“Making stuff is the heart of everything. That drive never goes away. What can I make next?” said Paula Scher and I believe this sentiment is what guided her entire career. Her love of ideas, of concepts, of taking the familiar and dressing it up in new meaning and opening it up for new interpretations is what got her the title of a design superstar, one of the most influential illustrators, painter, graphic designers, and art educators of our time. She was born in Washington, D.C. on October 6, 1948. In the early days of her childhood, she and her family moved around quite a bit, and she felt like a misfit even in her own family. She tells us that: “I drew a lot when I was growing up. I had a pretty unhappy childhood, and I used drawing as a reason to go off to my room and be alone. I failed at everything else. As a child, I failed at everything but art. First, I was too scrawny; then I was too fat; my hair was never right; and I was never popular. But as the school artist, I was okay: that was the first place where I felt like I actually belonged.”
She attended the Tyler School of Art, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania in 1966, during the height of the 60s and the Vietnam War. She started wanting to be a painter but discovered she couldn’t really draw. She tried pottery but she couldn’t throw pots, she knocked her finger out of its joint when she took a metals class, and rolled her finger through a printing press. She was pretty discouraged with all her attempts in art, but in her junior year she discovered graphic design and everything fell into place. Stanislaw Zagorski, one of her college professors, was a very important mentor to her. Zagorski’s class was a combination of illustration and design and he encouraged her to “illustrate with type”, as she didn’t understand typography: “Once I started to see type as something with spirit and emotion, I could really manipulate it. I never drew very well, so my ability to communicate feeling through typography became really important.”
Zagorski convinced her to move to New York to meet Harris Lewine, who was a book jacket art director for Random House. Harris introduced her to Seymour Chwast, a graphic designer and illustrator, to whom she got married. Seymour was an influential mentor to her. When she met him she was only 22. He was 17 years older. He was already established and famous as a partner with Milton Glaser at Push Pin Studios.
By the end of 1970s, Paula Scher came into her own as a designer. She had an older friend, Henrietta Condak as a mentor. Condak was a married mother of two, and also an art director who worked part time. Together they rediscovered 20th century modernism: the Constructivists, Dadaism, De Stijl—all the popular movements from 1914 to 1940. They began experimenting in those forms, and people started calling it “Retro Postmodernism” That’s where she developed a lot of her visual vocabulary and created a lot of the pieces that are still well-known, like the “Best of Jazz” poster, which she designed in 1979.
After she completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts, in 1970 she moved to New York City with her portfolio and $50. She got her first job designing the inside of children’s books for Random House. This led her to getting a job two years later, in the promotion department of CBS Records, and a year later for Atlantic Records. When she was only 25 years old she returned to CBS Records as the East Coast Art Director, where she was responsible for 150 record covers each year. Her unprecedented approach to designing these covers was to mix in popular culture, interest and meaning in the cover itself and the artist, and a desire for those who saw these covers to buy the record.
Some of those iconic album cover designs are Boston’s debut album (Boston), Eric Gale (Ginseng Woman), Leonard Bernstein (Poulenc Stranvinsky), Bob James (H), Bob James and Earl Klugh (One on One), Roger Dean and David Howells (The Ultimate Album Cover Album) and Jean-Pierre Rampal and Lily Laskin (Sakura: Japanese Melodies for Flute and Harp). Her album cover designs were recognized with four Grammy nominations. She is also credited with reviving historical typefaces and design styles.
In 1982 she left the record industry.
Her father was a photogrammetric engineer for the US Geological Survey who invented a device that ensured the distortion-free aerial photography. It was called stereo templates and it looked like a piece of cardboard with three holes cut out of it. It corrected the lens distortion in aerial photography and enabled the government to make more accurate maps. Google Maps is based on his invention, which he gave to the government for $1,500.
Her father’s work encouraged Paula to create hand-printed maps. Based on Art deco and Russian constructivism, but not imitating its style, only making use of its vocabulary of form, she developed a typographic solution. The solution employed outmoded typefaces into her designs. She once said: “Designing typography is a big thing for me, and recently, some new technologies have really helped with that. I think that’s the biggest advantage of the technology for me — it helps me correct my mistakes — sometimes, even before I make them. It’s great to dream something up and then see it instantly in space.”
In 1984 she founded Kopel and Scher with an old friend from school, Terry Koppel, who was a magazine designer. They worked together for 7 years doing editorial design and promotion packaging and covers until the first Gulf War in 1990, when they parted ways because of the recession. She produced identities, packaging, book jackets, and advertising, including the famous Swatch poster based on previous work by Swiss designer Herbert Matter.
Paula mentions that all her best ideas had often come, intuitively, when she’s in a state of play.
