much a champion of the classic format for a design and an artwork, and my opinion is that it also feel like designer, it should not just be a white box that features some of that work but the whole thing should feel like that. He was very much against that, from my point of view I wanted the argument as it seems tat the books that are designed holistically are doing much better; they are selling much better and other designers have more interest in it.

If there is this fear of ornament how much does it come from this ideas that designers like to portray what they do as the solution to a problem, that there are a series of logical steps that leads to this solution and only this solution?

I’ve heard specifically in regular press i’ve seen interviews with designers in the regular press where the journalist asks ‘so you’re all about making things look good’ and invariably the answer of the designer is ‘oh not thats not what we’re about at allll.. we’re all about concept or solving problems to whatever it is, my feeling when this is a suspicion, that most of the people who are saying this don't know how to make something look good and I find that its actually incredibly difficult to make something look good and i’m not talking about copying art decor and it looks fine, but to come up with something that is aesthetically pleasing in a 21st century now kind of way is incredibly difficult. Max Bill actually wrote very eloquently about this and his stance (Max Bill being the original modernist designer, before Muller-Brockman/Tshichold/Vignelli etc) his view was that it has to functionally work, but beauty has to be a goal for anything to actually work. Say a chair, a chairs main function is to sit on, however that chair can have many side functions, and an easy one might be that if that chair is totally gorgeous, you can expand its longevity..if its a really beautiful chair then one might get it repaired as apposed to an ugly chair that you throw out after something breaks on it. Beauty might have a total environmental effect as people are keeping things for much longer, i’ve been waling around with a leather bag i’ve had for 25 years. I’ve had it repaired a dozen times simply because I think its beautiful not because its particularly practical or anything.. so I have not bought another leather bag in 25 years as a result. But theres many other side functionalities a bag or a chair may have  which can be improved by beauty.

So are you equating beauty with ornament?

No, not at all. I think that i didn't make that quite clear in the talk. No not at all, I think that the easiest way I could say it is from a philosopher from the United States who said that ‘we find beauty in things done well’, and this can be completely minimalistic, meaning i’ve just literally spent a night in the ‘house of light’, James Thuells private place that you can rent out and sleep beneath the sky scape, it couldn't be any more minimal, it was simply a square hole in the ceiling and it was overpowering beauty. Beauty that you could feel and touch and, and I went with a friend who is not in the art world and not necessarily swooned by art pieces and she was completely transformed by it. There is not an ornament to be seen anywhere in that figure so its not about ornament, its very much about the maker putting a lot of love, care and attention into this thing.

Presumably this could be expressed in non visual aspects as well? You were talking earlier about things like app design, surely there must be a certain beauty in things which just work well and leaves you feeling good rather than frustrated.. thats a form of beauty surely?

What I find is key is that area for a second is that in many of the wrong line application, including digital applications, there is quite an absence of beauty as a goal. Even if we keep with the most quoted company, look at Apple, there is a clear delight in the product, meaning we haven’t quite got use to them yet. There is clear delight and thought that went into the packaging, I mean so many people comment on what a little theatre it is when they unpack an iPhone or whatever it is; and I find much less of that on the Apple website, yes, it seems to have a somewhat similar aesthetic but not the same amount of thought or sacrifice that goes into it. Johnathon Ives was once talking about the stand of the old iMac, and how he worked to have that same thing made out of a single piece rather than living with the tiny seam that would be there when made out of two pieces, and the result of this was actually changing manufacturers. For those of us who have ever made anything in large numbers, changing manufacturers for a company like Apple is craaazyyyy that is too much work that there are so many difficulties to change your entire production line for something thats made in the millions, and all that trouble just because Johnathon thought he didn't like that little seam line that was there, at the back of the iMac that most customers would likely not see. I don’t see that same power and will of absence with their online office.

I wonder how much of that is because of the impact of UX, UI and data on the digital world..I guess that collision of a soft wear engineering mindset, a science mindset and a design mindset mitigates more towards universal standards rather than things departed from ‘the norm’?

I’ve fallen into this trap myself and I think a good example for me would be charity work, I mean when we take on a charity we don’t do it to enter it into D&AD we do it because we think we can help that charity, and we only take charities on that we really believe in, and i mean that mindset of what can we do to really help them? Beauty goes out the window because its like ‘who gives a shit about beauty we have to save whatever,’ the rainforest or whatever it is and I’ve just had an example of a young designer that use to work with us, very form heavy, who is muslim and he got involved with a charity close to his heart, its some sort of anti-trump charity that protests about the signing off of muslims, and the stuff that he sent me to show on my Instagram was extremely cold and was just a map of the US with just some san serif type  and because I did actually believe in his cause I did actually feature it and it got the lowest distribution, i’m not even talking about likes, it got the lowest distribution of the month. And i’m not just saying this because all our followers are pro-trump, they have responded extremely well to lots of anti-trump things we have shown and I am convinced that this was totally connected with its formal coldness. I actually advised him to totally redesign it and run it again again, or stay with that subject for a second, I have talked to the chief designer of a very large online platform about at least testing if a more beautiful version of this would work better, and even though its so possible, they never even considered it. They never ran a version that was more form based next to the one completely modernist and grid based and see if their was a difference. 

From the Sagmaister Q&A I realised that ideas again are at their most powerful broken down, and the value of beauty can be an emotion just as much an aesthetic quality. The most powerful design can also be the most simple. Sagmeister was a calm and collected speaker, and looks at design fully holistically, something I want to take on in the future as it was clear from the whole D&AD experience, that design is in no way a stand alone thing- design is the silent partner making everything function efficiently, or at all! The removal of design is the removal of soul and the removal of a brain from the designer is removing any potential the design could have on the world. Keep it simple.