Trying to look good limits my life

Trying to look good limits my life（Experimental work）

My grandfather was educated in sign painting and I grew up with many of his pieces of wisdom around the house, traditional calligraphy carefully applied in gold leaf on painstakingly carved wooden panels.

One of his panels, still hanging in our hallway in Austria, reads: This house is mine, and it isn’t mine the second guy wont own it either, They will carry out the third one too, so tell me, my friend, whose house is it?

I am just following this tradition with Trying to look good limits my life. The title of this work (and its content) is among the few things I have learned in my life so far (some of the others are: Having guts always works out for me and Everything I do always comes back to me).

Broken up into 5 parts Trying/to look/good/limits/my life and displayed in sequence as typographic billboards, they will work like a sentimental greeting card left in the park.

Stefan Sagmeister

Stefan Sagmeister, a native of Austria, received his MFA in graphic design from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and, as a Fulbright Scholar, a master’s degree from Pratt Institute in New York.

He formed the New York based Sagmeister Inc. in 1993 and has since designed graphics and packaging for the Rolling Stones, David Byrne, Lou Reed, Aerosmith and Pat Metheny. His work has been nominated four times for the Grammies and has won most international design awards. In 2001 a monograph about his work titled “Sagmeister, Made you Look” was published by Booth-Clibborn editions.