Graphic Design Legend & Pioneer Paula Scher

the moment is finally here where day 2 at Adobe MAX I just I can't believe it I'm a little nervous I got to tell you so my voice cracks a little bit you'll know why in a second because we have the most famous graphic designer in America here Paula Scher is here you guys make some noise look at that panning shot okay all right Paula thank you for doing this I'm just thrilled how much time do we have with you I just want to honor that first let's check our watches until about a quarter to six oh okay we'll get some questions in okay okay so for all the people that are watching on our live stream there's a whole group of people a whole bunch of human beings here we're gonna keep her warm so we're gonna get right into it I heard first of all that your talk went a little long we got kicked out of it so the first question I want to start with is just a really easy one was it a question that somebody had asked that you wanted to answer but you ran out of time to answer no okay I think I think the questions were we're pretty much along a similar vein and I think it's really it's always the same question and the question is how do you get somebody else to do something you know hire my logo pick the colors I liked you know all of that and that's the eternal question I don't really have the answer to that all the time you know no just drop a little pearl wisdom on us how do you do that how do you get your clients to to go out of their comfort zone to maybe change a pattern of behavior I don't always sometimes sometimes I do sometimes I do because I'm I can be persuasive and I'm very I don't give up you know I'm sort of it like a dog with a bone about it you know then I'll make a joke about it and then then that'll become the joke and the joke is that I'm gonna make them do what I want them to want me to do because I think it's gonna be better for them and that they can decide they believe that or they can decide I'm a pain in the neck you know I mean it really can go either way but it's it is in service of them because they're the beneficiary of it you know if the thing doesn't get made that's too bad for me but it's really too bad for them well but you're Paula Sharon you could do that and yeah it's really not true that's really not true there is not the reason I have so much work produced is I've been working 17 times longer than anybody's standing here I've been just doing this for 50 years my god if I didn't have enough pieces to show that would be really so sad because I've been doing it forever when you're when you do it forever and people recognize that you have a reputation and and that there is some basis and reason for them to listen to you they may listen to you because it's their money and if they put the money down they will listen also the fees matter you know that that if the fee is higher they tend to listen more oh I like that that's music to my ears they gotta want to pay the fee that's the that's the problem with that okay both ways so you if you if you pay more for something I think I've always told people this if they pay you more they respect you more well sometimes they just don't know if it's good I pay more for a coat sometimes because I think it's nicer than the one that was cheaper anybody else do that sure we all do that that's also that I mean it's part of it is perception Marta that part of it is actually knowing what you're doing part of it is understanding how to present somebody something to someone so that they they understand it and that that's really a matter of trying to understand how and what they see so you can put things in front of them in the order that they can begin to grasp what you're doing if you just say if you make a terrific design you hand it to somebody and say here and they don't know what they're looking at there's no reason that they're going to feel trust trusting of it so you want to set up a condition where you become a teacher to a degree some people sell I teach and that I think they both work well I was never particularly good salesman but I am a good teacher and and that's what I've done for a long time and and I fit the part I mean you you are you you have a reputation and there's a perception about you and that's helpful but you still have to build it and that comes from years of doing all kinds of work a lot of designers to get themselves noticed and I did this when I was young is take on pro bono projects and do them so you can make the work you want to make so you can show it if you if you show work and you're not proud of it and you say well this is really good except for this part here where somebody bad interfered and ruined it that doesn't count you can't you can't get away with that the piece has to be terrific and you have to feel terrific talking about it so if you're in a job and you're not allowed to make that work then you have to change your job if you're working for yourself and you're in your own business and the clients are making you do crappy things that you don't feel good about then you have to find a way to make things where you have complete control and do the work you want to do because that's the work you're going to show and that's the work you're going to get known for I mean the public theater is pretty much a free job you know I did that for years because it was exercise for me and because I knew I could make something I'd be proud of and that aspect it was especially important if I had some long slogs with a corporate client and it didn't go the way I wanted it to when that happens many times I'm not that different from you I'm just around longer so on the on the subject of pro bono work is there one project that you felt like it changed the course of your career there were a couple there was when my partner Terry Koeppel and I in the eighties started a business called Cove Helen share we made a little book called Great Beginnings that we mailed out and you know we did that as a promotion for ourselves in the book was the the beginnings of famous novels in the style and period in which they were written and it was really a little typographic Jim and I got reproduced in a lot of text books on how to design with tight and it kind of put us on the map so that the reputation for typography began with that and that was a that was a free thing we did there were there was a cover I did for AIG a that was a hand-painted thing that was sort of a precursor to the paintings I do and that was that was a it was a free job and it paid $1,000 