I think that maybe, subconsciously, it became clear to me quite early that designing has two main parts of it. One of it, of course, is the functionality. Like, you want to communicate something.

And then, the other part, I don't know, the possibility to also make something joyous that somebody would be a little bit delighted when they see it. And I think, so, these two things as a combination I always saw as the necessary ingredients into basically any sort of design. I think from the beginning, of course, I loved to combine my two interests - design and music.

Once I thought about that, and once it occurred to me that I could open a small studio that would really concentrate on doing design for music, my other love, that seemed extremely enticing, and I remember having a real warm and fuzzy feeling in my stomach, just being excited about that. I also knew that that's the job basically, if you're designing packaging for music, is to visualize the music. This really is a cover for David Byrne and Brian Eno, both of them absolute favorite musicians of mine that I've listened to a lot.

And look, even after years the battery still works. You have the CDs as being part of that. Then you have a whole little booklet in there, a pill and a dice giving you strange advice.

Plus, a whole little booklet that sort of, of course, contains the lyrics but also gives you an image going through this odd house. There is a steel door in the kitchen going down to some basement that's probably some dark side, but we don't really know - - it's just hinted upon. In the meantime, of course, the switch from the large vinyl - the 12-inch cover - to the CD had taken place.

And I saw that many record companies just reduced the album cover down to the new smaller space, which of course didn't work. I mean, it's very much likely this type wouldn't even work on a small, or reduced down. My guess would be that we would have done a totally different design.

Maybe fewer dots. I think there's some sort of possibility for an adaptation. But this one, probably considering also would need a different composition since the CD is not a real square, it has another line here.

So, you probably would have to recompose the whole thing. Because you had, that format was designed for that format. And reducing it down and putting it into a little plastic box yielded very unsatisfying results.

But I saw that the CD cover had other advantages - namely, you had many many more pages. Sometimes 16, sometimes 24 pages. So you could tell a story in a very different way.

The usual trajectory was, talk to the band, see why they made a new album, what's the influence, what the inspiration for the album was, where they wrote it, what it was about. . .

And really talk about the album, the lyrics, the concept behind the album. And we normally tried to avoid talking about the cover at all. David and Brian, of course, they are always among my very very favorite clients.

They're definitely, visually, very sophisticated. So, it's quite easy to talk about things, talk them through and it was always very much a joy. Well, no one quite thinks like him.

He's an incredible risk-taker. He knows exactly what he wants to portray. So, if you're hiring him to do graphic design or if you're hiring him to do marketing, it is pretty much the same path.

First, I have to understand the project, so I might meet the people, talk to the people, find out what they want to achieve, find out who their audience is. . .

Learn as much about what change do they want to achieve, because if they don't want to achieve any change then there is nothing to really do. Depending on what it is, the idea generation process even that one can be extremely different. Let's say, if we would do a film poster, it's much more of a distillation process.

In a similar way probably that if you do a brand for a. . .

Like if you do a new logo for a big brand. Here the process is much more what are the real, most important things that brand wants to communicate and how can we distill that in a single image that really communicates that. All of Stefan's work is very rigorous.

He's not a lazy designer. I've never seen a lazy piece of work from him. He creates everything.

The kind of projects we did that were similar were probably record album packaging and he really functions much more as an artist and I was much more of an art director. So, I would say that our approaches were dissimilar, though we both liked big, extensive, and fantastic illustration. But I did it much differently, more differently.

. . He made his own, I was buying it from other people.

I have sketchbooks. Normally I have a combination of sketchbooks, like a small one that I do quickly sketches in. Even there I might just make a note, also.

And then I have a large one where I do tighter sketches in, where I try to use the space more carefully. Or also, because as you go along I tend to create a whole bunch of ideas. And some of these ideas might not be right this time, but they might be the beginning of an idea for something totally different.

Not all that often, but here and there I might go through old sketchbooks, see if something triggers something from something that had nothing to do again with the thing at hand now. This is a project that we just made for an exhibition in China. And this is basically a very large piece of canvas, so, it's almost 3 meters by 2 meters.

And you have embroidered onto it these very simple forms, like these very simple cones. And there's a book stuck on them, and that book will be very very carefully embroidered, quite realistically embroidered. And this one was all about literacy in the past 200 years.

How illiteracy changed from being very high to being very low worldwide. This one, I think, is about poverty. How, basically, people dying in famines changed from the last 200 years.

I do enjoy the creation, the idea process, but sometimes it's difficult to get into it. So, it can also be very frustrating, specifically when nothing comes. It's just not.

. . It's not a lot of fun to sit in front of an empty space.

Because sitting there for hours with nothing arriving is just too painful. You know, also if you think about his work practice, he's always kept his office very small. That's by choice.

As you know, he takes sabbaticals every few years. That was extremely important to him is to be able to clear his head and that there's a fearlessness. You know, about like, "Am I going to lose clients?

" You know, "How am I going to sustain it? " I don't know any architecture firm or any other design firm or anybody else that would just say, "I'm taking off for a year. I'm closing.

