Paula Scher

Paula Scher

Paula Scher in "Take a Closer Look" speaker event at the GDMA Degree Show in 2010
Born (1948-10-06) October 6, 1948
Washington D.C. (United States)
Nationality American
Education Tyler School of Art (BA 1970)
Known for Graphic Design, Painter, Author & Educator

Paula Scher (born October 6, 1948, Washington D.C) is an American graphic designer, painter and art educator in design, and the first female principal at Pentagram, which she joined in 1991.[1]

Education

Paula Scher studied at the Tyler School of Art, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1970.[1]

Life & Career

Paula Scher moved to New York City and took her first job as a layout artist for Random House's children's book division.[1]

CBS Records

In 1972, she was hired by CBS Records to the advertising and promotions department. After two years, she left CBS Records to pursue a more creative endeavor at a competing label, Atlantic Records, where she became the art director, designing her first album covers. A year later Scher returned to CBS as an art director for the cover department.[2] During her eight years at CBS Records, she is credited with designing as many as 150 album covers a year. Some of those iconic album cover designs are Boston (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). In addition her designs were recognized with four Grammy nominations. She is also credited with reviving historical typefaces and design styles.[1]

Russian Constructivism

She left Atlantic Records to work on her own in 1982.[3] Scher developed a typographic solution based on Art deco and Russian constructivism, which incorporated outmoded typefaces into her work. The Russian constructivism had provided Scher inspiration for her typography; she didn’t copy the early constructivist style but used its vocabulary of form on her works.[4]

Koppel & Scher

In 1984 she co-founded Koppel & Scher with editorial designer and fellow Tyler graduate Terry Koppel. During the seven years of their partnership, she produced identities, packaging, book jackets, and advertising, including famous Swatch poster.[2]

Pentagram

In 1991, after the studio suffered from the recession and Koppel took the position of Creative Director at Esquire magazine, Scher began consulting and joined Pentagram as a partner in the New York office.[2] Since then, she has been a principal at the New York office of the Pentagram design consultancy.[1]

Educator

In 1992, she became a design educator, teaching at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York. 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, the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, the Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich and the Centre Georges Pompidou".[1] As an artist she is known for her large-scale paintings of maps, covered with dense hand-painted labeling and information. She has taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York for over two decades, along with positions at the Cooper Union, Yale University and the Tyler School of Art.[5]

Print

Paula Scher has contributed to numerous issues of Print. Her first Print cover was with her friend Steven Heller. Together they created a parody issue in 1985, a genealogy chart of graphic design.[6]

Branding & Identities Systems

The Public Theater

In 1994, Paula Scher was the first designer to create a new identity and promotional graphics system for The Public Theater, a program that become the turning point of identity in designs that influence much of the graphic design created for theatrical promotion and for cultural institutions in general.[7]

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.[8] 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. The design was to appeal to a broad audience from the inner cities to the outer boroughs, especially those who hadn’t been attracted to theater.[9]

From 1993 to 2005, Scher worked closely with George C. Wolfe, The Public’s producer and Oskar Eustis, who joined as artistic director during the fiftieth anniversary in 2005, 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 font called Knockout, created by Hoefler & Frere-Jones, which provided affordable and accessible productions.[7]

The Public Theater Posters:

New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park

In 1994, Scher created the first poster campaign for the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park production of The Merry Wives of Windsor and Two Gentlemen of Verona, and was borrowed from the tradition of old-fashioned English theater style. This laid the foundation for the new overall identity and visual language that came to define the Public Theater for the rest of the decade and beyond. The designs for the Shakespeare in the Park campaign went all across New York, like the buses, subways, kiosks, and billboards.[2]

Scher’s Shakespeare in the Park campaign had become a seasonal tradition in the city. The identity has progressed over the years which redesigned The Public Theater logo in 2005 and 2008. The campaign in 2008 for the productions of Hamlet and Hair, utilizes the strict 90 degree angles of a De Stiji-inspired grid, a pattern in Manhattan’s streetscape. The identity is like New York itself, constantly evolving [10]

In 2010, Scher designed the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park poster has presented powerful productions of The Winter’s Tale and The Merchant of Venice, starring Al Pacino as Shylock. Scher’s festival promotional campaign focuses on the reminiscent language in both plays by pulling lines from each production to meet in a dimensional expressive of words and typography. This campaign was award for Print Regional Design Annual 2011.[11]

New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park Posters:

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

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. By 2004, Matthew Carter redrawn a new custom typeface named MoMA Gothic. Although MoMA core identity is well developed iconic museum but the applications like the web, print, and physical environment has not been unified or visionary like the museum itself. In order to continually carry the spirit of the institution, the museum hired Pentagram to design a more powerful and integrated comprehensive system.[12]