for expenses something like that and I I did it all with handwriting so I didn't have any expenses so I got to keep $1,000 but you know it's still a free job but you know I I've done that I'm doing it right now I got involved in a campaign for mental illness that I'm working on that was a complete donation because I thought I could make it powerful and I felt like it would be wonderful really do something that I could put into out into society that would do some good you know I mean I do things like that all the time and I showed you if you were in the lecture the type directors Club is a free job and I used that to experiment with you know that the work the free work isn't free it's not like you're not getting anything for it if you're just giving it away and you're not getting anything back from it then definitely don't do it but the point is that you should be looking at it as a way that you can find your own spirit or you can do some good or whatever it is you want it to do otherwise no I think you're nourishing some Souls right now and also shocking a few others because I have to say that hundreds of wards museums inclusions and every single thing I can think of that I'm shocked to hear that Paula Scher still needs to do probable pro bono work to kind of explore your creativity don't be ridiculous we all do that I mean that that's painters do you think I mean you most of us want the opportunity to be able to try something and even fail and that you're not really allowed to do that in your day job you can't you can't fail you have to you have to meet some some standard and you know design is messy I mean to grow in it you have to experiment to make experiments you're going to fail and and the thing is that failures are great because now you know what not to do that's a really good learning thing knowing not what not to do saves you a lot of time but then every now and then you discover something that's possible and that is it that's great that's a breakthrough that's what you want to have happen so that if it's a day job and you're doing this thing just to earn a dollar I don't even know that the community needs you I mean I think that as designers we have a responsibility to raise the expectation of what design can be so that each piece that's done elevates an area if you if I once did a parking garage for a client and I didn't want to do the job and he said you can do whatever you want just do it and I designed a parking garage that I'm really proud of because all of a sudden parking garages were not bad things to design anymore that you you know that you you break into an area that may have been crummy and you've turned it into something that can be terrific and I think I think we all want that to happen because it broadens the ability of what our possibilities are on the flip side have you taken on one of those projects thinking this is where I get to do something cool and it didn't work out that way yep lots of times sometimes sometimes somebody asked me to do something and I just do a horrible job and feel terrible and tell them to go someplace else I mean that's happened like you know you're not good every time you sit down I mean it takes it takes time and energy and it's not equal every day it's not like you go in every day and you're equally brilliant some days you I've gone through periods where I didn't so fallow I haven't had a decent idea for months you know and I'm sort of falling like at all tricks I mean I'm a human being people people stink from time to time it's okay it's not terrible to do something horrible it's just depressing when you're doing what do you do to get out of that funk if you enter into the funk I've had I've had fallow periods where everything fell flat and generally the way I get out of it is going to a lot of museums and seeing a lot of things that that spark some ideas that I better dormant and then then I get invigorated and I can do it and I'm lucky because I live in New York City and and you live here and I mean you've got some of the best museums here now so that there's nothing that's keeping you I guess you all don't live here do you you came here maybe there maybe live in bad places is that possible but if you live in places that that there are things around that you can access that are going to sort of spark your enthusiasm and bring ideas to you that that you have to go and do that it's sort of like feeding yourself you know it's it's nourishing and if you don't live near thing you could always travel to New York or other places right I just I just realized that of course people don't act they actually came here like I did I just made an assumption everybody lived in LA and good there's a lot of LA people here though there are ok so here's another question this one Matthew kind of helped me out with because he did go to your talk he was sharing with us about the Parsons new school and there's this thing that we talk about a lot that attachment like designers get attached to things clients get attached to things people get attached really easily and it causes a lot of friction in our lives and what you realized in that year tweets was that it was the students who lived with this didn't want to change right I have so many questions about this because I don't you don't strike me as a social media person but here you are you're answering the tweets like why do that even and how do you process all that they asked me to do it oh my gosh and I really I really didn't like the idea of it but then I turned out to be really good at it and also it deflated it it made it funny and instead of awful because the amount of criticism was huge and and also there were there were phony rumors around the school like about how much I was being paid for it which you didn't you know it wasn't anywhere near reality so the whole thing became inflated and I think that my learning from it was really when the students left and it stopped and that I didn't think it was that simple but of course I mean I should have I should have understood that because they would that was their identity they went to school there that even if even if they didn't have a good one that was theirs and that you it was it was as if I had come and they saw me as a big famous designer and I take it and I didn't even go to Parsons and I'd taken this thing away and like I'd done some terrible thing and I get that I could I could really see how they could feel that way and then the fact that it changed so quickly was really amusing but we have these sort of crazy