Type Over Time: Paula Scher

so Edie was five years off I think I met him in probably the early 70s 70 or 71 and I have been a practicing graphic designer for 45 years and I thought I'd put together some things I've learned along the way and it's a short talk but it will sort of tell you why I think the way I think why I designed the way I think and the way I do and I think it is things that happen to you at the moment you walk into design that you retain forever so here are some life lessons from the field fall in love with something that was designed that means that early in your early days and this probably happened to many of you there are things that you saw that you retain forever because when you see things for the first time they're more meaningful because you don't know them for me it was three Beatles covers it was the revolver cover is where I learned obsession and it came to factor into my paintings a lot later the Sergeant Pepper cover where I learned about using cultural references in design and the White Album which was the ultimate coats bug cover and that I find when I think about what I'm going to do or how something can be I'm always drawn to these three factors they never go away they stay with me for 45 years it's great to have heroes and mentors and I had two really big ones the first was my teacher at Tyler a man named Stanislaus Gorski it was a Polish illustrator who came to the United States and I went to school at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and he had done the cream cover how cool is that now I didn't go to school to be a graphic designer I really didn't know what graphic design was I wanted to be an illustrator discovered soon I couldn't draw but part of the reason I wasn't comfortable with design was I was very uncomfortable working with type it seemed sort of like a form of organization and to me that was like cleaning up your room and something I had no interested in particularly as an individual so sagorsky realizing that I was screwing up everything I touched said three simple words to me he said illustrate with type and that that in fact gave me my whole career I've been doing it ever since and I didn't even know it when he told me I didn't know how valuable those words were it's only in retrospect and sometimes you'll go back and you'll search and you'll find that that happened to you and of course the other major mentor and influence in my life is my husband twice Seymour quaffed and I met him with my portfolio in 1970 when I was graduating school and I was 21 years old and I was a fan of his work and he taught me how to see and he taught me how to work and that I've used that forever even though our work is quite different and we lead very different work lives so much of what I learned through his eyes stays with me this was very important to me personally as a working person in the 70s when I began designing record covers I hated Helvetica I just hated it I thought it was organized orderly and boring I also thought no matter who used it it always looked the same no matter how they used it sometimes the spacing was better or worse but it was always the same and that's not what I wanted to do what I wanted to do is to make things that were recognizable as individual things and initially I worked very much like pushpin except I didn't make pictures I used typography that I would draw or pull out of tight books and redraw or find in antique stores and have somebody else draw it and doing this kind of very difficult work pre-computer was great for me because it was a challenge and because it was something I became upset with and this work I did in the 70s stayed with me really forever and I think what was fascinating about it to me looking at it now where there were things that seemed obvious and easy but at the time they weren't because people didn't design like that doing an illustration and putting typography on it wasn't that unusual but doing the back cover without any illustration on it in fact was so in a sense when I had done this back cover in 1976 it was more radical than you would imagine at that time and we built things and this is pre computer so these things were made by hand they were inlaid and they were drawn this is my own drawing and nicotiana building it or the stained glass window that was also built by next ashion oh it seems easy now you just sort of you know manipulate something in Photoshop but in those days you actually had to make things and there was something about that craft have stayed with me forever that I always missed or redrawing typography in the mechanical bull pen room and putting it together by hand or piecing together type in in a way that wasn't typically done but this was all my rebellion to Helvetic on the grid and all of that provoked that this is a hard one you find that you know different things at different points in time when you're young you don't know very much in your in 20 so that everything that you learn is huge and you have tremendous growth really quickly and you sort of leap up the surreal staircase in your 30s you know a little bit more so you don't grow as much but if you notice the risers get shorter and the steps get shorter on the right no the risers get shorter and the steps get longer as you get older in your 30s and you're a pro in your 40s you're an aging pro but your 50s are great because you actually achieve power that's because your clients are getting to be the same age you are and people in their 50s are at the top of their game so you're working with a person with the most power and that's the best period for your work in terms of actually calm pushing things but then in your 60s they start dying or retiring and you're in big trouble the diagram of power sort of works like this in your twenties years so you're either a peon or of under Kent if you're a peon that's okay you got a lot of room for growth if you're a vendor Kim that's actually dangerous because you have nowhere to go but down in your 30s you're a pro you're a young pro that's good and your 40s you're an aging pro by your 50s you've hit the power stage by your 60s is waning power by your 70s is total decline in your 80s is life to achievement words and/or death there are variants isn't it but not many I've checked it out so the next rule is really to go the distance and to keep working and to find the thing that you can work on and you can stay with and you can grow and they can sustain you and for me I was lucky in that it came in a form of a particular account which was the public theater and I began designing for them in 1994 when I did their identity and I've been working for them for twenty three and a half years still going strong and I was capable of using this as a vehicle to grow because I stayed with it season after season year after year it had good