In 1991 she joined Pentagram, the world’s largest independent design consultancy. The firm is owned and run by 23 partners, each of whom are leaders in their individual fields, and Paula Scher was the first female principal to join the company and since then, she has been a principal at the New York office of the Pentagram design consultancy. Her client list includes companies like Tiffany & Co., Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and Citibank. Among other designs, she is the one who created the iconic Citibank logo and also the Windows 8 logo.
For the Citibank logo she took elements from two existing logos of two corporate merging and put them together. She sees things before anyone else does. In the Netflix episode “Abstarct: The Art of Design” Paula Scher demonstrates the power of language in design. She takes the letter E and designs it in many different ways. Each iteration of the letter gave the letter a certain distinct feeling. For example, letter E with a thicker bottom line gives it a feeling of stability — while a skinny and tall E gave it a feeling of instability and fragility. E with middle line equal gave it a feeling of uniformity and E with shorter middle line gave it style. This shows the power of design elements in helping provoke a certain emotion in the viewer.
Before designing the logo for Windows 8 Paula asked Sam Moreau, principal director of user experience for Windows: “Your name is Windows. Why are you a flag?', reiterating the importance of visual language and the message we want to convey.
Outside of her work at Pentagram, Paula paints a map series in her free time. Each map features a different theme like US interstates or median home prices. Scher produced silk-screened map prints of cities, states, and continents entitled The World. She created screen-prints of the NYC Transit. She has also produced limited edition maps of China that represent the rapid economic growth and industry of the country as it attains superpower status. The maps keep her creative juices flowing. When asked if she ever hit a creative block Paula said: “I think blocks are common to all creatives. For me, the solution is to get up and get moving. I can’t just sit there and puzzle my way through; I need to get up and find new inspiration. I can do that by talking to the team, looking at a book, watching a movie — just about anything can turn into inspiration. That’s one of the things that is so amazing about living in New York. I can go outside, take a walk, and see so many different things. Every building is different — even down to the numbers on the fronts. There is so much to see, so many people. I draw inspiration from all of that.”
In 1992, she became a design educator, teaching at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York, expanding her area of expertise from designing to teaching. In addition to teaching at SVA for over two decades, she taught periodically at prestigious art institutions including Yale University, Tyler School of Art and Cooper Union. Scher is a recipient of the School of Visual Art's Masters Series Award.
She received more than 300 awards from international design associations as well as a series of prizes from the American Institute of Graphic Design (AIGA), The Type Directors Club (NY), New York Art Directors Club and the Package Design Council. She is a select member of Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) and her work is included in the collections of New York MoMA, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Bibliotheque nationale de France, the Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich and the Centre Georges Pompidou". As an artist she is known for her large-scale paintings of maps, covered with dense hand-painted labeling and information.
She is the author of “Make It Bigger” (2002) and “Maps” (2011), both published by Princeton Architectural Press. She is the subject of “Paula Scher: Works” (2017) edited by Tony Brook and Adrian Shaughnessy and published by Unit Editions. She even made it on the Silver Screen, in the Netflix documentary series about leading figures in design and architecture: “Abstact: The Art of Design”
When she first moved to New York, she lived in many sublets in the first two years, with various friends and acquaintances, and this experience inspired her to write a children’s book, “The Brownstone”. She says:” The book was about a bunch of animals who lived in a brownstone apartment in the city. There is a bear who wants to go to sleep for the winter, but a cat is taking piano lessons next door, so all the animals have to move apartments six or seven times to work everything out. The whole book is a cutaway of the building with illustrations of the animals moving furniture up and down the stairs. When I worked at Random House, I had met an illustrator named Stan Mack, and he asked me if he could illustrate it. I never had a text, so I gave him a set of diagrams of the cutaways. He took the story to Knopf to get published, and it was a hit. It stayed in print for 20 years.”
Scher held her first solo exhibition in 2006 at the Maya Stendhal gallery in New York, where she painted two 9-by-12-foot maps that resembled patchwork quilts from afar, but contain much textual detail. She created lines that represented the separation of political allies or borders dividing enemies. Scher created the maps into layers that reference what we think when we think of Japan, Kenya, or the Upper East Side. The United States (1999) was painted in blocky white print and full with list of facts that comprehend when we think about cities. Africa (2003) represented in a stark black and white palette, hinted at a tortured colonial past. The land of the red rising sun represented Japan (2004). This was Scher's first solo exhibition as a fine artist and sold every piece between $40,000 to $135,000. The Maya Stendhal's owner decided to extend the exhibition for four weeks, until January 21. Therefore Scher decided to produce silk-screened prints of 'The World' that contained large-scale images of cities, states, and continents blanketed with place names and other information. It's full of mistakes and misspellings and visual allusions to stereotypes of places such as South American, painted with hot colors and has two ovaries on the sides. It was not created to be a reliable map but convey a sense of the places that are mediated and mangled.
In 2007, Paula Scher had created screen-prints of NYC Transit and Manhattan that is printed on hand-made deluxe Lana Quarelle paper. NYC Transit portrays the island of Manhattan as a busy destination crisscrossed by a subway system of loopy, color-coded lines and stations. It also shows the Manhattan night famed neighborhoods.
