THE DESIGN GURU
[www.thehindu.com]

How did you enter design and music industry?

Design and music are my two interests. As a teenager I was interested in the design of album covers. I studied design in Vienna and worked in a magazine. In 1993 I entered music industry.

And met Mick Jagger?

Oh yes. I can tell you about meeting Mr. Jagger.

Jagger's assistant Lucy gave me a quick rundown on Mick and I found him to be friendly but busy.

He grabbed my portfolio and said, “So, you’re the floaty one.” “The floaty one?” “Yeah, all your covers seem to float in the plastic box.” He liked the Lou Reed package, liked the attention to detail in some of the others. I asked him about his favourite Stones covers and he mentioned without hesitation: Exile on Main Street , Sticky Fingers and Some Girls . These are my favourites as well, I told him.

Jagger showed me the presentation for the stage designs, labelled ‘The Blasphemy Tour,’ and I got it.

I felt like I had won the first prize in ‘The Big Rolling Stones Meet the Band All Expenses Paid’ radio show contest, I said. And they all cracked up.

How much of the music influences the design of the cover?

Look at the iconic covers - Pink Floyd Dark Side Of The Moon , Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s… and such. A good cover is meaningless if the music is bad. Generally, the musicians and the designers meet and do a visualisation. That’s how it works.

IHAVEANIDEA
[ihaveanidea.org]


ihaveanidea: Give me a crazy client story with the big lesson you learnt from the experience.

Stefan: Here is a long account of my first meeting with Mr. Mick Jagger: On Wednesday, a brand new and extra-clean stretch limo picks me up at the studio. We are going to Newark airport, and the driver hands over business class tickets for LA and I have a stupid grin on my face all the way to the airport, looking out over the New Jersey industrial landscape with the Statue of Liberty in my back, contemplating if this is one of those ‘happy’ moments that I have about once a year.

The next morning, Jagger’s assistant Lucy meets me in the bar, gives me a quick rundown on Mick and we go to the suite. In the elevator I’m nervous. Mick opens the door, turns around immediately without saying hello and I feel awkward. Lucy introduces us, and he’s friendly but busy going through a Sotheby catalogue with Charlie Watts. “At nine million that’s a real bargain”, he says in heavy British accent looking at a Monet painting. “Pity I have no walls left to hang it”.

As I help Lucy opening the water bottles, Mick grabs my portfolio and says, “So, you’re the floaty one”. “The floaty one?” “Yeah, all your covers seem to float in the plastic box.” He likes the Lou Reed package, he likes the attention to detail in some of the others and now I can stop being nervous. I ask him about his favorite Stones covers and he mentions without hesitation: Exile on Main Street, Sticky Fingers and Some Girls. These are my favorites as well: “We should have an easy time working together since I would have told you exactly the same covers only in a different order: Sticky Fingers, Some Girls and Exile on Main Street“. Charlie Watts (in lowered voice) asks Jagger: “What’s on the Sticky Fingers?” to which Mick replies: “Oh, you know Charlie, the one with the zipper, the one that Andy did”.

The stupid happy grin is back on my face.
Jagger shows me the presentation for the stage designs, labeled “The Blasphemy Tour”, with a huge baroque cross in the center of the stage. “Just look at it for style, forget about the title and the cross, we got rid of that.” I mention that I’m certainly glad they did, cause after having had the orthodox Hindus on my back for the use of Hindu iconography on the Aerosmith cover I have little desire to revisit the religious world and have right wing Christian groups making bomb threats. Watts asks me about my accent and I tell him all about Bregenz, Austria and that I lived in New York for the past eight years, and that I’ll fly back there tonight. “Oh, you came here especially for this, so this is like a little vacation then.” I tell him I feel like I’ve won first price in “The Big Rolling Stones Meet the Band All Expenses Paid” radio show contest, they crack up and I am out of there. I take the limo back to Rizzoli’s, get some books on Baroque, meet with the stage designers and fly out at 8:30. I feel good and am asleep before the plane leaves the ground, having learned no big lesson whatsoever.

