Life Lessons from the Field – Paula Scher – btconfBER2017

so I've actually been a practicing designer for about 45 years and so I've spoken in a lot of places and done a lot of conferences etc and I find that you are pretty much within 10 years always the same age and that I keep getting older in the audience's keep getting younger and that's fine because you're looking at me from a distance and that makes me very happy but I I found over the period of time of working and through the breadth of technology that exists on our planet that there are things that are always true and that have been true for forty-five years and that they have nothing to do with technology and they have everything to do with making things and people and I thought I'd give you my ten life lessons from the field these are things that if you haven't already thought about them or done them you may go back and think about them and that there are things that stay with you your whole life your own version of them not my version of them but your own so starting from number one fall in love with something that was designed know what it was remember it remember the first time you saw it remember how you felt when you saw it remember why you felt that way and they'll all be different but you'll return to that always because when you're thinking about why you're doing something that will come back and haunt you for me it was three things it was these three Beatles covers the revolver cover I saw when I was in high school and I thought it was the most involving and fantastic thing before I had even begun to take drugs and you know I am of that age and and it stayed with me forever and the artist was klaus voormann this is an album designed by Peter Lake and Janet Haworth and I saw this my first year of college and I stared at it for about two hours while I was listening to the this incredible record over and over again and I remember finding things in it and having my own sense of the contemporary culture reaffirmed by what I found in it it was if the album talked to me all the jokes of the people oh good they're still in the back and there's Marilyn Monroe and they're all in there together and it was amazing and Peter Blake who I'd later came to know was one of the primary authors of this and then finally this audacious only a year later after making the most involving record cover this arrogant audacious album cover of nothing that only the Beatles could do and that was pure hutzpah and for me the stuff stayed with me because in everything I do it's going to be involving is it going to reflect the culture of its time so this is going to be outrageous and that those things have made me want to keep making things and incidentally what was really funny to me and I only realized it later is the three artists I talked about we're actually fine artists none of them functioned as graphic designers and I never knew that until very recently and that's who the Beatles got to do their covers rather rather amazing lesson number two is about heroes and mentors people that said stuff to you that stayed with you and that that you draw from and you draw from those people at very specific moments when you feel like you've lost it and I had two important ones one of them was my teacher in college my illustration and design teacher named Stanislaw sagorsky he was a Polish illustrator he spoke very bad English he would say things like probably you should do over for me better and you know I would feel terrible and I had to please mr. Zagorski because his English was bad and he had been a record cover designer and he did the cream wheels of fire cover when I was a junior in college and that was just the coolest damn thing on the planet he persuaded me to move to New York he told me that graphic design was a field that really anybody could go into if they really wanted to do it and it's absolutely true it's not like being a movie store so that if you want to do this thing you can and I moved to New York because of him but the most important thing he did for me when I was frustrated with lining up Helvetica on a grid is he said illustrate with type and in those three words he gave me the rest of my career and I think about it every day my second hero and mentor is my husband Seymour Quast who was a founder of a studio in the 60s called pushpin and he was partners with a designer named Milton Glaser and they made work that looked like this and I met him when I was 21 with my portfolio I married him I divorced him and I remarried him we've been in every possible relationship none of them work but we've stayed together all these years because we're united by our passion for making things and he's a man who makes things all the time his work is biting funny political he does it because that's what he does and that seeing that has been continually inspiring and I don't know if I were it would have worked the way I did all these years without being in that relationship lesson number three and this is really important early on and later which is push back against something find the thing that's contemporary that you hate and overthrow it be a rebel question it don't follow the norm just because people are doing it and for me when I entered the design field the thing I hated more than anything was the typeface Helvetica I hated it because I thought anybody could use it I hated it because I thought it felt like cleaning up my room but mostly I hated it because in the 60s it was the language of corporate design and I blame corporations in America and American power for the Vietnam War which I was protesting so voting you know being using Helvetica is like endorsing the Vietnam War I just conflated those things and that's the way it was actually it's a completely beautiful typeface I can't you know I feel like a fool standing here and saying that but because of it I began drawing typography and looking for dated typefaces and things that were discarded this is long before the computer and before typography was drawn and so readily available you made these things by hand and these were all record covers I did in the 70s