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. Julia Hoffman, MoMA’s creative Director for Graphic and Advertising and her internal team have used the new system and brought the system to life in applications from larger banners and subways poster to the website.[13]

The Metropolitan Opera

Paula Scher and Julia Hoffman designed the new identity for The Metropolitan Opera. The Metropolitan general manager, Peter Gelb proposed to rebrand the institution and reach a wide audiences like the younger generation that never set foot inside the opera hall. The identity is set in Baskerville and Avenir and the campaign features performance of “Madama Butterfly”.[14] The print ad campaign launched on August 20, 2006 and according to Thomas Michel, the Metropolitan’s marketing director, it was a successful sales day in the history of the organization.[15]

New York City Ballet

Paula Scher designed a new identity and 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. Scher designed with Lisa Kitchenberg of Pentagram and the NYCB’s Luis Bravo, to create an identity that links the company’s legacy and location to a modern and dramatic new aesthetic. 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, in the way it resemble to the buildings of New York appear sometimes. It has a softened transparency and a subtle gradation of color that will include shades of blue blacks, green blacks and red blacks.[16] 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.[16]

Environmental Graphic Designs

New Jersey Performing Arts Center

In 2000, Paula Scher created an interior design for the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. In the design, there are words running along the walls; tubes and balconies reflecting with vast letters that gives a joyfully effect to represent the shows performance in the building. [17] It was signature and environmental graphics for the Lucent Technologies Center for Arts Education, a school affiliated with NJPAC.[18]

Achievement First Endeavor Middle School

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. With the help Rogers Marvel Architects, who designed the school as a refurbishment and expansion of existing building. The design was based on Endeavor’s teaching philosophy and series of motivational slogans used by its teachers. Scher has enlarged these concepts into super-graphics that help define the interior spaces. 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.[19]

Microsoft

Scher designed a new logo for Windows 8 and also the logo of Office 2010.[20]

Paintings

The Maps

In 2006, an exhibition at Maya Stendhal gallery in New York City, Paula Scher 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.

For instance, 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, hinting at a tortured colonial past. The land of the red rising sun represented when we think of Japan (2004).[21]

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.[22]

Scher is currently represented by Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery.

NYC Transit & Manhattan

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.[23]

Limited Edition Print Map

In 2008, Maya Stendhal released a limited edition print map of China and renowned artist Paula Scher. The map is 48.5 x 40 inches, printed on deluxe Lanaquarelle paper, hand-made in the Vosges region of France. Scher collaborated with Alexander Heinrici to convey the hand-painted map to represent the rapid economic growth, booming industry, the success of Olympic bid, and superpower status on China.[24]

Personal life

In January 1970, Paula Scher first met Seymour Chwast when she was a senior at the Tyler School of Art. They met each other through an interview at Pushpin, arranged by an art director named Harris Lewine, where she took her portfolio to him. In 1973, she and Chwast married, and divorced five years later. They remarried in 1989.[25]

Awards

Art Directors Club Hall of Fame 1998, Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design 2000, AIGA Medal 2001, National Design Award (Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian) 2013 Honorary Doctorates from Corcoran School of Art, Maryland Institute of Art and Moore college of Art.

