It took graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister exactly two minutes to settle on Bali as his new home when he started to conceive of his experimental year away from client work in 2008. In a process of elimination, he was lead naturally to a place that is quite the opposite of his New York home.

Sagmeister made a tight plan “like grade school” which included a list of “design-y things” he wanted to work on, having learned from his first experimental year in 2000 that his time could otherwise just while away. Sitting on his couch in his Balinese house every morning with his pot of coffee, he expected to con­sider his weekly list: producing local crafts, four hours; the development of typographic commix, six hours; story writing, one hour; type animation, four hours; and future thinking one hour (obviously he didn’t put too much emphasis on the future). Other than his list, Sagmeister left New York for Bali with no preconceptions.

He left Joe Shouldice in charge of the studio, busy with lots of long-term projects; Sagmeister Inc. declined all new client projects during this experimental year opening up all other possibilities for Sagmeister to explore.

Following are excerpts from letters Sagmeister sent home to friends during his year away.

MONTH 1
I am in a beautiful house in Sayan, a tiny village close to Ubud, the spiritual, crafts and artistic center in Bali’s jungle-like interior. As far as I can tell now the ceremony culture is incredibly active and alive, the crafts intricate and varied. There are entire villages of woodcarvers, stonemasons, wig makers, textile weavers and silversmiths close by—and all the art is crap.

I get up every morning at five awakened by roosters, which I encounter later in the day again while they get their thighs massaged in preparation for the cockfights complementing most temple ceremonies.

I do seem to have a whole lot of energy. After enjoying a giant pot of coffee and a medium-sized cigar for breakfast, I start my daily schedule of little experiments. This is coming along very well, I am adhering to the 45 planned-out weekly hours and—even though it’s just been four weeks—I am getting somewhere already.

So far it has proved to be very easy to meet people. Since I arrived, I have only enjoyed a single dinner by myself and that was only because I needed a quiet evening after going out every night. The local culture is all about refinement, which manifests in all areas of life: in the preparation of food and its presentation, in the way one handles oneself in public, as well as in the incredible development of most crafts and all ceremonies.

The goal of the people is to be as removed as possible from anything animalistic. Consequentially, no self-respecting Balinese keeps a pet. Dogs, which prowl the entire island unchecked, are neither let into the house nor are they fed. On my first morning walk, I had to collect all my guts to keep walking when a moving pack of hollow-eyed, scabby dogs assaulted me. I wound up shouting at them aggressively, which sort of worked, but resulted in the immediate depletion of every bit of serene energy my short morning meditation might have yielded. In retaliation I am designing a version of a T-shirt I’d seen an old Cantonese man wearing in New York’s Chinatown: “So many dogs, so few recipes.” That’ll show them. 

MONTH 2
Not a single day has gone by without me thinking at least once, “Fuck, am I glad I’m here!” It’s just so easy.
 
As the village neither possesses proper street names nor numbers, today at 6 A.M. I was sitting on the couch in the open living room trying to think of a sign for my house so that visitors could easily find it. I go out to the small alley to take a picture of the entrance in order to be able to draw a little sketch. The next-door neighbor, who runs a tattoo shop from his house, asks what I am doing. I explain I want to make a sign and then the manager suggests mounting it to the electric pole on my property, which is partially obstructed by shrubs. My neighbor offers up his own land for the sign, indicating he’d like a little something for it. “How make sign? Metal? Wood? Stone?” “I’m not sure yet.” “Have friend, makes beautiful stone carving?” “Sure!” “When visit?” “I don’t know…” “Now, time?” “Now…it’s 6 A.M.!” “No problem.”
 
We take my scooter, drive ten minutes to the stone mason’s house in the stone masons’ village, wake him up, his wife brews extra sweet Bali coffee and we drive to his workshop where I sketch out the sign and amaze both of them with my ability to draw in perspective. An “S” in a circle, constructed out of tightly interwoven stone leaves, carved painstakingly as a deep relief into a single 3' × 3' foot slab of white stone from Yogyakarta, all commissioned before 7 A.M. for the price of a New York parking ticket. 

Last week included a fantastic visit to Orlando Bassi’s wig factory. It’s just incredibly exciting to see a craft I know nothing about performed at its highest level. They make wigs for shows on Broadway, films in Bollywood and barristers in the U.K. Working with human, horse, yak and synthetic hair, they produce a vast variety of styles. And here is an interesting fact: It has become very difficult and expensive to find long human hair, as the traditional supplier, Russia, is now too sophisticated to have their women cut off their long hair for money. As hair extensions have become a popular fashion item for women, there is lots of competition for real hair. The most expensive is long blonde or white hair. Orlando has people going through regular black hair looking for single white hairs, collecting them strand-by-strand.