Friday Feature – 04/06/2021 – Paula Scher

Date of Birth: October 6, 1948
Place of Birth: Washington, DC. (USA)
Alma Mater: Tyler School of Art, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania.

Paula Scher is an American graphic designer, painter and art educator. She is also the first female partner at the design agency Pentagram, which she joined in 1991. She has since become one of the most influential graphic designers in the world. Paula Scher is married to fellow designer Seymour Chwast. They met in January 1970, during her third year at the Tyler School of Art and they married in 1973. They divorced five years later but remarried in 1989. Scher and Chwast now live and work in New York City.

Shortly after graduating from Tyler, Scher moved to New York City and took her first job as a layout artist for the children’s book division of Random House. In 1972, she was hired to the advertising and promotions department of CBS Records but left after two years to pursue a more creative endeavour at competing label, Atlantic Records. There, she became the art director and began designing her first album covers. Scher returned to CBS a year later as art director for the cover department. 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 included Boston by Boston, Poulenc Stravinsky by Leonard Bernstein and Ginseng Woman by Eric Gale, which earned Scher the first of her four Grammy nominations.

After working freelance for two years, Scher co-founded Koppel & Scher in 1984 with editorial designer and fellow Tyler graduate Terry Koppel. During the seven years of their partnership, she produced numerous identities, book jackets, and adverts, including the famous Swatch poster.

The early 90s recession caused a major downturn in business for the agency. As a result, Koppel took the position of Creative Director at Esquire magazine in 1991. In turn, Scher began consulting and joined Pentagram’s New York office.

Scher became a design educator in 1992, teaching at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York. Since her appointment at SVA, she has also been awarded teaching positions at the Cooper Union, Yale University and the Tyler School of Art. 

In 1994, Scher was the first designer to create a new identity and promotional graphics system for The Public Theater, a New York City arts organization founded in 1954. The work she produced became a benchmark for future theatrical promotion design as well as cultural institutions in general. From that first campaign up to 2005, Scher worked closely with The Public’s producer (George C. Wolfe) and artistic director (Oskar Eustis) developing posters, ads and distinct identities. As part of the 50th anniversary campaign in 2005, 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 the type foundry Hoefler & Frere-Jones (now Hoefler&Co or H&Co)

“It took me a few seconds to draw it, but it took me 34 years to learn how to draw it in a few seconds.”

Paula Scher

One of Scher’s most prolific projects with The Public was her first poster campaign for the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park (aka Shakespeare in the Park). The 1994 productions were The Merry Wives of Windsor and Two Gentlemen of Verona. The designs for the Shakespeare in the Park campaign were seen across New York, including buses, subways, kiosks, and billboards. Scher has produced promotional work for every production since. Along with The Public, Scher has developed promotional materials and environmental graphics for a broad range of clients including Bloomberg, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet and the New York Philharmonic.

In 2005, Scher opened an exhibition at Maya Stendhal gallery in New York City. The purpose was to display two paintings that she had created. Both measured 9-by-12-foot and were made to resemble maps made of patchwork quilts from afar but contained numerous textual details when observed up close. The exhibit was a great success, which led the Maya Stendhal’s owner to extend the exhibition for four weeks. So 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. This was Scher’s first solo exhibition as a fine artist and each piece was sold for at least $40,000. Scher continued to make more such maps over the next few years. By 2011, she wrote the book “Paula Scher: MAPS,” displaying reproductions of her entire collection.

Paula Scher’s work has been exhibited all over the world. Such work 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 Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.