Design Matters Today with Stefan Bucher

It is Friday again! That means that Design Matters is live at 3 PM ET. My guest today is Stefan Bucher.

Stefan Bucher is a man possessed. When an idea pops into his head he can’t stop until he makes it real. Over the years this has led him to move from his native Germany to Southern California, where he got himself a degree from a killer art school. It pushed him to work as an art director at one of the world’s best ad agencies in one of the world’s wettest cities. It also got him fired from that same agency less than a year later.

He then moved back to Los Angeles and became the man behind the 344 Design Empire. He has created CD covers for just about every major record company (and for a few minor ones, too.) He has designed albums for Sting and Whitney Houston, and he once rode in an elevator with Hunter S. Thompson. Now that everybody downloads their music on iTunes he has moved on to making books and art catalogs. He’s good at it, too. British Design & Art Direction gave him a Yellow Pencil for “Most Outstanding Complete Book Design” for his design of the five-and-a-half pound “American Photography 17” annual, which—if you’re not following the graphic design awards circuit—is a very impressive thing. In 2004 the Art Directors Club of New York declared him a Young Gun, which isn’t too shabby, either.

He has designed for painter David Hockney, for Tarsem (the director of “The Cell” and the upcoming movie “The Fall”), and for the advanced thinkers at the Open Intelligence Agency. He wrote and designed the gratuitously ambitious book “All Access—The Making of 30 Extraordinary Graphic Designers” and spent two years writing and illustrating “ink & circumstance,” a column on life, love and graphic design for STEP inside design magazine. These days he films himself making ink blot monsters for his runaway blog Daily Monster. The first 100 Daily Monsters are collected in the book “100 Days of Monsters” which is hitting stores this week.

Design Matters airs live weekly on the Voice America Business Network, now the industry leader in Internet talk radio. The show was voted a "favorite podcast" on PSFK's Marketing Podcast survey and was recently voted 9th out of over 300 entries for the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum’s People’s Choice Award. The show is also available as Podcasts on iTunes, where over 50,000 people download the show every month.

Design Matters is from 3-4PM EST and you can view the VoiceAmerica Business site and listen to the show from a myriad of locations. You can go here, through the Sterling link: http://www.sterlingbrands.com/ListenLive.html

Everyone is welcome to call in live and toll free--the number is 1.866.472.5790.