It's not an easy language to understand. It is not meant to be accessible to the mass market. It won't sell as mall signage or supermarket packaging. And unless he is offered irresistible deals with unlimited creative freedom, it probably won't cross over to Fortune 100 corporate advertising and image campaigns, either.

Sagmeister's graphic language is personal and intricate, enigmatic and intriguing. It makes demands on you. In order to understand it, you, the viewer, have to spend some time with the object the designer has gifted you with. Rather than instantly absorbing a headline or an image, you will have to figure out a puzzle, spin a wheel, lift a semi-transparent cover, read a lot of tiny type, decode hieroglyphics, do something that will bond you with the product and the client's message.

Yes, there is a client's message. That is the fine line separating his work from art displayed in museums and galleries. But the client is not your run-of-the-mill marketer or brand manager. The client might be Capitol Records or Warner Bros. More likely, it is an artist -- David Byrne or Lou Reed or Mick Jagger -- who is engaging a kindred spirit to help craft an image and transmit a message to the people who will have the most affinity with it.

Sagmeister Inc., located in a penthouse apartment on an eclectic block of Manhattan's West 14th Street, doesn't look or feel like a typical graphic design firm. It's the live-and-work studio of a man who earns his living creating half a dozen CD packages a year -- and a few other projects that interest him -- and to which he and designer Hjalti Karlsson will devote the three months of labor one of their complex inventions requires. "Inventions" is a better word than "designs," because much of their work is three-dimensional and almost mechanical in nature, like finely honed little machines for communication.

Born in Bregenz, Austria, near the Swiss border, Stefan Sagmeister studied design at the University for Applied Arts in Vienna, which he describes as a conservative, old-time academy rooted in '50s conventions. "I learned a lot about composition there," he says. He also got the opportunity to experience the rewards of design entrepreneurship: he formed a student group that competed against "real" graphic designers, and that was selected to design posters for a local theater, Schauspielhaus. "It was great, great, great for us, " he says. The posters also helped him win the Fullbright fellowship that brought him to New York and Pratt Institute. "It was very unusual for an arty guy to get a Fullbright," he notes. "Usually they went to scientists. But I think the fact that the theater posters all over town were done by students really impressed the jurors."

On previous visits to New York, Sagmeister had fallen in love with the city's immediacy and man-made landscape, and in 1985 he became a resident, joining an international group of Pratt Communication Design graduate students. "I loved art school," he says. "And I was very aware of how privileged I was. The Fullbright took care of expenses so I didn't have to do stupid production jobs at agencies like everyone else." But he did have to look for a job after graduation, and was fixed on one goal-M&Co.-which he pursued relentlessly. He claims to have called Tibor Kalman "50 or 60 times" to ask for a job. Tibor didn't take the calls.

So he took a full-time freelance position at New York corporate and brand identity and marketing consultancy Moore Cornelius Moore, which showed him what he didn't want to do. "I really hated it," he says. "Corporate design is so committee-oriented. It's incredible how much time goes into selling the project rather than working on it. I hated most being removed from the product, like working on IBM's launch of OS2, and hardly knowing anything about it. I think they used my stuff at presentations to show the client the approach not to take."

After a year and a half, his visa ran out and he returned to Austria to fulfill his civil service obligation. Then, through a combination of happenstance and chutzpah, he joined Leo Burnett in Hong Kong. "I was there on holiday, pretty bored. I wanted to see design studios, so I pretended to look for a job. Burnett said they were interested in hiring me as their type director. I gave them a ridiculous price," he laughs. "After two weeks they asked me if I wanted to start an in-house design studio." So for two years he headed a five-person creative department that cranked out collateral for the agency's big luxury goods accounts: hotel chains, private banks, first-class airline seats. "It was incredibly work-intensive," he recalls. "We worked 80-hour weeks. New York feels laid-back by comparison. And just as I was getting really tired of Hong Kong, which is a one-dimensional city, all about money, I learned a job was waiting for me in New York with Tibor."

The campaign to work at M&Co. paid off when Sagmeister sent Kalman his 400-page thesis, "Amazing, Exciting, Spectacular Gimmicks in Graphic Design." Kalman was sold. But the stint at M&Co. lasted only six months. At the time, Kalman was making plans to move to Rome to edit Benetton's Colors magazine. And, admits Sagmeister, "After having my own gig in Hong Kong, it wasn't that easy to work for someone else." He credits Kalman with a lot, though: giving him his first CD assignment, "Yellow Magic Orchestra;" teaching him that small is better when it comes to design studios; and showing him how to make clients fall in love with designs they thought they hated.

When M&Co. closed in 1993, Sagmeister knew he was ready to open his own studio. He knew he wanted it to be tiny. And he knew we wanted to specialize in CD packaging. "I went around and saw all the record labels," he says. His instincts were right, because the studio's first cover, "Mountains of Madness," for a band-member friend, H.P. Zinker, was nominated for a Grammy. And, as reported by Billboard magazine: "That got the attention of creative directors at record companies, and the designer's name started to surface when [executives at] labels were discussing designs for upcoming releases."

Stefan Sagmeister's name has been surfacing for a few years now. But all the attention hasn't gone to his head. He giggles when describing being flown to London and picked up by a limo to meet Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in London. (The Stones were "very professional," he reports about his meetings on the "Bridges to Babylon" album.) And he makes a goofy face when telling how he had to place buckets around his leaky studio during an important Stones meeting. He doesn't mention that he's listed as number 63 in Entertainment Weekly's "100 most creative people in the entertainment industry." Or that his work was selected as "best in category" for packaging in the I.D. Annual Design Review two years in a row.