seasons and bad seasons it had times I thought I would drop it they were very frustrating times like when it became a hit in this capacity and people began imitating it because I went through a period where the Public Theater essentially lost their identity because everybody else was doing it but I began to grow it and try to bring other forms of language to it change type with it destroy it here I moved would type two accidents grotesque and nobody even knew I changed the logo I'm here and here and then changed it again the Republic theater actually has three logos in its 23 years or the thing has been redrawn on from really original Morgan would type two accidents grotesque back to knock out where it currently is then we began redoing the lobby and doing the environmental graphics and did installations and type into the walls and donor signage and here's where my posters belong behind glass as something from the past and I realized at the point that I had finished the lobby that the public I had to really rethink about how they talked to the to the world because all of communication had really changed it wasn't just that things had become computerized that that was there was digital media it was the amount of different platforms that things had to exist and for a theater that had this many components to exist the language would have to be broader based and capable of hitting more people and being more connected so what I did was take the Shakespeare in the Park posters that I was doing every summer and turning them into many identities that changed every year and that I would analyze what was in the poster whether it was a color palette or the way it was working and begin to do a whole season in it and I began doing this every year which I've been doing for four years and it really has worked for the public where I began to to use this in other projects where identities have subsets that continue to grow for specific periods of time and then change as just as soon as you get sick of them and it's been fascinating and I would not have come to this if I hadn't stayed with this project for 23 years it's interesting how when you go the distance with something you find yourself changing with it this was last year's this is what you see around town now and it'll go away the summer when the next one emerges this is a really hard thing to be when you're in your 40s and your 50s is is to be a neophyte because you just know too much if you've done something over and over and you know it again and again but I I was lucky in that I began doing something that I didn't know how to do which was environmental graphics I discovered that I didn't understand enough about architecture to make intelligent contributions so I would do things that were sort of naive and silly but in them were breakthroughs for example this is a building in Newark New Jersey that was a school for Performing Arts and they wanted to do something inexpensive and I thought well what if they just cover it with typography and I did a Photoshop rendering and the Photoshop rendering became the building there it is and that I wouldn't have done anything that's silly if I had been actually doing this professionally before I had started I just made a crazy assumption about it and it led me to do some work that was extreme so I began doing a lot of it and of course after you do anything three times you become an expert and then you don't know anything anymore sort of boring and hackneyed I began sort of doing doing change and creating movement for myself by changing materials and working learning how to work in all kinds of mediums and experimenting with plastics and glass and all kinds of things and digital medium and things things I didn't know how to work with but it all was the same vocabulary really it was it was taking typography and using it in crazy scale situations in space and it became very much part of what I do then I began building strange objects out of them or extruding things or projecting things or building murals and places out of paper this is a Planned Parenthood which just opened two months ago their headquarters made out of their identity and doing sign systems for the city this was the Rockaways after Hurricane sandy it became a sign system for all the beaches along the coast of of New York City and then painted buildings that were part of the system from these heavily structured concrete buildings were all painted bright colors going with the system and finally to a typeface called Rockaway wide which became part of their boardwalk and it's a font made out of 90-foot planks altogether making probably the biggest pixel in the history of typography and this is the boardwalk at the Rockaways which is right near Kennedy Airport and you you fly over it when you come to land that sort of shows you we had to drown go up and film the whole thing it was kind of amazing this is very very current it's going to open April 7th it's the quad cinema on 13th Street and it's a theater built out of typography that has four movie theaters in it and lighting on the ceiling that is typographic and programmed digital screens in the back etc it's all really the same extension of the the neophyte from not knowing exactly what I'm doing has been great the other piece of advice is to find a personal expression and you got them you just have to determine what it is you want to do I felt like all that work I did in the 70s was lost when the computer came in because I wasn't using my hands so I began painting these out of scale maps and I did it in a room in my country house in Salisbury Connecticut I didn't expect anything to happen with them I was just filling time and using my hands and making stuff which is the best part of designing and by accident I found a gallery and I started showing these things and people seem to like them and started purchasing them and now it's part of my life it's the thing I do all the time and I don't want to stop designing to make paintings I see it as an extension of the same thing hell they're not that different they're still tight now I didn't start doing landscapes but I find that these give me a lot of pleasure and this was for my last show about a year ago and then it got married to environmental graphics which was interesting I had this was for a commission from the city of New York where they took we took a painting I made and I had it blown up and had a sign painter repaint it unto individual pieces of masonite that were screwed into this wall to make this mural and I see his hand on top of my hand if you look very closely you can see the seams of the tiles that had to be removable in case of fire because it's the city owns it so it had all kinds of restrictions that's me and the actual painting against the the blow-up of the the painting that was repainted but here this