Manhattan’s visual canvas is defined by an electric, exhilarating collage, whether in the sensory overload of 42nd Street’s LED screens, the handmade signs painted for local businesses, or the advertisements towering over the cityscape.
Paula Scher’s compositions have made an unmistakable imprint on the visual symphony of New York and American popular culture. Her work for arts organizations such as The Public Theater showcase her ability to capture the vitality of her subject matter with heady assemblages of type and image. Her record covers for Atlantic and CBS Records from the ’70s remain classics of the genre, their intelligence and wit poignant to this day.
Paula joined Pentagram as partner in 1991, and she has since completed projects including a redesign of the Citibank identity, show openers for PBS, book design for Jon Stewart’s America, and environmental signage for a host of clients. She is perhaps best known for her use of type, but she tells me that it wasn’t until after college that she came to understand typography. “I didn’t seek it,” she explains. “It found me.”
Paula defines design as “the art of planning.” This description seems particularly apt, as her design and typographic explorations have increasingly moved from the two-dimensional page to the three-dimensional scale of architecture and buildings. If only we could enjoy the visceral delights of living in a city planned and composed entirely by Paula Scher.
What was your first creative memory?
I made a mural in sixth grade. It was a transportation mural. I remember it because it earned me some praise, though I’m sure I did a lot of things before sixth grade. But at that time, I got to paint a transportation mural showing a highway with cars on it. I made the highway with the traffic lanes “backwards,” and my teacher said, “Oh, it can be an English highway.”
When you were younger, what did you want to be
when you grew up?
A singer, dancer, piano player, and bareback rider—I wanted to perform.
I have a theory that graphic designers secretly wish they were rock stars. When did you know you wanted to be a graphic designer?
When I went to college, I didn’t know what graphic design was. It wasn’t until my junior year that I discovered it. And I think I wanted to study design because the school I went to taught a very Basel-oriented basic graphic design course, which was “white on white”: taking pieces of white paper and laying them over each other. But I was very sloppy; I was horrible at it. I was terrible at anything that involved rubber cement and rubber cement pick-up. These were things I just couldn’t accomplish. I went to the design department to be an illustrator, not a designer, because I didn’t think I had the skills to be a designer, whereas illustration seemed to be more expressive.
Did you have aspirations to be an illustrator or designer specifically, or was that something that happened more serendipitously? Was it something you knew you were going to do?
I always knew I was going to make things. I was compelled to make things. I wanted to make wonderful things, things that other people liked, things that were important and mattered. I wanted to do this because I liked the act of doing it, and I wanted that form of approval, and so I would have a way of expressing myself.
At first, when I was at college, I really didn’t understand typography at all. I actually learned it on the job; I didn’t learn it in college. I didn’t seek it. It found me. At one point I had a teacher who gave me some very, very critical advice. He told me to find one thing you can do. And only do that. Be the best at it, no matter how narrow it is. And get rid of all the stuff you don’t do well. And I found that to be an amazing piece of advice. I go back to it all the time.
How would you define the term “graphic design”?
I would start first with the term “design.” If you look it up in the dictionary, it says, “a plan.” And I see design as the art of planning. There’s an implication in graphic design that it involves both planning and something graphic, something produced, something that may have breadth or have words or images attached, or have some impact. It’s a nebulous description of design. I actually prefer to say I’m a visual planner.
Do you find that people understand what you mean when you say that?
No. They don’t understand until they see it. I believe that people are far more aware of the impact or import of design than they realize, though they don’t know how to describe it. I recently joined the Art Commission of the City of New York. They created a seat for a graphic designer, which they never had included before. They did it because they were confronted with so many sign systems that they had to deal with—and environmental projects that had gone awry—that they realized they needed a graphic designer’s expertise.
When something like this happens, you know that design has reached a broader audience and understanding. Serving with the Commission has been terrific. There’s an artist, architect, engineer, and an art historian, and there are two seats from the Metropolitan Museum and the Brooklyn Museum. It’s our responsibility to sign off on every building to be built in New York City that receives public funding. It has to go through the Art Commission. It’s totally fascinating.
Do you consider yourself to be successful?
It depends on how you define success.
How do you define success?
I think I’m successful in certain ways. I think that I’m lucky in that I like what I do, and I get to do it. That is a factor in how I see myself as successful.
I consider the fact that I have been able to continue to grow a very important part of how I perceive success. To me, success is not about money, it’s about what I design. If I get up every day with the optimism that I have the capacity for growth, then that’s success for me.
Do you consider yourself a confident person?
