Stefan Sagmeister

Stefan Sagmeister (born August 6, 1962) is an Austrian graphic designer, storyteller, and typographer based in New York City. In 1993, Sagmeister founded his company, Sagmeister Inc., to create designs for the music industry. He has designed album covers for Lou Reed, OK Go, The Rolling Stones, David Byrne, Jay Z, Aerosmith, Talking Heads, Brian Eno and Pat Metheny. From 2011 until 2019 he partnered with Jessica Walsh under the name Sagmeister & Walsh Inc. Sagmeister studied graphic design at the Hochschule fuer Angewandte Kunst, Vienna, graduating in 1986. He later won a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in New York, where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree.

Design career In 1991, Sagmeister worked with Leo Burnett's Hong Kong Design Group. In 1993, he returned to New York to work with Tibor Kalman's M & Co. design company. In 1993, he set up his company Sagmeister Inc in New York. He has since designed branding, graphics, and packaging for clients as diverse as the Rolling Stones, HBO, the Guggenheim Museum and Time Warner. He teaches in the graduate design department of the School of Visual Arts in New York and was previously the Frank Stanton Chair at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York.

Works and projects Stefan Sagmeister has produced multiple exhibitions that blend graphic design with research, interactive installation, and thematic inquiry. His exhibitions often combine visual communication with broader questions about human experience, perception, and data.

The Happy Show The Happy Show is a thematic exhibition centered on Sagmeister’s ten‑year exploration of happiness and how it can be understood and shaped.

Sagmeister & Walsh: Beauty Presented in 2019, Sagmeister & Walsh: Beauty was developed in collaboration with designer Jessica Walsh and shown at venues including the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt/Main and the MAK in Vienna. The show aimed to explore why people are drawn to beauty and how aesthetic qualities influence perception and everyday experience, arguing that beauty is not merely decorative but can have functional value.

The exhibition included around 70 object groups and installations across themed sections such as “What is Beauty,” “The Eye of the Beholder,” and “Transformational Beauty,” inviting visitors to engage with beauty in varied contexts.

Now Is Better Now Is Better is a long‑term project that Sagmeister and his studio have developed since 2019, with major public showings in 2023 and 2024. It visualizes long‑term statistical data including trends in democracy, war and peace, health, and literacy by embedding contemporary graphic compositions into 18th‑ and 19th‑century historical paintings.

The exhibition debuted at Patrick Parrish Gallery in New York and has toured internationally, including at the GGG Gallery in Tokyo and at venues in Seoul, South Korea.

It’s Getting Better In 2024, Sagmeister presented It’s Getting Better at the K11 Museum in Shanghai, an expanded iteration of the Now Is Better concept. The exhibition featured more than 100 works spread over 850 m² of gallery space.

In addition to data‑derived visual works, his exhibition included documentary materials and everyday objects such as water glasses and apparel connected to the exhibit’s themes. He designed to provide a comprehensive view of the long‑term trends represented in the project and to encourage visitors to consider shifts in global conditions over time.

This project situates Sagmeister’s visual interventions in a high‑altitude location, integrating historic paintings with contemporary graphic inserts that often visualize local Austrian data. The setting the Ice Q glass cube at the mountaintop emphasizes the context of the works and the long‑term perspective that Sagmeister’s exhibitions explore.

Awards Sagmeister received a Grammy Award in 2005 in the Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package category for art directing Once in a Lifetime box set by Talking Heads. He received a second Grammy Award for his design of the David Byrne and Brian Eno album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today in the Grammy Award for Best Recording Package category on January 31, 2010. He received the 2009 . In 2013 Sagmeister was awarded the Golden Medal of Honor of the Republic of Austria.

In 2018, he was voted Austrian of the Year by the Austrian newspaper Die Presse.

Exhibitions

2000 Design Biannual, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York 2001 Stealing Eyeballs, Kunstlerhaus, Vienna; Solo exhibition, Gallery Frédéric Sanchez, Paris 2002 Solo exhibition, Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna 2003 Solo exhibition, Museum fur Gestaltung, Zurich, Switzerland; Solo exhibition, DDD Gallery Tokyo 2012 The Happy Show, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia 2013 The Happy Show, Design Exchange, Toronto 2013 The Happy Show. MOCA, at Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles 2013 Jewish Museum, New York 2013 The Happy Show, Chicago Cultural Center 2013 The Happy Show, Paris, Gaite Lyrique 2015 The Happy Show, Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna 2015 The Happy Show, The Museum of Vancouver, Vancouver, Canada 2015 The Happy Show, Museum für angewandte Kunst Frankfurt 2018/2019 Sagmeister & Walsh: Beauty, Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna 2019 Sagmeister & Walsh: Beauty, Mak Frankfurt 2019 Sagmeister & Walsh: Beauty Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg 2021 Sagmeister & Walsh: Beauty Fondation d’entreprise Martell 2021 Beautiful Numbers, Thomas Erben Gallery 2024 Better and Better, Ice Q, Austria 2024 Besser, Galerie Maximilian Hutz, Austria 2024 This will be Boring, A4x Museum, Chengdu, China 2024 Master exhibit, SVA Gallery Chelsea, New York 2024 Beautiful Numbers, Lviv, Ukraine 2025 Por Fin, Algo Bueno, MAZ Museo, Guadalajara, Mexico 2025 My Butter is Better, Galeria Hilario Galguera, Madrid, Spain

Filmography The Happy Film (2016, documentary)