where I I found things like this was a buckingham pipe tobacco can where I copied the type typography for what's now a classic jazz album Saturday night in San Francisco or I used the influence of sort of Asian wood cuts and the back cover was actually very radical for its time because most covers had images on them and the whole thing became typographic a series of labels or I had people build things that from things I drew like this was a an inlaid record cover the the piece of wood I think was probably about three feet wide and it was carved and inlaid by a man named Nick fasciae know who built things and that of course there was no Photoshop in those days so that the kind of craft that you had to just absolutely do something was astounding now of course it's unexceptional because you figure you could do it in Photoshop this was another piece of inlaid stained glass that was also built by Nick pacchiana from @issue I drew and Leonard Bernstein purchased it and owned it and now it's in the family estate which I love you know I love that these things live on and you know I worked with a lot of period typography or not period typography but I crafted these things and they stayed with me and really what happened and remember I'm a designer in my 20s at the point I'm doing this is that it gave me a vocabulary I could use for the rest of my career I really knew how to work with type just from not liking Helvetica now this is very important and this is really about growth you have to defy the career staircase I'm going to give you the basic sort of structure of it and you can determine if it's going to apply to you or not but the trick is not to fall prey to it when you start out in your 20s you don't know very much because you really right out of school and you're learning stuff so that you if you think of a career like a staircase at the beginning the steps are very shallow and the risers are very steep and that's because you make big leaps because when you don't know anything you make a lot of mistakes you learn from your own mistakes and you move on and become professional that's how that happens and you're kind of either a peon or of under king depending upon the sort of position you have is you may think it might be terrific to be a vendor Kim but vendor Kim's burnout you're better off as a peon trust me in your 30s you're already becoming a pro so you'll find that the steps get wider and the risers get a little more shallow because you're on a level you've hit a level and you're starting to move along until you find the next thing that boys you up to to some significant growth and by your forties you're an aging pro happens very fast in this profession very scary because you find that you can be replaced by somebody who's in their early 30s very easily software developments they learn at younger all that stuff's scary so you'll find that this the the step got very wide and the rat riser got very shallow and then you pop up into your 50s and the only difference is you got power and the reason you have power in your 50s has nothing to do with what you've learned it actually has to do with the fact that all your clients are in their 50s because your clients are pretty much the same age as you are as you grow up so they're in positions of power therefore you're in positions of power and it's a great place to be you fifty is a great growth not so great you just try not to make mistakes you know sorted by your 60s you're sort of screwed you know things are getting a little a little rough you know you know if you're lucky you pass from 55 for about the next ten years and nobody really knows and then you know things go a little haywire you really don't know what's going to happen I mean I'll just lay it out for you straight I mean I hate to be brutal about this thing but I've looked at it for a long time and it's pretty much true defy it so now this may be contrary to pushing back against something and it may be contrary to defying the career staircase but you may find that you've begun to work with someone or something or in some area that where you keep growing it and evolving it and the situation is good and you think oh gee I've been doing this for a long time I probably should move on but in fact you're still discovering things and you have really powerful relationships and all of a sudden you find you're doing this thing very easy go the distance stay with it I stayed with something a client for now 24 years and I got very good at something as a result of it I really began to know an industry I became an expert in something even though I maintained lots of different types of client relationships and mine was with a public theater the public theater for those of you who don't know is a New York City not-for-profit theater that their mission is to put on plays that are for the public that are of interest that can be commercial enough to go to Broadway they are the home of Hamilton if you've heard of that play they were founded at the public theater another was bringing the noise bringing the funk or hair these are things you may know about and they were hatched at the small theatre in New York and I was hired to create an identity and a visual language for the theatre in 94 and I began creating this thing with American wood type before it was programmed and began creating a series of posters that have over the years received a lot of complaint it and it's a fairly small theater so that the graphic success was actually broader than the public's recognition of it because the public if you didn't go to the public theater you never saw these things and while I began doing them for these individual plays the one that everybody recognized was for this monster show that happened in the 90s called bring in the noise bring in the funk and what happened here was upsetting because the thing became a style and other people began working with it and when that happened I had to change it to make sure that the Public Theater would have its own voice and it wouldn't look like other plays but the problem with changing it which I did in the past 3 I showed you is that