Nicer Tuesdays: Paula Scher

our second speaker of these evening and we're whizzing across the world now over to Connecticut and it's no exaggeration to say that our second speaker has genuinely shaped the visual language of New York having created work for iconic landmarks like the High Line cultural institutions including the New York City Ballet and Public Theater and even the signage system for the city's parks we're delighted to have Paula sure joining us this evening to talk us through three projects that really encapsulate her approach to graphic design supporter if you're there can I please ask you to also switch on your video and audio so we can say hello I think I can hear you can I see for some reason uh-huh we can definitely hear you um so there might there might be a kind of I think I got it how's that mate well hey we can see how are you doing how's everything in Connecticut I'll show you it's not bad except I hate working here and I would much rather be at pentagram but that said what are you gonna do yeah it's difficult isn't it I guess um you said that the other day that you're kind of you you find it difficult to work in the countryside you much rather be in New York I mean why is that I thank you for one thing because guys and it's my painting studio and the city is about fast-paced existence about making quick decisions about persuading people to do things and this is where I shut down and my shutdown process has been taken away I'm on this little stupid box which I hate so there you have it fair enough yeah okay we endure excellent okay well listen I'm gonna and I'm gonna leave you guys to well I'm going to leave you to share your screen and show all of our power or people online your presentation I'll duck away and I'll come back in about 10-12 minutes once you're done fantastic great so I'm going to show three projects that were done this year that we're all done very quickly and where the process was exceedingly easy but a lot of fun also sounds great I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say I cannot wait there we go how do we do this chair there it is this is my site right now so the mental health coalition is organized by Kenneth Cole who if you don't know him is a major shoe manufacturing designer in the United States and he gets involved in social causes and he was a big a aids advocate in the 80s and did a lot to help eradicate and take away fear of AIDS and he approached me in September about taking the stigma out of mental health and I thought it was a great cause and I liked him and I agreed to do it and as I do these things I might deal with him was I'm gonna design something for you it's going to be for free but that's what I'm going to do and you kind of have to agree to it because otherwise then it becomes a feed pay job but there a lot of approvals and I in discussion with him the goal was to make a site where people could come and share their experiences and talk about how they were feeling and so it was a people site it should feel it should have felt lively it needed to be young and I decided that I wanted to do something that was very just very simple and iconic because one of the programs I admire most most in my career was something that I don't even necessarily agree with as a graphic designer in terms of things like typography and taste but it was an it was an AIDS aware mint awareness campaign called silence equals death and it used a purple triangle against a black background to make its point and I wanted something equivalent and began thinking that the best thing and why is this not moving forward let me just pull back for a minute I don't know quite what happened here but my my screen is not my thing isn't moving that's right well I'm the least technical person in the world but I might try and talk you through this do you have to click on that and then and then maybe you can move through it I don't know quite why it's not moving it should be moving now and you're not sharing at this point so I'm going back again okay share screen click on this I may have to double click let's see what happens great if that doesn't know it's still not moving which is really strange you are sharing but it's not if you click on you're on the window with mental health coalition right on it there you go did you do this no I think that was that must have been you it's moving now great this was the symbol the square peg in the round hole which as I said was influenced by the silence equals death campaign and it was coupled with very simple drug no fancy designs we decided to use the symbol as the letter O in all instances and the website is called the mental health coalition and there's a chat site called how are you really and it's about how you're feeling and they're celebrities that type in and tell stories and as well as individuals and there are videos on the site and and people begin to share their their sense of what they're going through we did this thing very quickly and we designed it in September and then it was sort of on hold for a long period of time while it was being viewed by innumerable people and I really don't know quite what happened for about three months and then Kenneth Cole came back and he said everybody loves this thing we have specific copy and we began working with a specific copy and the next thing we knew we were in the corona virus epidemic and suddenly mental health had never been hotter so we actually rushed this thing out after it sat around for three months from last fall when it was first designed what I'd like about the process of it in these sorts of events where you're doing projects very quickly and very inexpensive expensively is they tend to have an immediacy that isn't found in prod projects where you have a lot of time for refinement and also the client has a lot of time for deliberation it always tends to make the thing so refined it becomes painfully boring and in this instance I think all the mistakes for this one work even though it's klutzy in a lot of areas it's currently on Times Square and a moving animation