Paula Scher

Paula Scher (born October 6, 1948, Washington, D.C.) is an American graphic designer, painter and art educator in design.

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

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

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.

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 Stravinsky), 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).

Her designs were recognized with four Grammy nominations.

She is also credited with reviving historical typefaces and design styles.

She left Atlantic Records to work on her own in 1982.

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 did not copy the early constructivist style but used its vocabulary of form on her works.

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 the famous Swatch poster.

Together they created a parody issue in 1985, a genealogy chart of graphic design.

Scher was profiled in the first season of the Netflix docu-series Abstract: The Art of Design.

She also served as the first female principal at Pentagram, which she joined in 1991.

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.

Since then, she has been a principal at the New York office of the Pentagram design consultancy, where she 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, Bausch + Lomb, Coca-Cola, Shake Shack, The New School, 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 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

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 Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich and the Centre Georges Pompidou". 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.

Scher has contributed to numerous issues of Print.

Her first Print cover was with her friend Steven Heller.

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".

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

Based on the challenge to raise public awareness and attendance at the Public Theater along with trying to appeal to a more diverse demographic, Scher created a graphic language that reflected street typography and graffiti-like juxtaposition.

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 were seen across New York, including buses, subways, kiosks, and billboards.

Scher's Shakespeare in the Park campaign had become a seasonal tradition in the city.

In 1995, 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 had not been attracted to theater.

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.

The Public Theater posters: