Successful Designer's Formula: Sagmeister's 7-Year Sabbatical Cycle

Occasionally, when we talk with business executives interested in a career sabbatical program for their workplace, an odor of “mis-information mindset” leaks between the ears of one of them. The subtle stink arises with a comment like this:  “I can understand how someone unhappy, lost, dis-satisfied or suffering from priority-confusion could benefit from a break in their career, but come’on. If a person is successful, why would they want to go away?”

Translation:  Successful people don’t want to take sabbaticals.

Reality: Yes they DO. Even long 52-week ones!

If you haven’t heard the buzz on Stefan Sagmeister’s talk at the latest TEDGlobal 2009 conference (author, Daniel Pink reveals that Sagmeister’s sabbatical idea was a stand-out for him), here’s the skinny:

This extraordinarily successful designer says his business thrives on the creativity from his sabbatical formula of 7 years of working then one year off…and we mean off. Sagmeister does not take work from clients, and he is resolute about this, even if the work is tempting; in fact, he once declined an offer to design a poster for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign while on sabbatical. Sagmeister spends the year experimenting with personal work and refreshing himself as a designer.

In this inteview with Steven Heller, Sagmeister reveals the details:

Heller: What gave you the idea to make this 7-year sabbatical cycle a regular part of your life?

Sagmeister: “….many reasons, among them that from my experience I did my best thinking when not under pressure….“

Heller: How easy is it to put client-driven work on hiatus for an entire year?

Sagmeister:  “I had all sorts of fears that we would lose clients, be forgotten or have to start from scratch. And none of these fears came true. ….it is a simple time-planning event.  I put the plan in the agenda, work out the finances and tell the clients.”

Then what happens? Sagmeister says the ideas he comes up with during that one year are often the ones that fuel the financial success for the next seven.

What is Sagmeister’s “success?”  His book (Feb. 2008), Things I Learned Along the Way So Far, has 35 Amazon-5-star ratings. Sagmeister: Made You L ook (2001) a book about his work, sold for $275, has 20 5-star reviews, and still sells today (used-very good) for $275.

Not impressed by those 5-star reviews?  Okay, he received a Grammy Award in 2005 for art direction for Once in a Lifetime box set by Talking Heads – that should count.  He would also work on the 2008 David Byrne and Brian Eno album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.

In 1993 he formed the New York based Sagmeister Inc. and has since designed branding, graphics, and packaging for clients as diverse as the Rolling Stones, HBO, the Guggenheim Museum, and Time Warner. Solo shows on Sagmeister Inc’s work have been mounted in Zurich, Vienna, New York, Berlin, Japan, Osaka, Prague, Cologne, and Seoul. He teaches in the graduate department of the School of Visual Arts in New York and has been appointed as the Frank Stanton Chair at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York.

At 47, Sagmeister is on his second year-long sabbatical and says, “if this is as successful as the first, I’ll increase the frequency.”

Full-blown, future-forward ideas via Sagmeister; zero odor.

Note:  5% of Tedsters at the conference in Oxford have taken sabbaticals.