Does your work make people happy? Check out Stefan Sagmeister.

 

I have been studying and working toward changing my career, aiming to make it more interesting, more challenging, more creative and more beneficial to the world.  It is a hard set of changes to bring into effect but I’m working at it. 

Recently the work of Stefan Sagmeister has caught my attention.

An Austrian-born designer working out of New York, Sagmeister does visual design for some interesting, high-profile clients and has built a career working for people who are
a) able to pay well for design, and
b) willing to let a designer create interesting messages and convey them in interesting ways, which is something Sagmeister is good at.

Something challenges me about Sagmeister’s work: Relative to contemporary notions about advertising, branding and marketing communications, it unconstrained by concerns such as integration, brand identity or sales effects.

Sagmeister suggests that branding is outdated. Considering this assertion in the context of the emergence of user-generated content, perhaps Sagmeister’s suggestion reaches further than he intended.

Anyway, I am a willing shill for Mr Sagmeister’s work primarily because he chooses to discuss ideas such as happiness, helping people, improving people’s lives by creating design, and so on. He does this self-consciously but not arrogantly or pretentiously. Whether you like his design style or not, I think some of his ideas are likely to appeal to almost anyone.

I think that whether materials and messages placed into the world by marketers and advertisers bring quality or value to the world, or have the ability to add happiness or interest to people’s lives, is something that we should consider seriously.

From a purely pragmatic standpoint, a brand that people associate with great ideas and design, shared without being diminished by overt marketing messages, might have some potential.

I suggest this is particularly true in a world where people can select the mediums and messages that interest them and can recombine marketers’ attempts to create coherent, integrated communications—with entirely unpredictable results.

Question:  Can organisations that are generous enough and self-confident enough to embrace this ideal compete successfully against ‘traditional’ competitors? Hmmm.

Give Stefan Sagmeister a minute of your time…

PS:  One of the art projects Sagmeister discusses, the Bubble Project by Ji Lee (a former Art Director at Saatchi & Saatchi New York, now Creative Director at Google), is an interesting implementation of user-generated content—both online and in the physical world. Brilliant results.