the Public Theatre lost its identity so a new director was hired and he asked me if I would go back and redress it so I really identity so it had a very formal identity that looked like this and it got very boring very fast now I'm talking to you about over a 10 or 12 year period then after about I'd say 16 years we redesigned the lobby of the theatre and the lobby of the theater had this fancy digital Shakespeare machine that does 39 plays on blades it had typography and laid into the arches that stay there forever and donor's walls that popped out of the brick and in the front of the box office was a montage of all the posters I'd made and I realized at that point in time that that's where they belong because all the posters were digitized we only put them out in boxes once and everything had gun gotten to be digital and I was building a digital in-house department for them and that the work I had done really to be rethought and I began to realize that if you made everything the same it was boring after the first year and if you changed it individually for each play the theater lost recognizability so the thing to do which I I totally got for the first time after working there at this point for 17 years is what they needed to have were seasons in other words that you looked at everything they did they have a cabaret called Joe's Pub they put on about 12 plays a year they have a children's program they have a writers program and all these things need to be designed and that you could take the typography and the color system for the summer festival the Shakespeare in the Park Festival and you could begin to translate it into posters by flopping the colors but using some of the same motifs and you could create entire seasons out of the graphics that would become its own standards manual where I have about six different people making these all year so that was what we did the first year the second year we did the skewed typography it moved one way it moved the other way and then collectively it became the season so each year the public theater gets a whole new identity I think the fourth year we started slicing through the typography this stuff worked very well it just kind of very powerful very brash held up the past season last year we did this thing if you saw Netflix this is what we were working on the war love poster that ended up becoming a really terrific season and very recognizable and then this past year we did a Julius Caesar play that had five posters all together and then became also a season all by itself what's great for this is I still work with it and it's become my lab it's where I go to become new again it's where I go to see if I can try something I haven't tried before and that I can only do it because I built this relationship of trust with this place over 23 years stay with it it's a good thing being a neophyte means actually going back to being in your 20s again and not knowing what you're doing that's the way you learn stuff you learn stuff by making mistakes if you know something you already know how to do it you're already an expert so the way I actually began to broaden my career was in the late 90s in the year 2000 what had happened was that computers were prevalent websites were everywhere everyone was becoming a digital designer and I was in my early 50s and it felt very late for me to be very good at this thing and I didn't feel comfortable with it but I wanted to find another way to work now my life with technology has been really sort of a strange one where just as the point where I'm supposed to be out of it a new technology comes along and chases all the predictions for example I was told in 1994 that I was going to go out of business because I couldn't get my head around cd-roms now I've heard this every year for the next you know 15 or 20 years and I found that that these things change that's not what I'm about I'm about making things that are recognizable not about making things that function necessarily digitally though the things that I make are always used digitally and they're very different professions because I'm actually an image maker not a user designer that's not what I do so I wanted to find something that would relate to what I do but wasn't necessarily graphic design or the expectation was it wouldn't be an image that would be printed or even reproduced digitally and because of the public theater I got asked to work on a school for and actresses and it was in a building in Newark that looked like this it was a rectory building and it had been given to the New Jersey Performing Arts Center by Lucent Technologies and they wanted me to do something with it maybe cover it with banners so their budget was low and I made the discovery of my life which was that if you take a building and you make a Photoshop rendering of it and they have the budget to make it look like the Photoshop rendering it will come out in the end exactly like the Photoshop rendering so here was my Photoshop rendering of this building that I covered with typography and here is the building in fact more of my environmental design gets made looking exactly like what I've presented to the client than anything else if it doesn't look like it it's because it doesn't get built at all there's no middle ground it's not like they asked you to make something a little smaller they just don't because once they've agreed to the budget and the way the things are built that's the deal for this building I I didn't know who was going to paint it I hired guys who paint garages in Newark New Jersey and this was the best job they ever had they got up on the ladder they'd called me on the phone and say hey Paulie you know your type here you know we didn't like the spacing and we thought we closed it up a little and they were right they did a really good job with it I began doing this thing inside a lot of charter schools I got I became sort of the educational Queen and I still do this work of messaging and persuading public and private schools to not paint their buildings beige and that it's been quite successful and you know I work with union workers who