Stefan Sagmeister: Yes, design can make you happy

Stefan Sagmeister (born 1962 in Bregenz, Austria) is a New York-based graphic designer and typographer currently living in Bali, Indonesia[1]. He has his own design firm, Sagmeister Inc in New York City. He has designed album covers for Lou Reed, OK Go, The Rolling Stones, David Byrne, Aerosmith and Pat Metheny. Sagmeister studied graphic design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He later received a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in New York. He began his design career at the age of 15 at "Alphorn", an Austrian Youth magazine, which is named after the traditional Alpine musical instrument

In the video Stefan talks about moments of happiness he has had in his life and goes on to say how many of these moments had to do with design. He first talks about how he went to visit a friend in Hong Kong around 15 years ago, and at the time been a very supersticious person, upon landing at the airport he thought if he seems something good he would have a great time during his stay and if he saw something negative he would be miserable. And as he landed the first thing he noticed was a billboard with the word ‘winner’ on it. After leaving Honk Kong with a great job offer and returning to Austria, he packed his bags and another week later, still supersticious, he flew back to Honk Kong. On his way there he was thinking if the ‘winner’ billboard is still up he would have a good time and if its gone he would have a miserable time. It turned out that not only was the billboard still up, there was another one placed next to it saying ‘double-happiness. However, he had a terrible time there.

He also talks about how he went to Tokyo to visit a new museum. The innaugral exhibit was called happiness and under that theme the exhibition was sectioned into 4 sections. Arcadia, Nirvana, Desire and Harmony. Each section was different and unique. What he took away from the exhibition was that most of the pieces in their was about the visulization of happiness and not about happiness. He says that he felt a little bit cheated as the visualization is a easy thing to do and his studio does that sort of thing all the time.

All in all the Stefan goes on to mention and show many other visuals of design that was trully creative and no doubt depicts happiness through them.