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Paula Scher Flipbook PDF
Paula Scher
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Contents
01
Introduction
02
Design Journey
03
Journey at Pentagram
04
Milestone Works
05
Trivia - The Citi Bank Logo
06
The Maps Story
07
Thoughts & Conclusion
01
Introduction Paula Scher is a famous contemporary American graphic designer. She has worked tenaciously to reform the graphic designing industry with her overzealous determination and creative work for over four decades. Her unbashed and iconic pictures tracked down their direction into American vernacular. Other than this, she is also a painter and an art educator, who became the first female to be offered the principal position at Pentagram in 1990s. On October 6, 1948, Paula Scher was born in Virginia and grew up in Philadelphia and Washington DC. Her father was a photogrammetric engineer for the US Geological Survey who invented a gadget that ensured the distortion-free aerial photography. That urged Paula to make handprinted maps. She went to the Tyler School of Art, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania and finished her Bachelor of Fine Arts, in 1970. Later she moved to New York City beginning her professional career as a layout artist. She worked in that field for Random House’s children’s book division.
02
Design Journey She landed a job in the advertisement and promotion department of the CBS Records. Two years later she joined a competing label, Atlantic Records, as an art director. There she designed her first cover for an album. After acquiring some cover designing experience, she got back to CBS Records and worked there for eight years producing over 150 album covers annually. The album covers she designed included Eric Gale’ Ginseng Woman, Bob James’ H and One on One and’s
Boston. Her contributions included reviving historical typefaces and design styles. In fact, she earned four Grammy nominations for her inspiring designs. In 1982, she left CBS to explore graphic designing on her own. Based on Art deco and Russian constructivism, she developed a typographic solution. The solution utilized old fashioned typefaces into her designs. Her typography was influenced by Russian constructivism and without imitating its style she only made utilization of its vocabulary of form.
Ginseng Woman (1976)
In 1972, Scher jumped into the belly of popular culture; as art director for CBS and Atlantic Records in New York City. While at CBS she designed approximately 150 album covers a year, and produced innumerable ads and posters. During her decade in the record industry, Scher made work that was accessible but smart. She collaborated with illustrators and photographers to interpret music in suggestive, poetic ways—she preferred to invoke a mood or stage a mysterious scenario than provide literal depictions of bands and performers. - Ellen Lupton, curator at CooperHewitt,National Design Museum
03
Journey at Pentagram
In 1984, she teamed up with a fellow graduate and editorial designer, Tyler Koppel, to establish their firm, Koppel and Scher. The partnership sustained for seven years during which she created corporate identities, book jackets, advertisement and packaging. She also designed the iconic Swatch banner modelled after Swiss designer Herbert Matter’s work. As
the recession claimed many firms and companies’ stability, Koppel and Scher also suffered the consequences. Koppel left the firm for the position of Creative Director at Esquire magazine, while Scher joined Pentagram, in 1991. In its New York branch, she consulted the design studio as a partner and eventually worked here up to the post of principal.
Moreover, she expanded her area of expertise from designing to teaching as she accepted a teaching position at the School of Visual Arts. In addition to teaching at SVA for over two decades, she taught intermittently at esteemed art institutions including Yale University, Tyler School of Art and Cooper Union.
04
Milestone Works Scher has been a partner in the New York office of Pentagram beginning around 1991. She started her career as an art director during the 1970s and mid 80s, when her diverse way to deal with typography turned out to be exceptionally compelling. During the 1990s her milestone identity for The Public Theater combined high and low into an entirely new symbology for social establishments, and her new architectural collaborations have reimagined the urban landscape as a dynamic environment of dimensional graphic design. Her realistic characters for Citibank and Tiffany and Co. have become contextual analyses for the contemporary recovery of American brands.
Scher has developed identity and branding systems, promotional materials, environmental graphics, packaging and publication designs for a broad range of clients that includes, among others, Bloomberg, Microsoft, Adobe, Bausch + Lomb, Coca-Cola, Shake Shack, Perry Ellis, the Walt Disney Company, the Museum of Modern Art, the Sundance Institute, the High Line, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, the New York Philharmonic, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, the New 42nd Street, the New York Botanical Garden, the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Robin Hood Foundation, and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. In 1996 Scher’s generally imitated identity for The Public Theater won the sought-after Beacon Award for integrated corporate design strategy. She has served on the board of directors of The Public Theater, and is a frequent design contributor to The New York Times, GQ and different distributions. She served on the Public Design Commission of the City of New York from 2006 to 2015.