thing I did on my own then became part of actually a working job and they become connected they're not that just they're not that disparate this was done recently in Philadelphia it was my alma mater Tyler invited me to have a show and to involve the students and I had the students paint a map that was going to fill a 3,000 square foot space and what I did is made a small painting of the map and these colors and then we broke them up into tiles and like the other thing I just showed you and taped it to the wall and the students each got a section of the area that they filled in by hands so the whole thing was made by 152 students against my line work and I had so much fun doing this I really want to do a lot more of it because it was new and different and I was amazed that it in fact worked because you would think 152 people would just be doing something different but they really didn't because they were given one color of paint and three brushes of widths that they could work with so they were fairly limited and the designer was still controlling this is a controversial piece of advice but I found that to be able to continue to grow if I hadn't worked for free I wouldn't have made any breakthroughs because I would get the jobs I was always getting and I would repeat the work I'd always be doing so in order to change I took on different pro bono jobs I did things like an AIG a cover which was a donated piece of work like we all do and I started painting because I didn't want to have to have any money used for expenses because there was a thousand dollars for it and if I painted the thing by hand I got to keep the fee that's how I started doing these small paintings I kept doing them when people asked me to do free work just simply because it was an easy thing to do I made series of silkscreen posters when I wanted to switch my work and make it much simpler and I made these for sale with a silkscreen printer and it was a way of growing what I was making and doing at a time that I felt my work was getting stagnant posters were easy to do I did them for all types of things and it was a way of stretching but I also donated things to the city like the the park across the street from where pentagram is two guys came over and asked for a free logo for a thing I never heard of called the High Line a guy who had a restaurant across the street named Danny Meyer's stuck a shack there and he asked me to make a logo for it they paid me later believe me and then actual real donations like a sign system to the city of New York because they didn't have the money for it and they needed it but these were things that I think people think they're not supposed to do or somebody's taking advantage of you or that you shouldn't use the opportunity to grow yourself and for loss because this is where you get to do some of your best work it's really really good to hang around with smart people especially when you're feeling stupid sometimes it just rubs off on you and I hang around with a lot of them these are my partners at pentagram and in all ways they sort of inspire and provoke and I think that without them I would not have been able to keep working at the level I've been able to and find a group hang with them it's worth it this is the hardest piece of advice I have do what you do best but you got to change with the times and that's rough because sometimes what you do best is out of style so it's a question of figuring out how you take what you do and adapt it to the moment you're doing it I was a lot of things that a lot of different times in the 70s I was really a conceptual art director because I made all these covers for CBS records the ones I showed you that had all this typography on them but I also was art directing and buying a photography and illustration and sometimes the type was very neutral or no type at all or sometimes they were riffing famous recording artists or goofy bands or things that I really loved and thought were powerful and things I absolutely hated and that the thing was that at that time which was the 70s where I'm really in my 20s and on that low rung of the staircase everything was new and everything was a learning experience and from that period that eclectic typography really made me a postmodernist in terms of the way people thought about my work I didn't know what I didn't understand what the term meant at that time but I made things in the 80s that were really about using style discovering history and putting imagery and typography together in a way that that drew from stylistic periods and sometimes they were on self-promotion pieces and sometimes they were on real jobs and sometimes they got me in trouble in the 90s I really became what I would call a typographic expressionist and that sort of went along with what was going on stylistically if you think about the 90s sort of periods of Brodie and David Carson doing some extreme things I was doing them in my own way and of course there were these pieces that everybody knew at the time and they were they were loud and proud and complicated and aggressive and I think right on for the decade but they were me and by 2000 after New York got hit by 9/11 we all became memo lists and we all began to hold back and find a pure way to say something and then the decade became a little richer so we became a little bit more expressive but pretty much when I look at my work from the 90s it's all withholding and yet it's still illustrating with type in every way in this decade I began to think in terms of visual languages it's really what I was talking about with the Public Theater where the logo is less important than the way pieces and alphabets fit together and that I really used again a pro bono job to sort of figure out how to talk and style like how much you could you read of individual letter forms and recognize them as one thing and I had I think when at the time I did this twelve different designers of pentagram each did at EDC and they were told to do it in red make it concentric but the line weights can be anything and there was a moment where they weren't recognisable as the same thing and we began to create a parameter that became the manual for doing this and that was really great because it enabled me to do a lot of things in the decade that we're really similar that were real situations like this or that but it's really what do you recognize and can you recognize something without a logo and it with alphabets of course you can I think almost every job I work on now has some kind of component or part of this just simply because it gets you into every form of digital media and you have no problem being seen or understood for a group that is about stopping the period tax and it's already been knocked off and it's only been on the internet for five minutes it's absolutely amazing people Rob