I'm not taking on anyone else. " I mean, that approach in and of itself is just wild. It's very easy when you're in a very busy studio environment to get stuck in that "busy-ness" and not really take advantage of a possibility to take a step back and look at the bigger picture and sort of like check, "Is this really what I'm supposed to be doing?

" I'd say that the sabbaticals really came about because I found that after seven years of our own studio, and of it going very well, and after overcoming quite some fears that I had, I went for it anyway. And it turned out to be not only extremely an enjoyable year, but also very fruitful year where many of the thoughts and ideas that I was able to implement in the next 7 years came out of. I think he is functioning much closer to a fine artist.

And by that I'm talking about sort of economics of it. Because I always thought the difference between design and fine art is not a matter of value judgment, but a matter of how you begin to make things. I mean, a fine artist essentially decides they want to make something and they make it.

And if somebody else appreciates it and uses it and buys it, that's terrific. But you don't count on that. Whereas as a graphic designer you're usually commissioned to do something and you usually are collaborating with the client in a specific way.

Stefan did that for a long period of time and now he actually isn't doing that. He's functioning much more as a fine artist, where he's controlling his content and his exhibitions and things he wants to do in that vein. While I was on sabbatical, I felt that there might be a possibility to use the language that I had clearly learned - graphics - in ways that are non-commercial, that are more personal, or more expressive.

If I look at that series of things I've learned in my life so far, which really were the initial impetus - was a list that I drew into the diary. And when that then became design projects, the sentence was already there and then, of course, what to do with that sentence still needed to have an idea process. Like, do I just write or type that sentence out or do I make it out of things or do I make an installation that stays in a public space or.

. . ?

I had no idea if an audience would react to it or not. We were able to completely change medium, change production methods, change form and typography from one to the other, sometimes completely. Some were installations, some were digital, some were online, some were haptic, some were gigantic, some were tiny.

I mean, I think that overall we just tried out everything. If I look back at the - I think the studio now has been over 25 years old - and I look back at the pieces that I really think were worthwhile doing, the vast majority of them came out of thinking or beginnings that happened in the sabbatical years. A number of years earlier, I was on sabbatical in Bali.

My best friend visited from New York and he was checking how I was spending my time. I was designing furniture and he thought that this furniture for my own studio was really a waste of my time, that I somehow - that I should be involved in something where other people have more from. And when I thought about what that could be, that more useful thing, a film about happiness came to my mind.

Then when I returned from Bali and we started working on the film properly, it became clear quite quickly that doing a film on happiness in general was almost impossible. For one thing, it was such a big subject. It turned out that making a film about happiness was somehow like making a film about life.

So I narrowed it down to my own happiness instead. After all, on my own happiness I really am the world's number one expert. That turned out to be a much bigger challenge than I had thought of and hoped for and it became an 8-year project.

And the other projects, let's say, the exhibition and then ultimately the talk, came out of that desire to make the film. I actually found a repeatable way to manufacture a happy moment. He knows exactly.

. . He has his mark on everything.

So, I'm going to give you. . .

This was a dispenser that you would pull out and it would give you instructions. And, of course, you can see that everything is yellow. Happy, right?

So, this is what somebody would pull out. "Call your mom and talk to her about the show. " "Adopt an accent for the next half an hour.

We recommend French. " "Find a good spot and point it at the ceiling. Once a crowd of curious onlookers has garnered, leave them to their wonder.

" And I could go on and on. We literally learned that if the exhibition can reach a certain size and a certain kind of prominence, many hundreds of thousands of people, and reach them in ways that are more likely more. .

. How do I say that? More.

. . Leave a bigger impression than a website.

And so, from that point, we found that exhibitions are really a great medium. Put a quarter in here. It goes outside.

Anybody can take it from the museum. It was packed. Just packed.

And, actually, the "Happy" shows were the most attended at the ICA. (Institute of Contemporary Arts) And this show actually traveled to, I would say - and he has it better than me - but I would say 10 or 12 venues around the United States and Europe. Stefan is a prankster and you can see that in his graphics, you can see that in his messaging for ads and certainly in "The Happy Show.

" He wants people to be engaged. I mean, I wouldn't go as far as saying that graphic design is the best profession to change the world. Now, if you look at design in general and all the design professions, the applied design professions, they have an unbelievable influence on the world.

100% of the things that surround us are designed. The apartment. The building.

The street. The neighborhood. The park.

And all of these spaces, from the interface to the city planning, depending on how well they are done, this has an influence. Has an influence on how I feel and has an influence on how I behave. In '93 I came back to New York City.

. . Starting to work for my old mentor, Tibor Kalman.

I think that from a design point of view, he was possibly the biggest influence on me. One of the lines that he mentioned a number of times was that you should only do things twice. The first time, you don't know what you're doing.

The second time, you do. The third time would be boring. He really took that seriously.

I think I'm not quite as adventurous. I myself basically never consciously thought about labels or that I wanted to be the bad boy of design or any of that stuff. But what I would like to do is to create things that either help somebody or delight somebody or hopefully do both.

So, I do feel that design is what I've been put on this earth to do in many ways.

Stefan Sagmeister : portrait d’un « bad boy » du design