Stefan Sagmeister (born August 6, 1962) is an Austrian graphic designer, storyteller, and typographer based in New York City. In 1993, Sagmeister founded his company, Sagmeister Inc., to create designs for the music industry. He has designed album covers for Lou Reed, OK Go, The Rolling Stones, David Byrne, Jay Z, Aerosmith, Talking Heads, Brian Eno and Pat Metheny. From 2011 until 2019 he partnered with Jessica Walsh under the name Sagmeister & Walsh Inc. Early life and education He began his design career at the age of 15 at "Alphorn", an Austrian Youth magazine, which is named after the traditional Alpine musical instrument. Sagmeister studied graphic design at the Hochschule fuer Angewandte Kunst, Vienna, graduating in 1986. He later won a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in New York, where he received a Master of Fine Arts degree. Design career In 1991, worked with Leo Burnett's Hong Kong Design Group. In 1993, he returned to New York to work with Tibor Kalman's M&Co design company. In 1993, he set up his company Sagmeister Inc in New York. He has since designed branding, graphics, and packaging for clients as diverse as the Rolling Stones, HBO, the Guggenheim Museum and Time Warner. He is the author of the design monograph "Made You Look" which was published by Booth-Clibborn editions. He teaches in the graduate design 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. Controversy Sagmeister became the subject of controversy after his performance of a lewd joke about animal fellatio at the annual web conference Webstock in Wellington, New Zealand, in February 2017, embarrassing a sign language interpreter and upsetting some in the audience. The organizers apologized to the interpreter in person, and to attendees following the incident, and on Twitter. Webstock organizers also followed this apology up with a longer statement on their blog. The joke, according to Fast Company, involved having a sign language interpreter assigned to his talk "interpret a story about a manatee giving itself a blowjob", with repeated requirements to the interpreter to use gestures to indicate the sex act. Sagmeister later apologized through the Sagmeister & Walsh Twitter account, and from his personal Instagram account. Awards Sagmeister received a Grammy Award in 2005 in the Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package