languages now they don't just Rob logos and then there was Parsons in the new school which was programming three alphabets together to create a new font and I think I designed this too two years ago and I see more and more people doing it which is really strange because it was sort of scary when it launched but not now here's the school doing it and I love when you make these languages and they go out into the world and other people start stretching them and playing with them and it's great so that's all of my wisdom and one more thing you can see it now altogether it is in one book compiled by skin and Adrian Shaughnessy and published by unit editions and it'll be for sale if you go to the internet at unit and it's five hundred and twenty two pages and Tony broke did an incredible job of making me look good and I hope you all see it and thank you very much I'm supposed to do QA I'll take them come on you have to ask questions I'm standing here you're not allowed to not ask them oh my god what a dead audience yes okay hi my name is Julia thank you very much for the presentation and my question would be about the maps what was this first map you drew and what it was representing the first lap I drew was on the back about AIG a cover in 1991 I think or nine maybe 1989 and it was a joke it was a right it was a cover I had done because the thing was called graphic design USA that was the name of the annual and the front cover was a listing of all the states in the United States and the percentage of people who used Helvetica and the back cover was a painting in the United States I did for memory and accidentally left out Utah and I looked at it and I thought I thought this would be great so I started messing around with them first they were small illustrations and then they gradually became bigger one day I looked at them and I thought this would be much better big and that's when I started really painting the serious maps yeah um thank you for talking to us today and I always look at your work and it seemed very fearless to me and I'm wondering if at those different points when your 20s and 30s and 40s were there like multiple moments where you kind of had to find that confidence or that ability to kind of think outside of the box or do you attribute that fearlessness to just something that you've kind of always had I'd say it's probably a combination of both I mean I am acutely aware that you have to challenge yourself and that if you find yourself in some sort of plateau where you're doing everything very much the same you have to either redirect yourself or become even more obsessive about it you have to do one or the other otherwise it sort of gets flat and and for me the I really don't have a broad palette I'm a horrible art director of photography I have no interest I always hated photo sessions I don't like illustration because the illustrators get all the credit and that that for me I have this limited teeny palette of typography in which I do a couple of small things well so the question is how many things can I do them on and how much can I change it to keep this game going and that that is in fact what I planned and what I do and I do it consciously and I do it in specific periods when I notice things are getting flat I can't pretend like these things just happen but I've been lucky I think to see certain opportunities to do them and also to use the opportunity of pro bono to reinvent because that's where you get to do it otherwise you're just trapped in who you already are and you don't get to expand it it's yes I didn't I like when they stand up and yell hello hello so I wanted to talk about the low ratio of women creative directors just sort of across the board and I noticed are you know that in your abstract episode you've talked about how you didn't use like sort of succeeded in this you know as a designer and sort of peripherally noticed other women sort of encountering problems like that like not maybe not moving ahead do you have advice for everyone in the design community to how we can sort of close that gap of you know the of creating more female leaders in the design industry well I have a particular philosophy about it which is that I thought originally I could help women because I thought it would be really good if people thought that women made really good designers you know I mean it's sort of like the way they thought they made good nurses and schoolteachers well I couldn't they make really good designers and that it could become a mood of women's field why not I'm surprised it took so long but I see more encouragement about it every day I don't I don't have any um I don't have any advice for how one encounters it because I don't know you as a human being so I can't say oh do this I don't know if that would work with your personality but I think the thing to do is understand that it exists that it didn't go away and work anyway because that's its best revenge that's the best advice I can give sooner or later it breaks down it's one by one it's never going to be all at once but just keep doing it I mean there are a lot more women practitioners and I remember when I started there are a lot more women in higher positions that I remember when I started even though it's not anywhere near half and women also get to work longer because they're smarter one more I can't see could you talk a little bit more about defying the staircase that you outlined in your presentation because I'm a student right now a senior I'm very much trying to figure out what my career might be in you know get a first job and get paid for what I'm doing so I guess any advice or any more clarification on how or what that could be well it's hard it's hard to tell you what to do because what I learned was in retrospect so so it's not it's not like I can say do this and you'll you'll be on that career staircase I can only tell you what tends to happen and I think that has to do with growth but if you if you take my staircase literally which is it's not that crazy you'll find that the next five or ten years are periods where you learn the most because you know the least if you don't know very much every every experience is new so that's your opportunity to season what you want to do is be around people and experiences that can open your eyes and teach you how to see that's why it's important to have Mentors that's why it's important to fall in love with design all those things matter because that's how you grow after that call me up and I think that's it Thanks you

Channel: Type Directors Club

Views: 15,629

Rating: 4.9312716 out of 5

Keywords: paulascher, design, pentagram, typedirectorsclub, tdc, typeovertime, type, tipo, tipografia, tipographie, nyc, newyork

Id: znQEswmsKCY

Length: 33min 36sec (2016 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 12 2017