Celebrating Stefan Sagmeister: Liberating our local advertising

By Admin N : We were working on our book design project when my teacher, for inspiration, told us to check Stephen Sagmeister; and so I did (nerd, I know!). Imagine my surprise when I saw in his portfolio that he was the brains behind the AÏshti identity and advertising campaign!

Now Sagmeister managed to establish himself among the elite designers in the world, having a great eye for typography. Who can forget his Aiga Detroit poster where his interns carved all of the info into his skin in order to visualize the pain that seems to accompany most of their design projects? I absolutely love the guy!

Aiga Detroit poster

He even published a book back in 2008, titled: Things I have learned in my life so far.
A genius work where, in pursuit of happiness, he managed to turn the answers into typographical treatments on billboards and signs using different media and compiled in a book with a very interesting interactive cover. See for yourself:

As previously mentioned, Sagmeister is also the designer behind the Aishti new identity and packaging, the ingenious very minimal orange box and black type that creates great contrast and a very elegant look.

“Aishti Identity Identity and packaging design for Aishti, Aizone, and Minis department stores. For Aishti’s new identity, we honed in on the dots above the “i” in the logo and created a series of graphic patterns which were used across Aishti’s stationary, wrapping & tissue paper, gift cards, garment bags, credit cards, stickers, and more. The Aishti gift bags each feature a surprise inside: kissing couples. Aizone bags featured optical illusions inside the bags. For the minis brand we created a series of characters which were interactive with the shopping bag handles.”

The controversial AÏshti 2011 ad campaign featuring a naked woman; the ads were seen as sexist and another example of “sex sells”, which made us wonder about the audience’s cultural and artistic background, kind of blinded by the chaos of random advertising approaches and reached a point where identifying art from eroticism became an almost impossible task to accomplish.

AÏshti Advertising Campaign, a luxury department store in Beirut. We honed in on Aishti’s signature orange gift box, making it the visual centerpiece of the campaign. The box becomes a symbol for the brand, turning into an object of luxury. Campaign images were used in newspapers, magazines, and billboards in the Middle East.

Great color contrast!

Here’s another one, may be my favorite!

Aizone
Sagmeister Inc.’s rebranding of Aizone in 2010 focused on strong black and white patterns which reflects the dynamic, vibrant nature of the brand. The Fall / Winter 2010 campaign debuted these patterns through typographic optical illusions. For the Spring / Summer campaign fashion models were incorporated into the signature graphic patterns. Working with renowned body painter Anastasia Durasova, we painted the models to match Aizone’s patterns and photographed them in patterned environments.

We might be featuring a very small sample of Sagmeister’s works, but this selection relating to local advertising simply shows that there is no excuse for lame advertising approaches and we don’t have to adapt to the copycat land we live in, we can be innovative and lose the boundaries we always use as excuses for being too generic and lacking creativity.

Articles have mentioned your Style=Fart philosophy, do you feel that being trendy in design is a disservice to the concept?

No, if it’s for a trendy client or project. Yes, if is not.