which I can't show in this in this presentation but it's gotten around very fast and I sort of love that about it it's made me really happy to work on it no normal was the original name for the organization before we got into the mental health coalition as the owner of it and that's how we thought thought it would initially launch and these were all headlines that we wrote for it in September and it will be out we hope for as long as it possibly can we hope it's adapted we hope people pick up pick it up and it becomes a symbol for mental health in general Museum lab is a project I did in last year with the Pittsburgh Children's Museum who I had designed I think maybe fifteen years ago and I keep my clients for a pretty long period of time and they're loyal they come back even if it's 15 years in between what museum lab is is a building a library that was converted into a maker lab for adolescents as part of a school system in Pittsburgh and it's connected to the Children's Museum the building is sort of great this is the building it was built in the late 1800s by you know wealthy I think oil benefactors who left this to Pittsburgh and it was their public library and then it was left in ill repair and it was given to the to the Children's Museum and they hired an architect named Julie Eisenberg who I work with and I really enjoy working with her and she didn't have enough money to do anything with it she began you know renovating it and fixing spaces but then they just didn't they never raised enough money and they wanted to open it so we had a meeting on the inside to try to figure out what to do and I kind of thought it looked great I mean it was sort of a ruin but the more she peeled off from the building and uncovered layers of it the more beautiful it became so our philosophy was if you don't have money don't finish it and mitigate it with signage so we began to determine how the signage would function and figured the best thing to do was to make the signage very bright to do something that was lit and actually became objects by itself laying on top of this sort of beautiful ruin and that the signage should be something that was contemporary and and something that was also inexpensive so we used fluorescent tubing and built the entryway desk out of it here's one of the spaces being worked so here the two different types of spaces that you're really dealing with some that are ruins like this and some that are half-finished and painted here's a ruin on the outside of the building we hung neon a neon sign for the building that was tubular that would lead you into the sort of tubes we'd be using on the inside here it is in the daytime and this is a rendering of the desk the desk was a series of tubes that were built into just a clear plastic cover with a metal top and there's the actual finished desk this is not a rendering is the rendering and this is not the rendering this is it and I love doing environmental graphics because my game is how much can the finish thing really look like the rendering how possible is that and I find very often it is quite amazingly possible particularly in signage much more say than graphic design because in signage if you show something to a client and they like it and they like the Photoshop rendering and it works within their budget they will build it they'll rarely change it where that's not true in graphic design we know those things change all the time here are the tubes and you can see the type that's laid on top of the tubes that's cut out the donors wall was made of a series of fluorescent tubes and everybody's name was painted on the tube and here's a close-up of it and then this is the space I showed you before briefly before we completed being painted and what happens is that this signage weds this room to the other room so it doesn't look like a total disconnect and if you notice she left the planks in the in the ceiling raw the the raw steel exists everywhere and the signage is really everywhere in the space the other intervention we made was wayfinding we just decided that the wayfinding should just wrap around walls and hold it together almost like a sheet of paper would in a corner and you see these little corner tabs next to the big signage and here you see it in practice so you take something flat that's purely black and white and outlined and you put it on this you know exposed brick and cement and suddenly it finishes it in a way that seems impossible but a small intervention can do a lot with these cleaned up or raw spaces and it works well in stone and on the side of the building we accomplished the signage and had it made I think in a period of three months which is unusual for a signage program but if you do something that enix and really on the seat of your pants it's amazing how much you can do the last project I'm going to show is a project that was neither a not-for-profit or a pro bono job but a commercial job as a promotional campaign for a company called Flamingo that's owned by a razor company called Harry's in the United States and they make razors for women and they had an idea for a campaign that was all about pubic hair and they wanted me to design it because they loved my work for the public and in case you don't know there's only one L difference between the public and pubic so therefore I was the perfect person for the job they came and wanted us to promote this theme based on politics they thought they'd call it the bush 20/20 because we were in a political campaign season and they wrote sort of you know populist and pro-choice campaigns for the bush because you could use a razor or you could use some kind of waxing or you can use the depilatory and they favored all methods so that we looked at that what they had gathered and they gathered all these campaign buttons and and we began designing initially we gave them a presentation of three and I'm going to show you my two favorites they picked my most favorite but the first one was just sort of elegant you know we had one pubic hair sort of as the two in the B and they were sort of amused