Stefan Sagmeister is one of the most fabulous graphic designers around the world in the twenty-first century. In today’s class, we have watched two Stefan Sagmeister’s talks for TED. In both speeches, Sagmeister illustrates life moments that made him happy, and these impressive moments usually have to do with a good design. I think that Stefan Sagmeister’s success is a reflection of his intention in keeps the curiosity and exploration of life, driven by humanity, creativity, and humor.

At first, Sagmeister is curious to everything that exists in the daily details. For example, Stefan Sagmeister has mentioned Jee, a young Korean designer who prints 55,000 different sizes of empty speech bubble stickers to put on posters randomly when he goes around New York. Then let people fill them in with words; as a result, many of the bubbles filled with humorous quotes. Sagmeister considers that the writing is the most fun part of this project; it creates a close environment for publics where they can express themselves, and the advertisers finally get somebody to look at their ads.

Like Marian Bantjes, Stefan Sagmeister also pursues a more personal approach to his designs. Sagmeister always prevents his works from bland and boring stuff. Instead of relying entirely on computer technology; Stefan Sagmeister uses a wide variety of tools and techniques in his designs. For instance, to create a magazine divide page with his slogan “having guts always works out for me.” Sagmeister uses a white strip of cloth, furniture, flowers, police tape, sausages, and chairs to compose of each word respectively. Over the next few years, Sagmeister made a whole number of his list of life lessons into projects, including the inflatable monkeys, 65,000 coat hangers, and newsprint plus stencils.

As a student of communication design, Stefan Sagmeister is one of my favorite contemporary graphic designers. He prefers using a wide range of unusual materials to stimulate creativity, so I am under his influence by experimenting different elements in my design. In my booklet of personal statement, the front cover, carved in intaglio with letters “EXPRESS YOURSELF” on the pile of paper, and the background of all pages is photography of blank paper with some lines on the edge which connected with the extended lines on the two covers. Therefore, when you roll the book, those lines are extended from the book name to fore-edge, and then the back covers to point to my personal statement which is “live a life true to yourself, not the one others expected.”

Overall, I do enjoy today’s video of Stefan Sagmeister; his works give me lots of inspirations by exploration of personal approach through a wide variety of tools and techniques to achieve a good visualization of humanity, creativity, and humor with publics.