{"id":3528,"date":"2013-02-05T13:13:29","date_gmt":"2013-02-05T18:13:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/?p=3528"},"modified":"2019-07-26T19:22:16","modified_gmt":"2019-07-26T23:22:16","slug":"the-happy-film-stefan-sagmeister","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/05\/the-happy-film-stefan-sagmeister\/","title":{"rendered":"the Happy Film – Stefan Sagmeister"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you follow graphic design at all, Stefan Sagmeister<\/a> is probably a familiar name. To say that he is a big deal would be putting it mildly.<\/p>\n

Stefan Sagmeister has worked for the Rolling Stones, The Talking Heads, Lou Reed, and The Guggenheim Museum. Exhibitions on Sagmeister’s work have been mounted in New York, Philadelphia, Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul, Paris, Lausanne, Zurich, Vienna, Prague, Cologne & Berlin.
\n– Sagmeister & Walsh<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sagmeister was born in Austria and has been a New Yorker on and off since getting a Fulbright scholarship to Pratt in ’87. On graduating, he did 3 years of compulsory service in Austria. In ’91 he got a job as a typographer working for Leo Burnett<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0Hong Kong, then in ’93 he returned to NYC to work with Tibor Kalman<\/a>‘s agency,\u00a0M&Co. When Kalman closed up shop, Sagmeister formed Sagmeister Inc. (recently rebranded as Sagmeister & Walsh<\/a>)\u00a0where he produced some of the best graphic design work to come out of the 90’s.<\/p>\n

Sagmeister is well known for posters<\/a>, for instance, as in the iconic (and award-winning) examples shown below.<\/p>\n

\"Stefan<\/a>

Stefan Sagmeister posters – AIGA, Lou Reed<\/p><\/div>\n

I recently learned about Sagmeister’s work with Hillman Curtis, the respected and sadly recently deceased<\/a>\u00a0designer-turned-filmmaker.<\/p>\n

Curtis is perhaps best known for his popular\u00a0Artist Series, which was ongoing from 2005 and featured designers like\u00a0Milton Glaser,\u00a0Paula Scher, and\u00a0David Carson.<\/p>\n

His latest project,\u00a0The Happy Film<\/em>, is a feature-length film [that]\u00a0was in production at the time of his death.<\/p>\n

– Obituary from\u00a0idsgn.com<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So yeah, a great movie loosely based on\u00a0Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>by Sagmeister about… happiness? Well, sort of.<\/p>\n

“The Happy Film” centers around our main subject, Stefan Sagmeister, a New York-based graphic designer known for his rock n roll collaborations and typography. In the course of a year, Sagmeister will experiment with various practices that are widely touted as increasing one\u2019s happiness: meditation, cognitive therapy, and pharmaceuticals.<\/p>\n

The documentary will test these various methods during 3 x 3-month experiment periods.\u00a0 The production team will work closely with a group of health professionals to properly assess Sagmeister\u2019s well-being. Our health partners will monitor Stefan prior to the experiments, as well as participate in occasional check-ups during the course of our 9-month study.<\/p>\n

Throughout the film, Sagmeister\u2019s maxims, by way of the book \u201cThings I Have Learned in My Life So Far\u201d, will function as typographical set pieces that related to the ongoing experiments.
\n– from The Happy Film kickstarter<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wait, what? A Kickstarter link? That’s right. Basically when Curtis died, the film was about 40% shot and quite frankly had run out of money, so the production company and Sagmeister decided to try crowdfunding through Kickstarter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Stefan<\/a>

Stefan Sagmeister – the Happy Film (film still from the kickstarter page)<\/p><\/div>\n

For those of you unfamiliar with Kickstarter, here’s the down-low:<\/p>\n

Thousands of creative projects are funding on Kickstarter at any given moment. Each project is independently created and crafted by the person behind it.\u00a0The filmmakers, musicians, artists, and designers you see on Kickstarter have\u00a0complete control and responsibility over their projects.\u00a0They spend weeks\u00a0building\u00a0their project pages, shooting their videos, and\u00a0brainstorming\u00a0what\u00a0rewards to offer backers.\u00a0When they’re ready, creators launch their project and share it with their community.<\/p>\n

Every project creator sets their project’s funding goal and deadline.\u00a0If people like the project, they can pledge money to make it happen.\u00a0If the project succeeds\u00a0in reaching its funding goal, all backers’ credit cards are charged\u00a0when time expires.\u00a0If the project falls short, no one is charged.\u00a0Funding on Kickstarter is all-or-nothing.
\n–kickstarter.com<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sounds great, right? The neat thing about the Kickstarter platform besides allowing creatives to crowdfund is that to incentivize contributions, the creatives create rewards for pledge tiers. For instance…<\/p>\n

Pledge $500 or more<\/p>\n

\n

Stefan will pick you up on the North East corner of Tompkins Square Park (New York City) in a 1968 Firebird Convertible (it’s a rental!) and you’ll drive through Manhattan in the rain playing his 10 favorite songs. \u00a0In case it does not rain he’ll bring a water gun. You will be dropped off at a random street corner and he will speed away.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Uh.. I’m in! Anyone want to loan me $500? Sadly (for my dream of riding in an open convertible in the rain with Stefan Sagmeister anyhow) the funding was met within 5 weeks of the kickstarter launch in September of 2011 . In any case,\u00a0Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>is a very interesting book and the kickstarter trailer<\/a> is a lot of fun so you should definitely check it out. The film is scheduled for release in 2013.<\/div>\n

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If you follow graphic design at all, Stefan Sagmeister is probably a familiar name. To say that he is a big deal would be putting it mildly. Stefan Sagmeister has worked for the Rolling Stones, The Talking Heads, Lou Reed,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[348,270,242],"tags":[753,752,750,166,749,751,748,240],"class_list":["post-3528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contemporary-art-2","category-designers","category-video-2","tag-american-designer","tag-austrian-designer","tag-film","tag-graphic-design","tag-hillman-curtis","tag-new-york-designer","tag-stefan-sagmeister","tag-video"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2JDlZ-UU","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3528"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4699,"href":"https:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3528\/revisions\/4699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greynotgrey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}