him a list of the eighty participants speaking in eight different auditoriums
over three days, Sagmeister says, in his lilting Viennese cadence, “it
sounded like one big happy chaos that had everybody running around like
headless chickens.” This reference to domestic fowl was the egg that
hatched into an idea. Indeed, a picture of a couple of headless chickens
with its reference to voodoo ritual was just the perfect off-center illustration
that Sagmeister needed as the focus for a wealth of information on a dense
but dynamic poster.
The probability that such an image would be offensive to some,
including the client, did not really concern Sagmeister, who prostrates
himself to avoid making things good, clean, and ordinary—or what he dis-
misses as “nice design.” “There is so much of this well-done, competently
designed fluff around,” he observes, “that doesn’t bother anybody, doesn’t
annoy anyone, and is rightfully ignored.” He refers to design in which form
rather than concept prevails and ornamental layering triumphs—like slick
paper-company promotions where designers are engaged in orgies of
stylistic excess. “Tons of this stuff was given away by paper manufacturers
in New Orleans,” he chides, “gorgeously produced beautiful fluff designed
by people who have no opinions on nothing whatsoever.”
Sagmeister objects to experimental work that is really dysfunc-
tional. While some may apply the word “experimental” to Sagmeister’s
own work, he insists his design solutions are built on equal parts intuition,
play, and the desire to rise above the mundane. For example, he once
defiantly designed the logo, labels, and shopping bags for Blue, a chain
of blue-jeans outlets in Austria, using only gold and black. Sagmeister
maintains that he has no interest in hiding in a laboratory while his work
is tested; rather, he is on a crusade to pump untried ideas into the real
world. The Jambalaya poster was one way of announcing that he was an
enemy of the safe and sanctioned.
“I refused to do it in any of the ‘hot’ mannerisms, like Euro-
techno, the new simplicity, or tiny type in boxes,” he explains. In fact, his
real influence comes from a Swiss outsider artist named Adolf Wölfli, who
in the 1920 s covered his own imagery with bits and pieces of found detritus.
Sagmeister acknowledges that at the time he was given the AIGA poster
assignment, he was also working on album covers for the Rolling Stones
and the Pat Metheny Group, which demanded very exacting effort. The
Stones cover required months of tiresome research and the Metheny cover
involved creating very intricate visual codes. As a respite, he says, “I was
happily and mindlessly doodling.”
In addition to the headless chickens, which were deliberately
composed so that they would emerge as the poster was unfolded, the front
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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