emotional responses to these things that we feel ownership over you know like it might be it might be an identity for a school or it might be the way there was a store on a block and it left and something else replaced it and and there's this feeling of familiar and comfort with these things we have and when they're taken away it becomes very depressing and you get very angry about it and that's how people respond to these things but that's different from the kind of like online criticism of logos when they first emerge which a lot of that is just people being silly online you know there's serious criticism and then there's criticism that's just just somebody doesn't have enough work to do [Laughter] okay I want to follow up on something you said earlier in that you said that you're not a great salesperson but you're a really good teacher so when somebody's having the this issue of letting go let's it let's move back into the professional realm with clients right so you're saying if you just show up and here it is love it or hate it that's gonna create problems so it is are there these intermediate steps that you take and can you can you outline them for us like how about we have greater success in helping our clients deal with change well a lot of it starts before you begin designing because it has to do with your conversation with them and your access to them and and this assumes that the group here in talking to them are having direct access with clients and not working for somebody who has direct access with clients it's very hard when you're not the person who has direct access for clients because you're having somebody interpret what they said and they may not be doing it accurately and that could be bad but mostly if you ask somebody what they're looking for in a couple of key ways they're going to be able to tell you and the one thing that I've done at pentagram is we have this book of trademarks that has I don't know about 500 marks that we've done over the years and I if I have particularly if there are three participants who are the clients or more I give them each a book and I tell them to take it you know a sticky note and mark the ones they love when one color and the ones they hate in the next color so that way I can tell what their tastes are is somebody really a modernist or so does somebody like a lot of curlicues that's important thing to know if you have a group of three and they come out all the same and they pick the same ones that's fantastic if they come out all different you're in trouble because you're gonna have different tastes making decisions around the table so you have to know what they see sometimes you just ask them what they like and after they get through Nike and Apple you can get into the real things that you to find out like what are their competing businesses etc but they'll always say those three things sometimes it's it's something else but the Nike Apple and the one you didn't expect but but you do learn a lot from that because that tells you a bit about what kind of form they like and if they talk about their competitors find out how much they want to be like them and how much they want to be different from them and that's very revealing but these are things that give you cues on how to design something and if you don't ask those questions you're really not in a position to be informed about how to approach it it's one thing to say you have a good idea for a form or interpreting the business but if you do it and it's very pure and very modernist and you have somebody who doesn't like that you're gonna have a problem with the form so you have to know that from the get-go and that way you sort of know how to do it so it's just considering pretend and and women will understand this pretend like you have to shop for somebody else that's a little bit of what designing from somebody else's you got to go out you got to get them a shirt you know they'd like and you have to analyze everything they wore and what they always but they always bought and what they never bought and then you know sort of how to pick it that's kind of what you're doing when you design it's a girl the answer I love that answer actually you actually gave me some really great actual things that we could implement so super awesome the idea that you can ask your client about competitors like they want to be the same or different how do you phrase that in a way that allows them to tell you the truth because I think every client you ask that there we want to be totally different but just like everybody else well first of all they're human and you have to assume that's gonna happen from the get-go you know if everybody goes to a party they're all wearing black you can't make somebody who always wears black put on a pink party dress and go to the party you can make them wear a red belt on the black dress but that's about as far as you're gonna take him and you got to let it go just make it a terrific red belt you might zip up the whole outfit but you have to think about things in those terms if a client tells you that they don't want to be like someone but they're competing with them it means they want to be like them a little bit not just in the bad ways in the good ways and you have to find out what that means sometimes that doesn't have anything to do with their graphic design sometimes it has to do with the way they the company's organized or the kind of media they get or something they Envy about the other the other person and I think a little perception and the conversation will help you do it it's it's not that different from talking to a friend and trying to find out what they want or what's bothering them if they sat down and talked to you these people are coming because they need something and you have to figure out what it is they need and the way to know if you're on the right track is to play back some description of something that might be along the lines of what you might do for them to see if you get a positive read on their faces they're nodding you know does that is this something or do they not know what you're talking about and you can use examples should it be like such-and-such or what do you think of this and those those answers are very key when they start to tell you that they like something or don't like something you should listen very carefully when they do because they're telling you what to make for them and then you just make it see how easy it is so do you think designers get conflicted with the ICC's kinds of questions