When I was young, I was not a confident person, but I presented myself as if I was. I was cocky, and I had a certain kind of attitude and panache that I rolled out when I needed it. But it was a piece of armor and a house of cards. After 25 years of working, I think I’ve gotten much more confident. I am more comfortable in my own skin. I don’t look around so much for approval. I find myself comfortable enough to be myself.
How would you describe yourself?
Short. Little. Perfectly formed. Little person with a big mouth.
How would your husband describe you?
Probably exactly the same.
How would Michael Bierut describe you?
The same.
Do you have a process that you use when you’re designing? A way that you initiate a project, a way that you work through a problem?
It’s a little difficult to say what I do first. I don’t do anything in any particular order. There’s a certain amount of intuitive thinking that goes into everything. It’s so hard to describe how things happen intuitively. I can describe it as a computer and a slot machine. I have a pile of stuff in my brain, a pile of stuff from all the books I’ve read and all the movies I’ve seen. Every piece of artwork I’ve ever looked at. Every conversation that’s inspired me, every piece of street art I’ve seen along the way. Anything I’ve purchased, rejected, loved, hated. It’s all in there. It’s all on one side of the brain.
And on the other side of the brain is a specific brief that comes from my understanding of the project and says, okay, this solution is made up of A, B, C, and D. And if you pull the handle on the slot machine, they sort of run around in a circle, and what you hope is that those three cherries line up, and the cash comes out.
When you’re thinking this way, is it something you’re doing alone, or with a lot of other people?
I could be doing it right now. I’m doing it right here. My day is very packed, and it’s filled with many interruptions. I’m thinking about the brief while I’m in an open space with tons of people, in the office, with telephones, my staff, while gossiping with my partners, while thinking about what’s going on in the world, during whatever’s going on at that moment—plus the brief.
I am conscious of resolving the brief, but I don’t think about it too hard. I allow the subconscious part of my brain to work. That’s the accumulation of my whole life. That is what’s going on in the other side of my brain, trying to align with this very logical brief.
And I’m allowing that to flow freely, so that the cherries can line up in the slot machine. I don’t know when that’s going to happen. I’ve had periods of time when the cherries never line up, and that’s scary, because then you have to rely on tricks you already have up your sleeve—the tricks in your knowledge from other jobs. And very often you rely on this.
But mostly what you want to do is invent. And to invent, you have to take the odd and the strange combination of the years of knowledge and experience on one side of the brain, and on the other side, the necessity for the brief to make sense. And you’re drawing from that knowledge to make an analogy and to find a way to solve a problem, to find a means of moving forward—in a new way—things you’ve already done.
When you succeed, it’s fantastic. It doesn’t always happen. But every so often, you take a bunch of stuff from one side of your head, and a very logical list of stuff from the other side, and through that osmosis you’re finding a new way to look at a problem and resolve a situation.
How are you able to evaluate your own success at solving a problem?
It’s very hard. I know when I make a breakthrough. There’s a moment of “Eureka!” And that comes from knowing what previously existed in that area or arena and pushing it forward. If it’s a magazine, there’s a history of magazines; if it’s an identity, there’s a history of identities. If it’s an identity for a certain type of business, there’s a history of identities for that certain type of business.
Generally, there’s a paradigm of what things look like in any arena. What you want to be able to do is find a new way to stretch that paradigm forward, to break its own mold.
Sometimes to do that, you borrow from another area. That’s why I like to work on all different types of projects.
Right now, I’m designing a building as a user’s manual. I’m taking a form of print and marrying it to a three-dimensional system. Then the knowledge “over there” informs something new “over here.” That is when it’s possible to make a breakthrough. And that is really what I want out of design. I want to create unexpected things set in a way that makes logical sense. I want to reinterpret how things can be put together. This changes the expectations of what is possible.
What do you do when you experience the feeling of “eureka” about a design solution and your client doesn’t? How are you able to convince them to see things your way?
I do that in a variety of ways, and I’m not always successful. The best way to be successful with this is to be doing the job for free. Very often, I do a lot of work for nonprofit organizations. I literally donate the work—so that I can make a breakthrough. If I’m doing a job for free, they’re not challenging me, they’re accepting what I create. If they pay me, they have a right to participate.
Occasionally, we make a breakthrough with a very well-paying client. With one particular client, I made a presentation before I showed any work and logically explained why they had to do what I was presenting. I proved my thesis before presenting creative solutions. I’ve done that a number of times, and I’m getting better at it. It’s a lot of work, but I’ve been trying to do this more and more. I know I have a tendency to jump to an answer without taking the time to express the logical steps.
Back when I was in high school, I took geometry. In the class, we were taught to write a theorem to show how we got to an answer. But I just rushed and wrote the answer. I don’t know why or how I knew the answer, I just did. I couldn’t explain it, and my teacher insisted that I prove it out. This type of proof is a struggle for me. But slowly I’ve been getting better at explaining to people why “this” is the answer.