usually don't care about their jobs that much and I had two terrific painters who worked on this music room that you're looking at and I remember one of them when he saw the cop he said oh lady you're crazy and then he did it and it was just gorgeous they do glorious work it's it's funny with you challenged people they really they really have fun with it I began designing exterior signage for theaters and Interiors of theater spaces but then it moved on to corporate work and I began doing insides of corporate headquarters this is a massive digital sign that my partner Lisa Strauss Feld programmed and it was based on Bloomberg's identity which is really the world in numbers so everything that was communicated on this digital signage which is essentially an AP news feed was parsed so that all the important numbers were blown up big and drunk jumped across the spaces we designed this thing this way because we had originally designed it as one giant Jumbotron that this thing would project on which was actually a little boring but that's the way we had designed it and then we were told to lose 40% of the budget so we cut these spaces in it it was so good for the piece so good nothing like a budget cut these are the stairs and Bloomberg's headquarters they're all different heights so the numbers were just determined based on the one height the tallest ceiling and if they it was actually the lowest ceiling and that if the ceiling was too short it just bent around which is the way we do stuff I built things out of all kinds of materials I still do and it's really a kick because I realized that environmental graphics is just graphic design with a different PMS swatch book and it's a lot of fun to to figure out space how people are going to read things in space and I still feel like Annie if I doing this here's some crazy stuff like this was a this is for a Brickell city center in Florida if they ever come out of there flood down there and this is a sign that's going to be about a hundred and twenty five feet high and rotate this is you're looking at a virtual reality little sketch we made of a Planned Parenthood's headquarters where we made a hallway mural that runs up about five flights of steps out of there out of there advertising from all the all periods of time that we recolored and turned into pop art essentially these are the pieces flat and they're really birth control devices you know so it's sort of fine art of birth control pills and diaphragm cream and all kinds of exciting things like that here's a syringe that's nice the pills what was wonderful is that the all over the United States after this thing was installed the various Planned Parenthood headquarters began calling them for big hunks of the mural that they could put in various office spaces so it was the first time I had done one of these things that became exportable and it's it's quite wonderful when you design something for a given space and it moves around just like an identity they're really the same thing it's like how do you encapsulate the spirit of a place and or an individual or a group in a in a form of graphic design I seem to be missing something here oh dear okay I can have to talk about this without an image that seems to be missing in 2013 New York City had this really bad hurricane called hurricane sandy and it demolished the boardwalks and I was hired I'm a little worried about this because I see some images about the next one there there there okay I was high I was hired to create a new sign system for the demolished area and got this idea to do what I called sort of emotional wayfinding signs where I took all the entrances to all the beaches in New York City and I know you don't think their beaches in New York City but there are they run along Brooklyn and Queens and they have specific street entrances and you walk through the street you go onto the beach and I did this because the communities were really devastated and they were almost against any kind of renovation except having their their wooden boardwalks were built back which was an impossibility so we did these signs and then painted these bright colored buildings along the what was left of a little cement version of the boardwalk and then began working on the boardwalk itself and we created a font for the boardwalk which we called Rockaway wide for Rockaway Beach and it was made out of the pixels from the letter A that you see here what you're looking at or the boardwalk planks on the top and the way the letter forms are made out of the planks and here it is on the boardwalk and the whole thing runs about a mile wide you're looking at some drone shots it just opened last summer for the first time it was two years in the making and the town loves it I really am so ecstatic about it because it's very hard when you work with community boards and people to get their involvement and buy-in because everybody is more angry usually than they're ready to come together but when they saw their neighborhoods reflected in these Beach shots I sort of won them over and the boardwalk became easy you see this if you fly into Kennedy Airport in the morning or evening you'll see it because airplanes fly right over that area this is a cinema that we just completed only a couple of months ago it's an art house on 13th Street in Greenwich Village and it's made out of the logo for the quad which is qu ad for letters and it was designed as a series of in air-conditioning ducts that go into the theater and out of the theater and then of course everything's in cubes and there's an animated giant jumbo wall built out of cubes and you might be able to see some need to see if I can get this to animate you know there these things are programmed we wrote a program for films of black and white films of old movies and they have different grid breaks that sort of suit the cinematography and I think we made 12 of these at all and they can they can use them for a month and get rid of them but they ended up mixing them up in the period of a month so I think we're going to have to make 12 more cysts soon the run of each sequence runs about 20 minutes