but then they have their happy ears on and they don't actually listen to what the clients say back is that where that some of the conflict might come in I'm not sure I you know I think that I think that the designers have gotten themselves in positions of having direct contact with specific clients and I've had success with it know how to ask the questions and those who have done it less don't and I think it's a learning curve and some of it has to do with watching somebody do it successfully yourself and has to do so much of how we work has to do with where we've worked because what you see is what you know and you really need me to see somebody demonstrated like when I worked in the record industry I work for a very powerful art director named John Berg who made a million record covers and he was a fighter and he he never gave in and he could persuade anybody to anything but he had a big office with lots of awards on the wall and seemed to have a lot of power and some of the bands were intimidated by him but I watched the fact that he was always steady on demanding a certain level of equality and not letting them screw it up and that involvement being more involved with them having more meetings with them actually having to put in more time into that situation to make it go his way that's what he did and I learned that from him that you don't give it up you know somebody says well I really don't like that I might stand back and say well let me show it to you but in a slightly different way you know that there may be a way that you get around it you might make some slight modification that actually makes it work for that person and it may make the job better also it's it's sort of a tenacity not not to let go of the opportunity of making it to be the thing that you're going to be the most satisfied about showing that's really all it's about I'd love to make a hard pivot right now and talk about something else is that okay do whatever you want on the serious abstract which I'm sure almost everybody here is seeing or so I'm gonna switch gears here because I watch it I feel like I get to know something about you and and I'm connected to it what was that like for you during and what happened to your life after if anything had change at all you have cameras following you the whole time that's got to be an unusual experience yeah that was that was annoying the the interview parts were sort of like this like that Richard press it was the director is a terrific director and and he he filmed a lot of moments where I'm describing sort of the things I'm talking about now you know like how how to work with a client the diagram of the meeting which was actually in my book make it bigger and he didn't talk tell me what he was doing with all that information at the point he got it so he would want a certain scene of me behaving a certain way so he'd make me run up and down a flight of stairs casas about 17 times so he make me walk out in New York City and have me come back and know somebody blocked me and had to go back and walk it again and do it in high heels on a really hot day I mean it was really annoying and you know I until I saw the film done I wanted to kill him the worst thing he did and and I here's what here's where he was truly a genius the way the way they're set up there's a format and if you watch Jonathan Hoefler switch is out now it's the format it's very similar and the thing is that it's a story about the person and the work they do but they focus on a project and that at the beginning they talk about the project and by the end of the the thing you see the project being realized and that's that's sort of the the modus operandi of those so we were going to do the public theater poster because it was the only poster I knew would come out in time for the the thing to end because they have to be out in May and we started they started filming in January so the timing of it was perfect and in my book this diagram of a meeting is do you guys know what this is I don't know if you saw it it's sort of this where I'm describing how you meet with a client and there's a group of people and there's a level of expectation and when you get to the top it's the pinnacle and then somebody who usually wasn't at the meeting or was left out of the process starts taking it down and you know it's sort of showing all the negatives of it and it comes down to below when you walked in the door and then you got to take it back up and you get it up to a certain point and it's not as high as the original point of expectation was but it's pretty good and you got to end the meeting there because if you don't end the meeting it's going to devolve down it'll be you know below ground level so he wanted me to describe this thing and draw it at the same time and he had me bending over a piece of glass where my face was showing through and I was doing this thing with the marker and I could never get the damn diagram to fit on the glass so he kept making me retake it which was really really awful and I hated it and it was mad at him but what was miraculous was I had no idea where he was going to use it and he used it in that public theater meeting where I'm describing it now the public theater clients are probably the sweetest people on the planet and they never really reject anything but they do make rebuttals and I watched this thing and it was totally true and I don't know how he knew that was going to happen but he knew it was going to happen because it always happens even when you don't even know what's happening so that was Jesus credit he was a genius yeah it could just be that that's how all client meetings are - right it's always there's some truth to that everybody years like I've experienced that before and okay so now you're like Netflix everywhere are people like yelling your name down the street and or whatever I was like is your life different after the Netflix series that much I mean I there were some people that I got a lot of calls for business from it and they were really bad that call so that's not good clients but you do get client calls I got a lot they're all sort of crappy not just people who didn't know what they were doing you know letters from people who said one woman sent me a logo she had designed for her business and you know stuff like that so they were filming on and off from January to May yeah and they're editing like they and he did things I didn't know he was going to do like they called me down to this sort of post-production thing and they said quote