by it and then we cut it down so it had a little logo that was this B and we put it on buttons and you could be Gro choice and then we had to cut bait and began getting elegant and disgusting at the same time and this all if you're not if you're not from the United States you wouldn't know that this is from the Statue of Liberty which is give us your tired and poor instead of it's your tweets shaved curly masses and fighting for the American pubic and finally Texas as king of gro choice which was something I've always wanted to do anyway I always saw Texas sort of like this in relationship to the United States you know it's my map thing they thought I'd gone too far and said nope and the winner was the usual heavier lighter font which is sort of reminiscent to the public and a series of very bold very simple outdoor posters that wound up being everywhere in New York City Nowak sation without representation this is a few big service announcement and all models are created equal they were really they were really pro-growth pro-choice for the pubic good etc here's how it looked in New York City they took a little store downtown in Soho and they had posters up all around the building outside the street here's the store here the things they gave away loaded with pubic memorabilia and people read these in the street so here you have it three projects this one was probably the shortest we designed it in a week and it was out in two and the others were probably two to three weeks in design time at most they were a lot of fun I enjoyed doing him and it's my favorite kind of work amazing thank you so much Paul I think everyone at home will be having goose bumps looking at all of that work it's so good and thanks so much I think if you can stop sharing your screen I've just got a couple of questions for you I mean I'm really sorry to everyone in the audience because there were so many good questions in that Q&A bar and I'm fortunate I can only only got time for a couple but I'm tried to kind of amalgamate as many as possible and worth saying that someone said solid pottery on that last one I think everyone loves a good pun which is great and a couple of people had this question for Upolu and it's kind of yeah variations on a theme I guess but what's the first step for you in a branding or design I mean is it long hours with the client or are you going away and doing isolated research or is it something else what's that kind of first step look like well I am I would say I absorb things very quickly and I have a methodology that Malcolm Gladwell who is sort of a pop psychologist writes about it calls it thin slicing which is the ability to consume a huge amount of information and decide which parts that are actually relevant to what you're doing you'll find that a client will come in they'll just like sort of spew out all kinds of stuff that doesn't really have anything to do with what they're asking for they think it does but it doesn't but I know what does so the my first step is to find out what part of what they're saying is utter and pointless for my purposes and what part of it is absolutely relevant to the project they usually if I ask the right questions they've designed it because I've gotten it out of them and they don't even know they've said it so that is really essentially my process then I start sketching and I usually begin working with one one of the people on my staff whether it's Jeff close or Emily at word or Rory since the three people who I go to and you know then we'll work up a thing together like I'll make a sketch they'll sketch it back we'll sort of talk about it back and forth we'll get it up on the computer and we need to make three sometimes we make five but we need to make three so usually we get one real good one and that's the first one and then after that we're killing ourselves because you got to come up with the other two that's the hard part but that's my process essentially then when I see them I play back everything they've said to me so they know I've listened and I've heard them and once we get through that process we can have a discussion if we have one client it's easy if we have three clients as plausible and if you have 20 in the meeting forget it amazing fair enough I think that's really good yeah really good insights for everyone and the second question is from Jeannette one of the most common mistakes you see in branding and design work I guess there's a massive question but are there any kind of big mistakes that you see kind of cropping up over and over again well I find that there there's too much dictation of what things look like that come from website design in other words that because you have because it has been written that websites must function some specific dumb way that I can't figure out why they do but they must therefore you're making design choices that were really designed for website design and that's very that's very depressing for example rarely is there a beautiful editorial website I think the New York Times is about as good as it gets there are some others but they're rare mostly people don't make editorial design for website they make sort of orders of things and clumps that look like they fit into somebody's wireframe then what happens is that permeates society so much that it eases out of the website and winds up on everything and that's really depressing I think that we should make it our goal to overthrow this whole methodology fair enough I'm sure you've got a lot of people who would agree with that as well and listen we could do this all evening I'm sure everyone would love it but we're gonna have to move on and just say thank you so much for joining us and for that amazing presentation and Paul odd yeah I asked you to mute yourself and stop your video if that's okay and we'll see you soon right amazing stuff

Channel: It's Nice That

Views: 6,541

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: #itsnicethat #nicertuesdays #paulascher

Id: md3-EQh2-CY

Length: 21min 28sec (1288 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2020