Stefan Sagmeister is among today’s most important and influential graphic designers – often referred to by his peers and critics alike as one of the “living legends” of contemporary design.

Born in Austria, he now lives and works in New York, where he formed his firm Sagmeister Inc in 1993. He has designed branding, graphics and packaging for clients as diverse as the Rolling Stones, HBO, The Guggenheim Museum, Time Warner and the visual identity for Rem Koolhass’s Casa da Musica in Portugal. He won a Grammy Award for his design of the Talking Heads box set (after being nominated for a Grammy five times), and, without exageration, has won almost every major design award during his career. Solo shows on Sagmeister’s work have been mounted in Zurich, Vienna, New York, Berlin, Tokyo, Osaka, Prague, Cologne, and Seoul.

In June 2000, Sagmeister took a year off from client work to concentrate on experimental projects. One of the key outcomes resulting from that year’s experiments was the body of work “Things I have Learned in my Life So Far”, an ongoing project in which Sagmeister creates unorthodox physical and graphic designs from the collection of “life lesson” sentences he has extracted from his journals for print, media, and public installations around the world. A collection of these designed sentences has just been released, and the project was the subject of a 2008 solo show at Deitch Projects, NYC.

For La Biennale de Montréal 2009, Sagmeister is opening up the creative process of his “Things I Have Learned in my Life So Far” project to the public, giving the Biennale one sentence from his journals that he has not yet designed, with an open invitation for public to be the designers of that sentence.

Designers or inviduals wishing to obtain the sentence to participate in Open Design may do so by emailing: design@biennalemontreal.org

In May 2009, a selection of the best designed sentences will be exhibited at the Biennale.