Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2966 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-01
• Number of items: 15
• Binding: Paperback
• 248 pages

Amazon.com
Amazon Best of the Month, March 2008: Many consider Stefan Sagmeister to be our most important living designer, but he reaches beyond design circles in sharing 20 Things I have learned in my life so far, including the fact that "keeping a diary supports personal development." Proving his point, this book grew from a list in his diary during a year-long commercial hiatus. He returned to paid work with greater freedom from clients and himself, and created a series of projects spelling out personal truths--"worrying solves nothing," "trying to look good limits my life," and other simple, meaningful statements. Most are public and interactive (words spelled out on the backs of swimmers in the Hudson River, or displayed by enormous blow-up monkeys lounging around Scotland, or flaming in Singaporean bamboo scaffolding), while others are more private experiments with intriguing materials (sausages, cacti, sperm). All are presented--along with personal anecdotes supporting his assertions and notes on the practicalities of creating each project--in an alluringly interactive format: a "box" of 15 booklets with unique covers that can be switched to transform the look of the case from creepy to lovely. --Mari Malcolm

From Publishers Weekly
In 2000, Austrian born, New York-based graphic designer Sagmeister created this book's eponymous list in his diary, including twenty statements such as: "Trying to Look Good Limits My Life," "Assuming is Stifling" and "Worry Solves Nothing." These "maxims," which Sagmeister admits verge on the "banal" but which are also devoid of cynicism, were transformed into art projects: "Assuming is Stifling" graced the cover of a Japanese annual report; "Everybody Always Thinks They are Right" was represented by six 33-foot white inflatable monkeys, each one displaying a different word. This "design book for non-designers" is itself an experiment in form, comprised of 15 booklets in a box whose cover is a cut out of Sagmeister's face; when inserted, each completes the portrait in a different way. One of the booklets includes essays on Sagmeister's oeuvre, the most interesting by critic Heller, who states: "This is truly the nexus of art and design in the service of expression." This book is bound to be of interest to followers of Sagmeister's work, as well as to the general reader in search of an invigorating approach to graphic design and, one might argue, autobiography.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Stefan Sagmeister is one of the most influential graphic designers working today. Since 1993, Sagmeister Inc. has focused on all things printed. He lives in New York.

Daniel Nettle is a reader in Psychology at Newcastle University and is the author of Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile.

Steven Heller is co-chair of the MFA/Design program at the School of Visual Arts.

Customer Reviews

Great designs and interesting format
This isn't a book, but a series of mini books in a cool package.

Design - dozen or so mini books, the outside is cut to show the textures on the cover of each through the holes. Each one of the covers are really cool an visually interesting.

Books - The mini books each have a typographical experiment in them and usually a page or two, explaining the sentence his experiments make (sometimes more).

This is not a how to, a our company had this project, or philosophy of book (books?). It is what he did while he took a year off, and did whatever he wanted basically.

Cool for sure, I enjoyed it a lot.

self help books usually turn me off
There is one section of bookstores that I traditionally avoid when browsing:
the self-help section. It's not that the ideas of how to live a fuller life are not
worthy of my attention, but the way these book are written usually wears me
down by their linear nature and repetition of thought. And they often seem
disingenuous. Sagmeister's book is the opposite. It is an alternative
self-help book designed for those of us that like to think about our values
but suffer from short attention spans and require visual stimulation and
maybe some shock value to get us motivated.

There is a lot of work here. A lot of ideas and images. It is a bold compilation of twenty thoughts presented in provocative visual pamphlets. Like his graphic work, the book breaks boundaries and is a bit rebellious, but not in a self-conscious manner. You actually get the feeling that Sagmeister takes his personal development as seriously as his ideas on
design and that he believes that design can make a difference. It's very optimistic. It makes you want to want art or change the world or change yourself or rethink the very form of a book. Maybe the fact that it is broken up into bite size chunks with dramatic and hilarious and curious photographs of real world examples makes us see that it is possible. Or maybe the fact that this compilation is a work in progress rather than a final thesis makes it accessible.

"Everybody who is honest is interesting" is an appropriate aphorism taken from the text. You get the sense that Sagmeister is being honest in this work. And in our world of marketing jive this is refreshing. I'm guessing that one other thing that Sagmeister has learned in his life is that most gifted designers are not gifted writers and that most need good editors. The book is especially well written and concise. My only criticism is that the pamphlets don't go back into the sleeve so easily, but I have learned to live with that.

Is there more?
I had a hard time liking this title because it seemed like it could have been more. Perhaps if I made it to his gallery show I could have felt that I connected to its vision. It is beautifully designed, all there with the big named photographers, artists, illustrators, etc. But I was left wishing that there was more that I could have gotten. It felt like a sidekick companion than the entree.