Paula Scher and Typography

I walk outside and I see typography everywhere. New York City is the city of signs. Sometimes things written by hands, mismatched, hung up in some peculiar way. You think, oh my God, can I get up there and please readjust that sign? That's just absolutely awful. The way numbers are on doors, no two the same down the block. All messages are different, and they're everywhere. Typography is painting with words. That's my biggest tie. It's my crack. Paula Sher is the goddess of graphic design. Her stuff is everywhere. Paul has been able to come up with more ways to make tight talk than anyone else and to create a distinctive body of work just with letters. When I go to work every day, I feel like I'm navigating myself through a maze. Hey. How are you? Look at this, a real tight book. Oh, can you bring this to Courtney? I sit nose to nose with my partners. My team is on the fourth floor. I have to run up and down steps to see them. I actually like this. I think you should move them lower. It's very quick-paced. You're really seeing something that looks like this. I'm solving things on scraps of paper. Starting something. Getting interrupted. The interruption is great. I like the way the icons also interrelate with the thing. Pentagram is a design cooperative. There's the benefit of a large firm, but everybody gets to act like they're an individual. There's no boss, just friends. Pentagram's a super group of... The most famous designers in the world doing the best work in the world. It's like an all-star team. And all is the indispensable player on that team. That one's my favorite so far. We all have our own individual style, individual way of working. I could never walk into an office and sit down at my desk to design. I would accomplish nothing. I can sit down at my desk to read my email. You go through your junk mail. A lot of crap. And you throw it all out and you make a little order on your desk. And then you go, oh my God, how am I going to solve this problem? Then you walk up the stairs, go into the ladies' room, put on your lipstick and figure it out. Oh, I love it like that. It's very slurpy. Slurpy, yeah. Do you want anything? Yeah. Ideas can be triggered by working with my team. Maybe an optical illusion. I see more than I would see if I was just doing it all by myself. It's fantastic. I think that you have to make girls and boys the same weight, with the exception of the, you know, pointy things, and then figure out how the other type intersects, and then we've got to figure out color. We're working on the summer festival posters for the public theater. They put on free Shakespeare in Central Park every summer. So, like here... It says Taming of the Shrew inside the wrap. You don't have to do that work with a whole name. You're just putting this in some kind of Lawson's shape. I think it would be cool. Yeah, it's really fun. So, give it a shot. I've been designing for the public theater since 1994. My first project was creating an identity for the theater. When they hired me, they had a name issue. One of the things at the time that was very challenging about the public theater, it had these multiple identities. It was the public theater, and then some people called it the Joseph Pepp Public Theater, and then there was Shakespeare in Central Park. I wanted everything to feel like it was of one, that it was breathing fully as an institution. It had to be populist. I knew it had to be New Yorkish, meaning it had to be loud and proud. I was flipping through one of my favorite books in American wood type. I like American wood type because it's powerful and it has many forms. On this particular page were these R's, and they go back to the skinniest form or to the widest form. And I realized I could make the word public in the same kind of weights, and it would symbolize all of New York. Every type of weight was included. You can create an identity. for a whole place based on a recognizability of type. Paul's work pulled people in. You instantly knew the public. It's a language that could be dissected, taken apart, put back together. That's one of the things that I think is really thrilling about it. Typography can create immense power. You're working with things that Create character. You're working with weight. You're working with height. If you take an E and the middle bar is the same length as the ends of the E's, it feels different than if the little bar is half the length of the E's. If you lift the little bar up higher, it will make the Thai face look like it was drawn in the 1930s. The same thing as if you drop the middle bar lower. Look modern. If a font is heavy and bold, it may give you a feeling of immediacy. If a font is thin and has a serif form, it may feel classical. So that before you even read it, you have sensibility and spirit. And that if you combine that with a meaning, then that's spectacular. When I did the Highline logo... The goal was to make it look more like a railroad track than an H. If you take the