Over the span of her career Scher has been the recipient of hundreds of industry honors and awards. In 1998 she was named to the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, and in 2000 she got the Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design. She has served on the national board of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) and was president of its New York Chapter from 1998 to 2000. In 2001 she was granted the profession’s highest honor, the AIGA Medal, in acknowledgment of her recognized accomplishments and commitments to the field, and in 2006 she was granted the Type Directors Club Medal, the first woman to get the award. In 2012 she was honoured with the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Design Collab Award, in 2013 she got the National Design Award for Communication Design, presented by the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, in 2019 she was named a SEGD Fellow, and in 2021 she was respected with the title Royal Designer for Industry (RDI). Scher has been a member for the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) starting around 1993 and served as its president from 2009 to 2012. Her work has been exhibited all around the world and is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris. Scher is featured in “Abstract: The Art of Design,” the Netflix documentary series about leading figures in design and architecture.
Identity for one of the world’s leading opera companies, a constituent organization of New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.
Identity for the oldest symphony orchestra in the United States, one of the constituent organizations of New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.
Identity for the Microsoft Windows 8 operating system.
Logotype and packaging makeover for the quintessential luxury retailer.
Identity designed for one of New York City’s leading institutions for new theatrical productions.
Trivia
05
The Citi Bank Logo
How could a multi-billion dollar base their identity off of a second? Reply: “it’s a second finished in 34 years” says Paula Scher for her napkin sketch of the Citi logo. questioning came when Paula Scher first introduced her initial sketch of the Citi logo on a napkin during a client meeting. At that point, Citigroup had quite recently changed their name to Citi, signifying the union with insurance giant Travelers, the largest merger at that point. Met with protection from the new logo and identity design, Pentagram proposed multiple illustrations depicting the change from Citigroup and Travelers to the red curved Citi logo over a 14-year period.
Through all the resistance, Citi’s consumer banking activities and cards divisions welcomed the new identity with excitement. With their help, the new logo and identity executions were in progress. As for myself, I accept the red angled logo design is the most ideal answer for Citi. The abbreviated four-letter word creates a more instantly recognizable brandmark and the red bend over the letter “t” impeccably portrays the Travelers umbrella and the mix of the two brands into one. Better said by Paula, “The Citi Bank logo is totally intellectual. It was a marriage of the Traveler’s umbrella and the word Citi to make an umbrella in the word.”
06
The Maps Story In the 1990s, Paula Scher began painting colorful typographic maps of the world, its continents, countries, islands, oceans, cities, streets and neighborhoods. Obsessive, opinionated and more than a little personal, the paintings were a reaction against information overload and the constant stream of news, which, like the paintings, present skewed versions of reality in a deceptively authoritative way. The paintings are collected for the first time in Paula Scher: MAPS, a new book out now from Princeton Architectural Press. MAPS presents 39 paintings, drawings, prints and environmental installations, including Scher’s commission for New York City’s Queens Metropolitan Campus. Many of Scher’s original paintings are huge—as tall as 12 feet—and the book reproduces the works
in full and in life-size details that reveal layers of hand-painted place names, information and cultural commentary. The book’s jacket folds out into a 3’ by 2’ poster of a portion of World Trade, a painting from 2010. The book opens with an essay by Scher about the influence of her father, a photogrammetic engineer who worked on aerial photography for the U.S. Geological Service in the 1950s and taught her that maps were never totally accurate. (The essay’s title: “All Maps Lie.”) Scher’s father invented a measuring device called Stereo Templates that corrected lens distortions when aerial photography was enlarged for printed maps. Simon Winchester, author of The Map That Changed the World, contributes the book’s foreword, about the charm of maps in the age of GPS.
07
Thoughts & Conclusion
Paula Scher has revolutionized design industry with her design approach that I have always been fond of and I love the work that she does. I have always wondered that there is so much work that goes behind making brands and identities be unique and rememberable which is true. However, while researching about Paula, I have come across some surprises that shows not always do you need to get complicated with things that actually work in its simplest form. That is what I like about Paula, as she says “Less is more, more is more, problem is the middle”. I like how she plays with typography and the outcome is always smart and aesthetic. I like how she connected Citicorp and Travelers Group and the outcome didn’t lose its meaning and was welcomed by everyone. There is so much that we can learn from every successful designer stories and come across some surprises. Paula continues to surprise and inspire us with her work and I hope to be as good as her one day.