Who

One of the city's more prominent graphic designers, Stefan Sagmeister is best known for having styled hundreds of album covers.

Backstory

Sagmeister first arrived in the U.S. in 1987 when he attended Pratt on a Fulbright Scholarship. After returning to Austria to fulfill his mandatory military service (a conscientious objector, he performed community service instead) and a stint as a typographer at Leo Burnett's Hong Kong branch, in 1993 he moved to New York to work for famed designer Tibor Kalman. When Kalman moved his business to Rome, Sagmeister started his own firm, Sag Meister Inc., and began approaching record labels about designing their album covers. None were interested, though, and he made money by designing business cards. Months later, Sagmeister designed a CD cover for a friend; the drawing of an angry man covered by red-tinted plastic casing earned Sagmeister a Grammy nomination and led to invitations to design many more covers for some of the biggest names in music.

Of note

Sagmeister's done work for artists like Lou Reed, David Byrne, Aerosmith, the Rolling Stones, Pat Metheny, and Talking Heads, and serviced corporate clients including HBO, the Guggenheim Museum, and Time Warner. After four nominations, in 2005 he won his first Grammy award for the eccentric packaging of the Talking Heads boxed set Once in a Lifetime. Despite all that, his most famous creation remains a poster created back in 1999 that features text carved with an X-Acto knife onto his own torso.

No joke

Famously, Sagmeister used to keep a sign in his studio that said, simply, "Style=Fart"—a reflection of his belief that ruminations on style are nothing but hot air.

Personal

Sagmeister is single and lives in a West 14th Street condo.