Sagmeister Inc.’s Experimental Outcamp is located in Bali, Indonesia, far from Stefan Sagmeister’s headquarters on “wonderful West 14th Street” in New York City. For the second time, Sagmeister is scratching the proverbial “seven-year itch” by dropping out for an entire year, leaving clients behind, to refresh and renew himself as a designer and artist. Sagmeister began his first client-free year in 2001, when he was 38, and he is now beginning his second at 46. He says he has only two more sabbaticals to go before his retirement age of 65 and argues that it is much more useful to take those years early, interspersed throughout his working life, rather than pin them to the end of it. In fact, after it became clear that the ideas he developed during his first sabbatical subsequently inspired his most successful design projects, he became convinced that he needed to make a respite integral to his creative regimen. How many of us dream of doing the same? Sagmeister has certainly become a model for those who can consider such a radical leap; for the rest of us, we’ll live vicariously. It was in this spirit that I caught up with him via e-mail to find out how, a few months into this adventure, his expectations are meeting reality; what inspired him to select Bali; and what he misses, if anything, now that he’s so far away.
As part of a series of type treatments, Sagmeister created the letter s floating on water, using flowers that fell from the tree in front of his studio.
HELLER: This is your second in a seven-year cycle of “sabbaticals”; what gave you the idea to make this a regular part of your life? SAGMEIS TER: My desire for the initial experimental year had many reasons, among them my experience that I often did the best thinking in time periods without pressure. After my studies, I had moved from city to city every two years, so this kind of thinking was often done in between jobs and places. After running the studio in New York City for seven years, I had no intent to move again, so this year allowed for time to explore. Ferran Adrià, who is now considered by many to be the best chef in the world, closes his restaurant north of Barcelona for six months every year—while keeping a full kitchen staff— in order to experiment. That’s half of
his time put aside for experimentation, compared with my paltry 12. 5 percent. If this second year turns out to be as enjoyable and influential for the subsequent work as the first one, I might increase the percentage considerably. HELLER: Did anything else specifically trigger this? SAGMEIS TER: When the 60-year-old Ed Fella visited our studio in New York and brought a number of his fantastic four-color ballpoint typographic experiments, I was completely blown away. He self-mockingly called it “exit art”—art he does before he dies. I was in love with the sheer inventiveness and quality of the work and at the same time felt that it would have had a bigger impact on a working life if interspersed regularly throughout one’s life. HELLER: How easy is it to put your
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