Betty Davis in a movie and I would quote her and then my voice was running over that I mean it was wonderful what he did it was great Wow good director yes okay now boy we only have like 10 more minutes here right eight minutes okay I'm gonna switch gears here one more time okay you mentioned your former partner Terry yep and I was reading that recession hits in 91 yeah I just want to know how you deal with adversity because we see you as the person who succeeded it was just on Netflix and winning awards and just do whatever you want world-beater but there's this period in time when you guys split up as your partnership seven years and I think and how did that feel what was that process like about like god this sucks a little bit or does it well it was just it was sad you know I mean it wasn't it wasn't a bad breakup it was a it was a necessary breakup we had it we had a business that were based on both of our businesses and Terry was a magazine designer and in the bush recession there just weren't any magazines to design so we had to stop drawing the salary because we we'd moved into these this new place and it was very expensive and I was sort of living off the expense account and he couldn't afford to do it so he took a job at Esquire and I just I was running the business by myself for about a year and a half and then kind of Graham asked me to join and then I closed it all down and that's what happened and if Terry hadn't left I don't know if I would have joined pentagram I have no idea about that I just know at that time it was the best thing to do how do you pray like if we can rewind the tape how do you process that because if we're in a business that may or may not be working out with a partner what are signals that maybe this is it obviously worked out pretty good for you we were good friends and we're still friends and we're very different personalities but I enjoyed him because he made he made life easy for me because he just made me laugh all the time he's very funny man and you know we had a really good time starting up that with that company and we a lot of success in the first four or five years and the recession was hard recessions are hard to overcome if you're in a business that isn't recession proof you know if you're diversified it's much easier than if you're really in one area and if that area goes down you're really in trouble partnerships are difficult because you have to share and you have to share equally even though you might not be putting in equal amounts of work and that makes it problematic pentagram is a remarkable relationship because everybody shares the money equally and the partners have very broad differences of scale of business but you have to make that decision as a person to make that thing work things that are on the outside it's funny I think that things that are caused by outside influences in funny ways are easier to live with in a partnership than things that come from the personal failings of the other individual or yourself those are harder to deal with as a designer is how can we make it recession proof is there such a such such a thing possible save a lot of money the economy goes up and down I've been through a lot of recessions like when I joined C's pentagram there was a recession still and then there was the 2008 crash you know we but if I had an architect partner his whole business fell apart because it was an architect and there just was no work for architects I mean there's this stuff happens and the best thing I can say about graphic design within that is if you're diversified you have a better shot of working and it's good to have good relationships with a lot of your old clients because you may need them when the chips are down and a lot of them come through so so yeah it's not it's not easy but everybody survives it it's just not easy and if everybody's going through it at the same time then it doesn't feel as bad if it's only you then it's terrible okay I'm gonna seek you one more question is okay what are we doing okay four minutes okay I have to ask this question what gets you out of bed each morning where's your fuel coming from what motivates you to to do what you do to continue in business be who you are well if you don't want a physical philosophical answer I'll give you a practical one I want both okay I don't know about the philosophical one the the practical one is that I have a project coordinator named rusty who is fantastic and he puts everything in my calendar and he sends me an email the night before to make sure I do it and what gets me out of bed in the morning since I've got to be somewhere so I just get up and I do it and I don't worry about it too much because I'm just getting out of bed is the hard part not because I'm depressed or anything just because I don't I like sleeping so so you know I look at the thing and I go oh I got to be at downtown and 8:30 and and the traffic's bad and then I move you know and if I don't have to then I don't move so much that's all it's not that complicated okay so we have one more minute can I get the philosophical answer that one intrigues me even more I like making things and that's really what I'm interested in and I like it even more the more I the older I am because I find that all the things that I sort of achieve like I can't even remember when I'm putting together a talk or a lecture and I get an idea for it what to even show because I forget about my old work very quickly and I'm really on to the next thing and that's that's what drives me and it's fun if it isn't fun it isn't worth doing because it's you know clients are irritating sometimes there isn't a good economy sometimes you're stuck with some long slog a job you can't get rid of I mean there's all of that so you better love it because there's no reason to do it otherwise really there are there are other decent ways to make a living I hear real estate is actually still a good profession okay I think we're Anna that was lovely thank you very much guys round applause Paul share guys [Applause] thank you very much

Channel: The Futur

Views: 59,206

Rating: 4.9830179 out of 5

Keywords: netflix abstract, paula scher, pentagram, design studio, livestream, live-stream, graphic designer, design legend, first female design partner, adobe max, 2019, graphic design, design, logo design, branding, identity systems, identity design, public theater, MoMA, Metropolitan Opera, New york

Id: VJ54aG0q4WE

Length: 32min 52sec (1972 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 05 2019