Design is Play
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Paula Scher is a woman of design who I have always looked to for inspiration, and she has taken design and played with it to convey the strong messages seen in her work today. Scher has produced award-winning design, not only for her work with big corporate identities, but also for her extraordinary typographic skills she used in all her designs. In Meggs’ History of Graphic Design she is described as
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an “outspoken designer with an ironic sense of humor”. Scher designs to a philosophy that “design is play” and you can’t let the pressures of the clients needs interfere with the “serious play” of the design. She incorporates that philosophy into almost everything she designs, whether she uses typographic messages to convey her ideas or an old school twist from a previous design.
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Scher designs to a philosophy that
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“design is play” and you can’t let the pressures of the clients needs interfere with the “serious play” of the design.
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Paula Scher Swatch Watch USA 1984
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� All through the eighties, clients seemed to believe they were buying style, not thinking.
One of her famous pieces, a poster for swatch, was based off of a famous Herbert Matter poster from the 1930s. In this poster she mirrors Matter’s design and takes the basic properties of Swiss Design and brings them up to date and incorporates them into modern concepts for the Swatch Company. She was, I believe, a genius in doing this because she conveyed the message of swatch as timeless in style and brought for the old concepts of Swiss design and modernized them. She often references Swiss Design in her work, often referred to as the International Typographic Style, and she uses the type to convey a stronger message than a photograph or graphic.
Herbert Matter Swiss Tourism 1934
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music graphics were characterized by generous budgets, elaborate photography and illustrations, and opportunities to experiment.
Paula Scher first began designing at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and after graduating with a Bachelors in Fine Arts, she began her career at both Atlantic and CBS Records as a record cover art director in the 1970s. During that time, “music graphics were characterized by generous budgets, elaborate photography and illustrations, and opportunities to experiment” Her
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“design is play” philosophy began to shine through in 1979 when “tight budgets often forced Scher to develop typographic solutions based on imagination, art and design history sources, and her fascination with obscure and little used typefaces. Art deco, Russian constructivism, and outmoded typefaces were incorporated into her work.”
The Best of Jazz 1979 (CBS)
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Paula cofounded Koppel & Scher in 1984, and started to become deeply passionate about book making. A famous piece the firm did was a promotional small book called Great Beginnings that featured the 1st two paragraphs of famous novels designed in the period style in which they had been written. Although the book was a gag and didn’t represent their actual style it was enough to grab others attention. Only seven years later in
1991, Scher joined Pentagram as a partner. “Drawing from what Tom Wolfe has called the “big closet” of art and design history, classic and pop iconography, literature, music and film, Scher creates images that speak to contemporary audiences with emotional impact and appeal. Three decades into her career, these images have come to be visually identified with the cultural life of New York City.”
Great Beginnings 1984 Koppel & Scher
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DESIGN IS PLAY
Scher’s philosophy and approach to design is to “play.” In a video she did for the Ted Partner Series, she talks about how she designs. She believes that in order to have a good successful design their needs to be play first, before you begin to step into the serious side of the design world. To sum up what her early design career was, Paula wanted nothing to do with the font Helvetica.
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I respond to the strength, organization, spirit, intelligence, and power of the graphics produced by the Bauhaus.
She thought it was too clean, boring, she hated it, and wanted to design anything that had no relation to it. This is why she stepped into the design realm of Bauhaus, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and Victorian Style. She knew that none of these periods had anything to do with Helvetica. She played with these time periods in design, and made them current and relevant to our times.
All posters Scher designed for The Public Theater
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All posters Scher designed for The Public Theater
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In playing and taking risks she created something beautifully successful which transformed her career and New York City as well.
“The Bauhaus influence permeates most of my work almost involuntarily. I respond to the strength, organization, spirit, intelligence, and power of the graphics produced by the Bauhaus designers and find it nearly impossible not to draw on some element that they had previously established.” She played with all her designs, and she specifically
refers to her work with The Public Theater. She used a new typographic expression to reinvent and transform herself and The Public Theater. She had no idea what she was doing but in playing and taking risks she created something beautifully successful, which transformed her career and New York City as well.
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atmosphere of inclusion and expanding possibilities enabled many designers to experiment with highly personal, even eccentric, directions.