Q&A: Stefan Sagmeister
[rollingstoneindia.com]

Have there been any raging conflicts?
Not always. When I worked with the Rolling Stones for Bridges to Babylon, it went really well, mostly because I worked directly with Mick Jagger, who was not only wonderful to work with, but also one who was very much in charge of things. There was very little interference from the record company and management. When you have to deal with a single client, things become quite easy. By far, the most difficult job I’ve ever done in my life was Aerosmith for their album Nine Lives. It had nothing to do with the band. The record company played a gigantic role, making it obscure as to who our client really was. It was a problematic to work on.

That was really interesting, thanks for posting it.

It struck me as strange, though, having read the longer version, that in the first version he didn't mention that Charlie was in the room!

"At nine million that's a real bargain"

Quote
Aquamarine
That was really interesting, thanks for posting it.

It struck me as strange, though, having read the longer version, that in the first version he didn't mention that Charlie was in the room!

The "interviews' all seemed to have happened at different times. Hence Stefan’s' recollection is somewhat incomplete in one of the interviews.

Here's a more complete story
[www.heraldsun.com.au]

MICK Jagger knew he had the perfect man to design the next Rolling Stones album. Stefan Sagmeister had the band covered, as seen in his design for Sticky Fingers.

The year was 1997 and Stefan Sagmeister's impressive track record included poster and cover art for Lou Reed and David "Talking Heads" Byrne.

But when the award-winning graphic designer met Jagger and the band in London to discuss concepts for Bridges to Babylon, he found there was a completely new brief.

"I had to come up with an idea for that new brief in time for another meeting that same day," he says.

Jagger encouraged Sagmeister to visit the British Museum and check out the Babylonian collection. Inspired by the sculptures, he devised a rampant Assyrian lion on its hind legs and parlayed this memorable image into Rolling Stone posters, stage designs and tour merchandise.

"It's quite a machine," he says of the Stones, "with Mick Jagger as the CEO."

Sagmeister, visiting Melbourne for agIdeas international design week, is bigger than the sum of his music-packaging parts.

His eponymous New York-based company takes pride in designing "all things printed" -- posters, postcards and perfume packages, books, billboards and annual reports.

And if London's renowned Design Museum is right, Sagmeister Inc. has the ability to "come up with potent, original, stunningly appropriate ideas" almost every time.

"That is our strong suit," the 47-year-old designer says. "If clients come with a concept which they visualise already, we are normally not the right designers for them."

Sagmeister grew up in the Austrian Alps, studied graphic design in Vienna and established a studio in New York in 1993 (which is his base when he's not living in Bali).

Some of his early "hand-made" images were amusing -- bare bums, wagging tongues, a headless chook. Others alarmed viewers. In 1999, he slashed his own torso with text and photographed the result for a design conference graphic.

Three years earlier, Sagmeister "tattooed" Lou Reed's face with lyrics for an album poster.

"We always meet with the band," he says. "We always talk about the history of songs: who wrote them, why they wrote them, why they think it's necessary to make another album. Often, we get unfinished songs and listen to those songs over and over while designing."

Does he have a favourite record cover?

Sagmeister nominates Sticky Fingers, the 1971 Rolling Stones album designed by pop artist Andy Warhol. Teasing and subversive, "that album has so many associations with it", he says.

"Jagger and I talked about Sticky Fingers at our (London) meeting and as we are talking, it turns out (drummer) Charlie Watts has no idea what the cover looks like.

"So Jagger tells him, 'You know, the one that Andy did. The one with the zipper'. And then I think Charlie got a clue.

"He was not playing a game or anything. Charlie seems to be uninterested in things that don't have anything to do directly with the music."

Sagmeister won a Grammy award for designing a 2003 Talking Heads box set called Once in a Lifetime.

Now, when music can easily be downloaded, he thinks the "high time" of art-directed CD covers is over.

"I am personally not nostalgic about it," he says. "There are so many other things to do."

Like designing furniture, teaching, writing books, and "designing something that induces happiness from the point of view of the designer and the consumer".

Sagmeister is instinctively democratic. He wants good design to reach as wide an audience as possible and this is a key message as he fronts forums at agIdeas.

"Designing things that lift people's lives . . . that's what was in my mind when I wanted to become a designer. Still is."

agIdeas 2009 international design week, from tomorrow, Hamer Hall. Bookings: 9416 2966 or www.agideas.net