She understood early in her career the need to always reinvent yourself, to think and create in fresh, new ways, and to never get comfortable doing only one thing: “I was beginning to learn that if you get good at something and become known for it, then it’s time to change it. If you don’t, you’ll be stuck and people will get tired of it. You’ve got to grow. Sometimes that means putting yourself in a position where you might fail or do bad work for a while because you’re still finding yourself, but I’m prepared to deal with those sorts of periods in order to grow.”
In 1994, Paula Scher was the first designer to create a new identity and promotional graphics system for The Public Theater and created the first poster campaign for the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park (which had become a seasonal tradition in New York city) production of The Merry Wives of Windsor and Two Gentlemen of Verona. The designs for the Shakespeare in the Park campaign went all across New York, on the buses, subways, kiosks, and billboards.
Based on the challenge to raise public awareness and attendance at the Public Theater along with trying to appeal to a more diverse crowd, Scher created a graphic language that reflected street typography and graffiti-like juxtapostion.
In 1995, Paula Scher and her Pentagram team created promotional campaigns for The Public Theater’s production of Savion Glover’s Bring in’Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk that featured the wood typefaces used throughout The Public Theater’s identity. Scher was inspired by Rob Ray Kelly’s American Wood Types and the Victorian theater's poster when she created the cacophony of disparate wood typefaces, silhouetted photographs and bright flat colors for the theater's posters and billboard. Scher limited her colors to two or three while highlighted the play’s title and theater logo that surrounded the tap artist in a typographical be-bop.
From 1993 to 2005, Scher worked closely with George C. Wolfe, The Public’s producer and Oskar Eustis on the development of posters, ads, and distinct identities. As part of the anniversary campaign, the identity was redrawn using the font Akzidenz Grotesk. The word “theater” was dropped and emphasis was placed on the word “public”. By 2008, the identity was even more definitive as it used a knockout font called Hoefler & Frere-Jones which provided affordable and accessible productions.
In 2010, Scher designed the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park poster for the powerful productions of The Winter’s Tale and The Merchant of Venice, starring Al Pacino as Shylock. This campaign was award for Print Regional Design Annual 2011.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is one of the most recognizable logotype in the museum world. In 1964, the Franklin Gothic No.2 logotype was originally designed by Ivan Chermayeff. In order to continually carry the spirit of the institution, the museum hired Pentagram to design a more powerful and integrated comprehensive system. To create a new approach that modernizes the institution’s image, Paula Scher designed a complete methodology for the new system to work at any scale, from an exterior banner to a print advertisement in the newspaper. Scher designed a strong grid to uniform placement of images and types. The artwork is being cropped to maximize visual and each quadrant of a page or a banner has specific function. A particular image is selected as the signature focus for an exhibit and list of upcoming events unrelated to the featured into a text block. The black on white logotype placed at vertically position whenever is possible and always bleeds off an edge.
Paula Scher also designed the new identity for The Metropolitan Opera, to reach a wider, younger audience and a promotional campaign for the New York City Ballet, one of the largest and well-known dance company founded in 1933 by Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine. The logo is set in the font DIN that appears slightly stacked on each layer. The palette is composed of black, white and silvery grays, and resembles a New York building. Scher also cropped the images of City Ballet dancers to create more tension and drama. The new identity and graphics appeared on bus shelter, subway poster, magazines and newspapers ads, in the company’s programs and website, and in environmental graphics at the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center where the company performs.
In 2001, Paula Scher created an interior design for the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, with words running along the walls; tubes and balconies reflecting with vast letters that gives a happy effect to represent the shows performance in the building. .
For the Achievement First Endeavor Middle School at Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, a charter school for grades 5 through 8, Paula Scher has created a program of environmental graphic that helps school interiors to become a better learning environment. She created vibrant space with bold typography font of Rockwell and simple paint to change the life of its students. The design was based on Endeavor’s teaching philosophy and series of motivational slogans used by its teachers. The graphics appear as an equations form (“Education = Choice”, “Education = Freedom”) in the hallways and quotations running around the wall of gymnasium and staircase which encouraging student to do better and create a unique environment of their own.
Asked what her message would be for scrappy, young designers, Paula Scher said: “I think the biggest message is that you have to love what you do and stay positive. When you’re just starting out, you’re going to make a lot of mistakes, but those accidents are the things that will generate discoveries. As you get older, you’ll kind of learn what works and what doesn’t, but in a way, you’re also learning to restrict yourself. Starting out, you don’t have that. You can do anything — and that’s where the really creative stuff comes from. So, you have to really love what you do to stick with it through the mistakes and come into your own. You’ll have bad days and crummy clients, but the design space is really getting better every year. The technologies — and, of course, the people — are making some really amazing things. I look forward to the future and what we’ll see there.”