Before her work for The Public Theater, Scher did not consider herself Modern or Post-modern, but after her posters started to show up all over New York City, and designers began to copy her type forms and abstract grids she would work in, she became a Post-modern designer. She has all the characteristics of a post-modern designer, such as eclecticism, ornamentation, kitsch, wit, and irony, but she wouldn’t say that about herself. In a post-modern article Scher was featured in a few years ago,
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she was described as a designer who seemed to always incorporate “an atmosphere of inclusion and expanding possibilities enabled many designers to experiment with highly personal, even eccentric, directions.” Scher’s work clearly fell into the Post-modern Design because her work is describes as “unfolding repertoire (including) several new directions, including casually hand painted lettering and images on very coarse paper.
All posters Scher designed for The Public Theater
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Typographic Poster Schere 1999
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� Her work redefined how many people and designers looked at typography.
This results in posters and book jackets whose words and pictures are unified through a common technique and surface; these designs project an unrefined, handmade character in counter point to the precision of all her computer-aided design.� I believe, her work has been ground breaking in the graphic design world because she is what I would consider, an underground
graphic designer in the beginning of her career. Her work with the public theater made her blow up around NYC and become more mainstream, but her original concepts, and the way she incorporates type into her design was an underground concept. Her work redefined how many people and designers looked at typography.
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Citi Bank Logo Scher 1999 Working Woman Poster Scher 1998
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Citi Bank Bloomberg Coca-Cola Perry Ellis The Museum of Modern Art Jazz at Lincoln Center The Metropolitan Opera The New York City Ballet The New York Philharmonic The Detroit Symphony Orchestra The New Jersey Performing Arts Center The New 42nd Street The New York Botanical Garden, The United States Holocaust Museum The Robin Hood Foundation The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.
New York City Ballet Poster Scher 2000
Ballet Tech Poster Scher 2000
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Scher’s self work that she has taken great interest in is, her Maps of the world. She started to create them during her work with Citi Bank. Scher exclaimed “I was going out of my mind between meetings, and phone calls, the
China, 11’ X 5’’, Acrylic on canvas, 2006 Africa, 10’ X 9’, Acrylic on canvas, 2003
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last thing I wanted to do was look at any type of logo forms. This is when I started creating the world maps. This was a way of experimenting and having fun with design, and getting my humor
back.� Paula Scher went on to create nearly 100 of these maps of all over the world. Her maps were her way to put her philosophy of playful design back into her life once again.
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She would begin to create a map, and mislabel places, put states and cities in places they didn’t belong.
She would begin to create a map, and mislabel places, put states and cities in places they didn’t belong, and would admire people who would go to see these things an point at a place and say “I was there” because they really had never been there because most of the places didn’t exist,or were in
the wrong geographical location. She has developed identity and branding systems, promotional materials, and environmental graphics, packaging and publication designs for a wide range of clients who pay for her effective playfulness in design.
Manhattan, NYC Transit 11’ X 5’’, Acrylic on canvas 2007
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Think Poster Scher 2005
“Paula creates images that speak to contemporary audiences with emotional impact and appeal. These images have come to be visually identified with the cultural life of New York City. Paula is a member of the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame and a past recipient of the Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design. She has served on the national board of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), and in 2001 she was awarded the profession’s highest honor, the AIGA
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Medal, in recognition of her distinguished achievements and contributions to the field. She has served on the board of directors of The Public Theater, and in 2006 she was named to the Art Commission of the City of New York.” Her work is important, to me, because I often look towards it for typographic inspiration. I feel that all contemporary designers can use her as an art reference and derive so much inspiration from her work.
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Bibliography Pentagram Website Partners: Paula Scher http://pentagram.com/en/new/paula-scher/ Identity works Identity forum Contributors: Paula Scher http://www.identityworks.com/forum/author/paula-scher/ Paula Scher Maps Map Gallery http://www.paulaschermaps.com/ AIGA Website Gallery: Paula Scher http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/medalist-paulascher Make it Bigger By Paula Scher Princeton Architectural Press, 2002 Meggs, Phillip B., and Purvis, Alston W. Meggs’ History of Graphic Design. (4th edition) Ed. Wiley. Revised by Alston W. Video of Paula Scher Get Serious campaign, http://www.ted.com/talks/paula_scher_gets_serious.html
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