I recently did a job, and my clients wanted me to tweak something. I thought it was an awful idea, and I didn’t want to do it. They came back and asked me to tell them why I thought it was so awful, and why they shouldn’t make the change. I made a very serious presentation articulating why I thought what they wanted to do was so bad, and why it was so off-target. It was very persuasive. After the presentation, they realized how poor the idea was. So I’m getting better at this. But that doesn’t make it easy.
Would you say your work is more intuitive or intellectual?
I think it’s both. Actually, this is what I think my husband would say about me: that I’m emotional and analytical at the same time.
So how do you know when a project is done? How do you know when you’re finished?
That is hard. Sometimes I’m done because I run out of time. That’s as good a way as any. I’ve done very good things that way. Sometimes a deadline gets you to stop. I love deadlines. Sometimes a project is done because you’ve done too much and you’ve made it worse. And you have to stop and go back. Sometimes you’re never done. But I think that it’s dangerous to have any kind of satisfaction. You always have to be striving to improve on the next project. The next project has to be what you’re aspiring for, not what you’ve just completed—you’ve already done that.
When you look at the work you’ve created, in the last five or ten years, do you feel that it’s good enough, or do you feel that it’s too soon to tell?
It’s not a question of just looking at the work; it’s a question of understanding where I was when I did the work, the context of when I did it, and where I am now. I find that you have to continually renew, that growth is what matters. You can’t do the same thing for five years. You have to get rid of it. It doesn’t matter anymore. Just let it go, even if it’s your signature. Even if everybody expects you to do it. Try to find another way to walk. It’s easy to say in theory, but harder to do in practice.
For me, that’s why the breadth, the core, matters. Because when I change what I’m doing from editorial packaging to environmental design to identity to motion graphics to some form of Web work—as long as I can do that—it’s going to take my work in another direction. Particularly because I’ve been practicing for 25 years, I have to keep walking forward. I can’t look at the past and worry about whether it’s good or bad. It’s critical for me to move on to the next project, to discover the next thing.
How do you find those new things?
You need to be logical. You have to go out and get the kind of projects that allow this to happen for you. I pay overhead. I maintain a staff. I’m not working in some ivory tower where I get to create work for myself. I’m working in the real word. The projects dictate when I can go to the extreme, and, to a degree, when I can invent.
Are you able to hold on to success and happiness, or are they fleeting experience?
I don’t even know that I feel it. Half the time I can’t
even believe it.
Do you worry a lot?
I worry about my future.
In what way?
I’m 58 years old; I don’t know how long I can keep it going.
What do you do when you need a role model? Where do you look for inspiration? I’m not talking about movies or books, I’m talking about people.
People inspiration is hard. There are a few women who have achieved an enormous amount. There aren’t a lot of them. You know, Stefan Sagmeister told me that no one has a breakthrough in their fifties. But I did. So now he says no one’s had a breakthrough in their sixties.
So he’s setting your bar. Are you afraid of anything?
Being over the hill.
Do you really think that will happen? I mean, honestly?
It’s inevitable; it will happen sooner or later. You can’t defy that forever.
What do you think is the secret to your staying power?
I don’t think I have a very big opinion of myself.
You’re just driven? Trying to prove yourself?
If you think you’re only as good as your last job—which I do—there’s more to be done. I know what I did today. I know exactly what level it’s at, and there are all kinds of problems and compromises that I must negotiate. Things that have to be held on to, things that have to be protected to make something move forward. And it’s very, very, very hard work. It doesn’t have anything to do with fame. It has to do with doing it every day.
That is all that matters—nothing else matters. I believe that we all want to leave something behind that is really, truly terrific. And we have this finite amount of time to accomplish it. Everything else is unimportant. I like that you’re doing this book because what motivates it is a really important discussion about accomplishments in graphic design. The accoutrements, and the awards, and my picture in a book don’t matter. What matters is the next project. If you’re sitting back and saying, “Gee, that was wonderful,” that is death. You’re killing yourself. You can’t do that. You can’t do that to yourself.
If you could fantasize for a minute, it’s five years from now. We’re that much closer to our imminent demise. How do you see yourself, your life? Are you painting, are you still designing? Are you still at Pentagram? What are you doing?
I am not really sure. I’m facing that right now, and I am really, totally confused. What I think is terrific is that I actually have the possibility to paint full-time. I would do it. On the other hand, when faced with the choice, I wouldn’t want to give up designing because I really love design. I really love designing. I guess I’m a very lucky woman.