Books

Book Review

Newspaper Articles

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Scher, Paula." (n.d.): Oxford University Press: Oxford Art Online. Web.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Palacio, Bryony, and Armin Vit. Graphic design, referenced: a visual guide to the language, applications, and history of graphic design. Beverly, Mass.: Rockport Publishers, 2009. Print.
  3. ↑ Scher, Paula. Make it Bigger. New York, N. Y. Princeton Architectural Press, 2005. Print.
  4. ↑ Meggs, Philip B., and Alston W. Purvis. Meggs' History of Graphic Design. 4th Ed. Hoboken, N.J.: J. Wiley & Sons, 2006. Print.
  5. ↑ Piafsky, Michael.; Karlin, Ben.; Scher, Paula.; Javerbaum, David.; Stewart, Jon, 1962-. "An Interview with the Writers of America." The Missouri Review 28.1 (n.d.): 92-118. Project MUSE. EBSCO. Web. 26 Oct. 2011.
  6. ↑ Walker, Alissa. "Design Revelation." Print 64.1 (2010): 18-19. Academic Search Complete. Web.
  7. 1 2 "New Work: The Public Theater | New at Pentagram | Pentagram." Pentagram. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://pentagram.com/en/new/2008/06/new-work-the-public-theater-1.php#NYSF1994>.
  8. ↑ Art Directors Club. Art Directors Annual 88: Advertising Design, Illustration, Interactive Photography. 88th Ed. Mies, Switzerland: RotoVision, 2009. Print.
  9. ↑ Heller, Steve. "Street Theater." Print 50.3 (1996): 29. Academic Search Complete. Web.
  10. ↑ Art Directors Club. Art Directors Annual 88: Advertising Design, Illustration, Interactive Photography.. 88th ed. Mies, Switzerland: RotoVision, 2009. Print.
  11. ↑ "New Work: Shakespeare in the Park 2010 | New at Pentagram | Pentagram." Pentagram. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://pentagram.com/en/new/2010/06/shakespeare-in-the-park-2010.php>.
  12. ↑ "New Work: The Museum of Modern Art | New at Pentagram | Pentagram." Pentagram. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://pentagram.com/en/new/2009/02/new-work-the-museum-of-modern.php>.
  13. ↑ Wheeler, Alina. Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide For The Entire Branding Team. 3rd ed. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2009. Print.
  14. ↑ "New Work: The Metropolitan Opera | New at Pentagram | Pentagram." Pentagram. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://pentagram.com/en/new/2006/08/new-work-the-metropolitan-oper.php#more>.
  15. ↑ Bosman, Julie. "The Metropolitan Opera's New Stage." The New York Times - Media & Advertising. N.p., 29 Aug. 2006. Web. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/29/business/media/29adco.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=business&adxnnlx=1323324478-u8Wy7NSB3p5NvL45qfeSBA
  16. 1 2 "New Work: New York City Ballet | New at Pentagram | Pentagram." Pentagram. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://pentagram.com/en/new/2008/01/paula-scher-designs-new-identi.php#more>.
  17. ↑ Luca Simeone. "Learning from Interstitial Typography." Leonardo 44.5 (2011): 466-467. Project MUSE. Web. 14 Sep. 2011. <http://muse.jhu.edu/>
  18. ↑ Pentagram." Pentagram. N.p., n.d. Web.<http://www.pentagram.com/search/new+jersey#/368/>
  19. ↑ "New Work: Achievement First Endeavor Middle School | New at Pentagram | Pentagram." Pentagram. N.p., n.d. Web. 7 Dec. 2011. <http://www.pentagram.com/en/new/2010/03/new-work-achievement-first-end.php>.
  20. ↑ Microsoft Unveils Bland, Blue Windows 8 Logo
  21. ↑ Coggins, David. "Paula Scher At Maya Stendhal." Art In America 94.4 (2006): 156. Academic Search Complete. Web.
  22. ↑ PAULA SCHERAMY GOLDWASSER. "Graphics' Grande Dame Remakes the World In Type. " New York Times (1923-Current file) 12 Jan. 2006,ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2007), ProQuest. Web.
  23. ↑ "Art World's Latest Sensation, Paula Scher, Paints the Town Red, Yellow, Green and Blue." PR Newswire Europe 7 Dec. 2007,: NewsBank. Web.
  24. ↑ "RENOWNED ARTIST PAULA SCHER RELEASES NEW LIMITED EDITION PRINT 'CHINA'." Asia Pulse 7 Aug. 2008,: NewsBank. Web.
  25. ↑ Goldwasser, Amy (2006-01-12). "At Home With Paula Scher - Graphics' Grande Dame Remakes the World in Type". The New York Times. Retrieved 8 May 2010.
  26. ↑ "Paula Scher." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Literature Resource Center. Web.
  27. ↑ "Scher Talent." New York 35.37 (2002): 113. Academic Search Complete. Web.
  28. ↑ "Awards: Print's Regional Design Annual 2011 | New at Pentagram | Pentagram." Pentagram. N.p., n.d. Web.<http://pentagram.com/en/new/2011/12/awards-prints-regional-design.php>.
  29. ↑ Hamlett, Phil. "Make It Bigger (Book)." Library Journal 127.17 (2002): 69. Academic Search Complete. Web.
  30. ↑ "AIGANY / PAULA SCHER: MAPS INTRODUCTION BY STEPHEN DOYLE." AIGA/NY. N.p., n.d. Web.<http://aigany.org/events/details/12P2>.
  31. ↑ Seymour, Chwast, and Scher Paula. "Bookend." New York Times Book Review (1998): 55. Academic Search Complete. Web.
  32. ↑ Scher, Paula. "The Queen Of Howdy Doody Dada." Print 54.3 (2000): 61. Academic Search Complete. Web.
  33. ↑ PAULA SCHER. "Op-Art: Diagram of A Blog" New York Times (1923-Current file) 5 Apr. 2007,ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 - 2007), ProQuest. Web.
  34. ↑ Scher, Paula. "Better Signs of Trouble." New York Times 13 Sept. 2009: 18(L). General OneFile. Web.

Further reading

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