and it was a lot of fun to do Charles Cohen who owns the the cinema is an a b-movie freak and collects and produces movies and he makes a lot of foreign films and documentaries this is the entryway to the cinema and you have the Q the U the a and the D Theatre lesson number seven find a personal expression that means find something you do other than what you do all day that you'd like to do just because you like to do it do it if it helps you if it's cooking that's great gardening swell or maybe it's making something else I started doing this really insane thing where I began painting these really big at a scale maps that are covered with information I've been doing this now for about 15 years and by pure accident I got a gallery and the gallery exhibits them so I have regular shows and that's not so great because the regular shows means that I have to do them and that sort of you know changes the game but I make discoveries with them nonetheless I learn a lot I learn a lot about places there are things that I add to it this is from my most recent show which was all about the United States and I find that it's the opposite of graphic design so that when I'm doing one thing that takes about five seconds because I'm working on four things at once and I'm telling different people what to do and we're moving things and then I'm running into a meeting and out of a meeting and then I'm going into another room and doing something else that the idea of being in a room and with a little teeny brush and a great big canvas and painting something this monotonous is actually terrific for my work because they're opposites and they balance what I do that day and in private life and I love doing it sometimes they become real projects like the city of New York commissioned me to create a mural for a public school in Queens that was about 2,500 square feet and we I did this mural by doing it small and hiring a sign painter to repaint it and it's very interesting for me to look at his hand on this mural but the mural covered the whole area and there was a skylight that it went around and when I was up for the mural with a city which was a commission I was against two other mural painters and I won the project largely because I was an environmental graphic designer and I proposed covering the whole space where everybody else was just making a mural in space and that's how I won the job I took one of my paintings and scanned it into a virtual reality program and showed them how it would move here's me holding up the actual painting against the the thing that was repainted so you can see the scale of it it was a lot of fun I've done this a couple times more and I want to keep doing them this is one I did in Philadelphia and instead of having a sign paper doing it do it I had the students do it I essentially painted this road map painted the rug in and that had 152 students paint on individual pieces of paper and they were given a section of Philadelphia that they found on Google Maps and they used the information to create their own backgrounds and paint this thing in it was sort of magical when you saw the space this is my most controversial piece of advice which is working for free is not giving something away working for free is getting something because you're the one who should be determining that you're doing it it isn't that somebody comes to you and forces you to do a free project you determine when you do the free project and there has to be some get at the end of it for example I used to do all this goofy stuff for things like AIGA functions that's an American graphic arts organization because it would get produced and people would see it that's how I started painting maps I made a series of silkscreen posters for a printer because he wanted to sell them and I wanted to make them and I wanted to make them because I was changing the way I was working and we sold them and made money on them and it really helped me grow as a designer I contribute political comment to the New York Times and send it to them and I think they pay me five hundred dollars but I don't care I just do it because I want to do it and that that's essentially working for free sometimes I do political commentary for magazines and I still make posters for political causes these are all things I do for free one thing I did for free went on for the next 15 years but they paid me I gave the High Line a free logo because two guys came around and they were going to do this project in New York City and it sounded cool and it wasn't very much work when they started raising money they actually began to pay me and I did all their signage then as a result of it I did the parks department signage that was a lot of work for free and I did that because I lived there and because they needed it but these were decisions I made not something somebody forced on me and I'm glad I did all of them I think that what's great about the control in this is that you can change what you do as a result of making something else but you can't expect to be a neophyte or not and not qualified and have somebody necessarily pay you for doing that so that the risks you take to grow are rewarded and what you get as a result of that work this is easy this is the art department from CBS records they were great I learned a lot there every single person I work with inspired me these are my partners at pentagram in New York and in London Austin Texas and San Francisco and they're the smartest people I know they inspire me every single day and they help me work they're the best okay the last piece of information is something that's falling there this is the hardest thing to do is that it's hard to change with the times because you think you already know something and you got to break some habits and I know that I've been working a long time and I could not have possibly been working without changing without adapting to stuff it's not that I changed the basic core of Who I am but I did change the way I worked in the 70s I was essentially as conceptual art director and I art directed record covers some of them were typographic but a lot