Stefan Sagmeister: (JP/J.B. Djwan)

If grammy award-winning graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister has learned anything in his 46 years, it is the importance of taking the time to reignite the passion for what you love.

Sagmeister left his home in New York for a 12-month “sabbatical” from his design studio Sagmeister Inc., which has designed album covers for great warriors of rock such as The Rolling Stones, Lou Reed and Talking Heads. His covers are legendary. As I.D. Magazine wrote of his work: “Sagmeister’s CD package designs are what poetry is to prose: Distilled, intense, cunning, evocative and utterly complete. His intentions have set a new standard.”

For all this level of praise and his connections to the heady world of rock stars and air-kissing art crowds, Sagmeister borders on the nerdy. Two meters tall, in jeans and a simple shirt, he is warm, friendly and charming – traits that are teamed with a brain that sears with white-hot ideas.

His delightful nerdiness is perhaps a physical expression of one of his maxims, collected in a book of What I have learned in my life so far: “Trying to look good limits my life.”

This philosophy is simple. Less time looking in the mirror means less time being self-conscious and less time building walls around yourself. The result is more time being productive, staggeringly creative and genuinely interesting – all of which Sagmeister does in spades.

What’s more, he is quite happy to share. On a howling rain-soaked night last week, Sagmeister gave a lecture on “What I have learned in my life so far” to the Ubud Rotary Club.

When asked what he had learned so far in Bali, Sagmeister quipped: “When dogs are around, bend down and pick up a stone.”

This year in Bali is Sagmeister’s second self-imposed sabbatical since he opened his design studio in 1993. Taking a year off is, for him, essential for renewal, for refocusing his direction and creativity.

He drew on the practice of sabbaticals in academia – where it is a standard method to hot-wire academics’ drive for their work – as a company initiative after he realized that time away could be more productive than repetitive work year on year.

“I had a fantastic designer visited the studio. He was in his 60s and doing what he called ‘exit out’ work – things to do before he died. While that may have been flippant, it struck me as a pity that humans spend 25 years of their lives learning, another 40 years working and then they retire,” he says.

“While it is very enjoyable to have a year off, it’s a lot better for society to have these productive sabbaticals [during working life] rather than tacking them on at the end of a career.”

Case in point: His design studio is still producing works that were seeded during the organization’s first client-free year seven years ago.

That period gave Sagmeister – whom some art critics describe as one of the greatest graphic designers of the age – time to reflect on what he wanted to say in his design practice. It was during this period that Sagmeister’s Things I have learned in my life so far began to take shape. Added to over time, his collection of maxims on the simple art of living has become the foundation stone of much of his recent work.

One maxim is illustrated in his “Money does not make me happy” images. The raised typography, designed by Japanese artist Ken Milki, is shaped to resemble Mount Fuji wreathed in clouds, but with the deceptively simple sentence wrapped around a casino, it takes on an intensely ironic meaning. (The installation had the full support of the casino owners.)

The statement “Trying to look good limits my life” became a poster series for the city of Paris, guiding the viewer to the conclusion there may be more to life than struggling under the burden of caring about one’s physical or personal image.

These works grew out of what Sagmeister terms “design authority”, where studios not only solve problems for clients, but also come up with ideas long before the problems are envisaged – design for design’s sake, and not necessarily for commerce.

“I look at design as a language,” he says. “I would not go to the trouble of learning French only to use it to sell, but that is the single-minded use of [the language of design] in many design studios.”

In Sagmeister’s masterful hands, that “language of design” comes in the form of typography, defined by typographer Steve Leadbetter as “what language looks like”.

Whereas those outside the design world might perceive written language as mere marks on paper, it is a field that claims a place in the realms of “high art”.

“Typography has always played a role in many cultures. In my view it was raised to the highest level in the Islamic world – Iran’s 16th century Islamic scripts of the Koran,” Sagmeister says.

“[Typography] has never reached such a level anywhere else in the world.”

But perhaps under his philosophical eye, someday again it can.

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