He is most comfortable doing the work. He likes applying 100 percent of his talents to design, rather than doing the "20 percent design, 80 percent other stuff" he experienced at other places. An inveterate music lover and concert-goer -- with tastes ranging from speed metal to Metropolitan Opera -- he sums up his involvement in complex, time-consuming CD packaging projects as follows: "It's nice being able to spend three months of your life on something that's going to be so tiny and portable." This is in stark contrast to the way most designers reacted to the demise of the 33 RPM record jacket. "I meet with the band," he says, describing his typical working modus operandi. "They give me rough cuts of the music. I listen to the music. I talk to the band about the content. I try to avoid talking about the cover. Then I come back and start working." Does he ever have to fight for his ideas? "All the time. I fight for things all the time. I cry and beg."

For the last three years, he's worked on most projects with Hjalti (pronounced Yalti) Karlsson, an Icelandic designer who was nearly as persistent about getting a job with Sagmeister as Sagmeister was with Kalman. A Parsons graduate and the studio computer nerd, Karlsson says that working for Sagmeister "doesn't feel like he's my boss, it's more like a collaboration. There's lots of back and forth."

Together, Sagmeister and Karlsson take credit for such projects as the pictorial hieroglyphic alphabet for the Pat Metheny Group album "Imaginary Day." To someone looking at it for the first time, figuring out the cover is not too hard (the title is written in English on a wraparound band). There are bees and pyramids and bones and Greek columns and lots of other tiny things, and after a while it's apparent that the tree is "P," the NASA picture of the earth is "A," and the railroad crossing sign is "T." But the liner notes are in code, too, and each photographic image is but one-sixteenth of an inch high. "This is insane," some might say. Yes, but anyone who's studied literature or music or art is aware of the relationship between insanity (i.e., taking the time to compulsively perfect something no one else would bother with) and genius. Sagmeister offers simply, "We selected things with Pat that relate to Pat's thinking or music." And for those who get stuck, there is a translation wheel in the middle, itself a perfect illustration of the Sagmeister philosophy: one, make people pick it up; two, make it an activity; and three, make it work on more than one level.

Then there is the matter of the handwriting. It is clear that Sagmeister loves to doodle and doesn't try to curb his urges. His angular, inky script on and around such images as tongues, chickens, bodies, and faces is the closest thing to a personal trademark. For the poster announcing Lou Reed's "Set the Twilight Reeling" album, he covered a Timothy Greenfield-Sanders photograph of Reed's bristly face with handwritten lyrics. Don't call the handwriting a style, though. Sagmeister is so anti-style that his slogan, "Style Is Fart" is emblazoned on the studio wall and has found its way into the small print on liner notes, posters, wherever he can squeeze it in. "Style Is Fart" could only have been devised by a non-native-English speaker who sees "fart" as a synonym for "hot air." He explains, "Style is not important. What is important is the idea or the concept." Sagmeister's concept can be disarmingly simple, yet the piece will be exquisitely produced in a way no one has ever seen before and that, one hopes, defies imitation. The concept behind the writing on Lou Reed's face? "The lyrics are intensely personal."

Sagmeister's work does have a subversive quality, yet it has managed to be discovered by clients outside the music business who thrive on the unconventional. For 14 years fashion designer Anni Kuan introduced her fall line to boutiques and toney department stores like Henri Bendel with photographs of her clothes worn by fashion models. Last year, Sagmeister messed up the clothes by cutting them up, rolling a dirty tire over them, and getting a dog to pee on them. Then he had them photographed in black and white, reproduced on tabloid-size newsprint, and shrink-wrapped along with a wire hanger on a piece of corrugated board. "At first I was terrified," admits Kuan, "but the response from stores was incredible. An unusually high percentage of postcards came back, with notes like "Most awesome." Reporting that appointments and sales went way up, she says, "Next time I'll leave it to him. I trust him completely."

Right now, Sagmeister Inc. is working on collateral materials for a group called Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities. No ordinary lobbying organization, this brainchild of Ben Cohen, of Ben & Jerry's fame, plans to convince the U.S. government and citizenry that it makes sense to move 15% of the $271 billion U.S. military budget to health and education programs. Lots of little graphic icons and inflatable balloons and numbers make the point -- on intricately engineered materials, that, as usual, require time and attention to understand. A pull-out card demonstrates that $17 billion budgeted for 10,000 nuclear warheads could be used hire 425,000 new teachers; that $11 billion earmarked for two-and-a-half Seawolf submarines could provide health insurance for 11 million kids.

What lies ahead for Stefan Sagmeister? More serious experimentation, he predicts. Staying small. Teaching in the masters' program in graphic design at the School of Visual Arts. Struggling with what he calls the elusive problem of how to touch somebody's heart with graphic design. He says, "People touch people's hearts all the time with books and movies. I would like to figure out how to do it with graphic design." Also ahead: staying in the music business with more interesting projects. This includes more work for his "favorite client," David Byrne, for whom he created the iconic happy, sad, puzzled, angry David Byrne dolls and recently designed a photography book, Your Action World, with a squooshy taxi-yellow vinyl cover. And the admiration is mutual. Byrne says of Sagmeister, "His work is like turning a corner and seeing a good friend -- but with a new face -- shocking and familiar. I've watched and studied him but have yet to discover the secret of how he's miraculously been able to charm the pants off his clients to get his ideas executed. I myself would love to know how it's done."