of them are photographic this is a whole series for Bob James albums they're still around I did these things when I was 25 26 27 you go and you buy them they're still there I bought a lot of illustration this is a classic Muddy Waters album here's Johnny and Edgar winter together shot by Richard Avedon designed in 1976 a Bruce Springsteen album from 1978 there are a lot of things I still really love I still love this illustration David Wilcock did for a jazz album and I absolutely hate this lives on lives on so in the 80s I think I was a postmodernist because all that work I did pushing back against Helvetica made me be known for sort of retro typefaces and working with historical sauce styles and it gave me a very strong reputation as a certain kind of designer which was good and bad but it also enabled me to start my own business in the 80s which was called Koeppel and share.this is one of the pieces we did to launch the studio and as a result of it I got more work that was like it Manhattan Records was done as a tribute to Broadway boogie-woogie and it's still in existence to this day and then this watch.watch poster which was a tribute to Herbert matter and it's probably the most controversial thing I ever designed and still being questioned to this day in the 90s I was a typographic expressionist I did things that were crafted and made up of letter forms and broken and some of them sort of violent and aggressive and lots and lots of experimental and moving oriented typography that became fairly well-known in that period and a lot of this still around still seeing things that were drawn things that were cut up like that and then by the 2000 period I became a minimalist and that series of black and white posters I showed you before that were the numbers were not terribly different from the way I began working in that particular decade and some of that was because of 9/11 and just sort of the kind of exuberance that existed in the 90s felt not suitable for the period after when everything suddenly got very serious and my work got very grown-up and I did all these institutional identities at link in the center that were all originally designed and and white and very spare and even identities for products this is a company that makes DVDs of classic films this is Bausch and Lomb a pharmaceutical company in the United States and the High Line which I showed you all logos from that period and now in 2010 I would call myself in this decade fairly much a visual language designer which is creating components that collectively you recognize something so that it'll be more than you know simply one form to recognize something but it'll be extendable in unto all kinds of things like books or websites or what have you and all of my work is really based on this it's now I mean it's everything I do it it permeates everything it probably started before 2010 but that's when I started to recognize that I was doing it this is for the the type directors Club and I had built this system by getting 12 people to design TD C's until they didn't be until they weren't recognizable as the same thing and when we figured out how far you could go which was pretty far we could write a little guidebook about it here's the basis for Microsoft that came out of windows 8 which was essentially nothing more than a perspective chart which after we did Windows 8 we just gave it to the in-house department and they rolled everything out sometimes getting outside consultants sometimes doing it themselves and it still holds I did this in 2012 this was a redesign of jazz which I had originally done in the early 2000s and redesigned again in 2014 and often I go back and redo identities and this you know had everything to do with being able to make these these moveable alphabets that were recognizable on the street and every form of promotion this is the Philadelphia Museum of Art we made about 500 A's of every piece of art in their collection that we could get hands-on that we could figure out how that was a triangle same thing and another little language for a woman social cause this is it what's going on here there we go this is a program that fights for it stops taxing periods actually 17 states have signed on since this whole thing was launched it's a lawyer and a PR person who came together to try to change America's laws about taxing tampons and it's quite amazing they're succeeding because it's not fair this is a typeface built out of three weights of a font designed by Peter B lock which became Parsons identity and the identity was designed to be flexible to be usable to be built by the in-house art department continually and and we still consult for them and this thing keeps growing mostly done by the student body or the in-house art department and it's fantastic I love I love watching it grow it's really fun so one more thing just as I've gotten through this whole thing because I'm looking at the next decade and trying to figure out what that thing is a man I know named Tony brooke has a publishing company called unit editions and he publishes books that he sells on lines and he does very beautiful monographs they are quite expensive but he approached me and asked me if he could do a book on my work which was an odd thing because I'm not dead yet so I I kind of didn't know how to respond to it and then I thought well why wouldn't I do that he's going to do a much better book on me than I would do on myself because he's a better designer than I am so I gave him my work it's in this book that's 560 pages and has interviews and a history and a lot of things you see him a lot more and what has been interesting for me at the point that it's come out is that I saw the book it's thick I looked at the work it's mine and I'm done with it and I'm ready for the next thing because I have to write another lesson for you so thank you all very much

Channel: beyond tellerrand

Views: 11,318

Rating: 4.9356914 out of 5

Keywords: paula scher, graphic design, design, life lessons, btconf, career

Id: Doy5MrgslF0

Length: 43min 52sec (2632 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 13 2017