kind of weight that might make the line for a railroad track and you put two horizontal bars across it, it begins to look fairly industrial. It totally changes the spirit without having to create any kind of illustrative narrative. I used to paint my fonts by hand when I was a young designer and I really miss it. When we became fully computerized in the late 90s, I didn't touch anything and I didn't use my hands. In the past, I cut things up, I ripped things, I pasted things. I touched art supplies. That physical loss was huge for me, and that's why I started painting. Uh-oh. That's Utah. I deliberately began painting the maps because they would take me a long time to accomplish in some very rote way. And that's actually everything that went away. These dotted lines are the distances between two given points. And the background is... the zip codes. It's not factual, it's emotional. Like Wyoming doesn't have very many people in it, but you feel it instead of know it. I'm not making something designed to answer questions, it's more designed to raise them. This painting is counties and zip codes. Why do some little states have a million counties and some big states have very few? This one is a demographic map. Average age of people, racial and ethnic breakdowns. To actually have any sense of it, you have to actually sit and read it. But the information is equivalently complicated and ridiculous. I used to make complicated, nonsensical charts and diagrams that were satirical. Silly information, fractured information, and I did it to make points. Then I started charting things that were not chartable, mostly denigrating my own physical appearance. I find it funny. Sometimes they're pithy and more meaningful, like... all my numbers on my credit cards, just to show how many numbers were attached to my name and they're in some computer somewhere. Later, they became political. Nonsensical. It ultimately turned into my paintings. Well, that one has a period. Maybe they should have periods. So, Paula, these paintings, they seem to have a little obsessional quality to them? Well, yeah, I think they're quite obsessive. It's the act of weaving little bits of information to make a bigger thing. OK, that's definitely stronger than that. Does this need to be... It started when I was very young. I had this very high IQ score in something called quantitative reasoning. My family thought it was going to be math, but it wasn't. It was the ability to synthesize a lot of information and come to a conclusion. A self-portrait. And I was happiest when I was making things. 1956, orthopedic shoes. 1959, developed a contempt for Girl Scouts. 1953, discovered I'm Jewish. Every hairdo I ever had. The Blonde Cut, the Sassoon, the Shag, the Summer Blonde, the Platinum Bond, the Street Blonde, the Reddish Blonde, and no blonde. I didn't really fit in very well at high school. I mean, I was a person who went to art classes instead of going to the football games. You know, there's something wrong with you if you do that. Then I was at the Tyler School of Art studying illustration, and I fell in love with typography in a way I didn't expect to. I was influenced by contemporary culture. Zigzag rolling papers, zapped comics, underground newspapers and magazines, and record covers, especially record covers. Those were the things that I really wanted to do. They spoke to me. I got a job designing record covers at CBS Records in the 70s. I'd combine the illustration with typography that related to the illustration or contrasted it. I first became aware of Paula's name in high school in the 70s. I'd spend three hours in a record store. I'd stand at those racks and look at the covers. I'd be like, wow, I really like the way that cover looks. I'd turn it over and see Paula Cher's name over and over again. I was a kid with... The best job in New York City. I had these recording artists and their managers and all these people coming in out of my office and always trying to keep these balls in the air to get them to agree to some design and get it to come to fruition, and I just became very good at it. Big recording artists were the things that the company cared about the most. So I would do pretty much what the recording artists wanted me to do. Like, for example, here on this Bruce Springsteen cover, it was shot by a friend of his who was a butcher, and I put this typewriter typography on it. Cheap Trick was a little bit different. They weren't as big as Bruce Springsteen, so I had a bit more control. With jazz artists, they got to be a little artier. Like, this is a series of covers I did for Bob James' label, Tappan Zee records and they were all single objects that were blown up out of scale. My favorite was always this matchbook. And then, of course, the monster illustration, Boston. Six million copies, I think, in the first month of sales. It was quite something. They wanted it to be something futuristic, so we came up with this half-baked idea that the Earth was blowing up. And all these spaceships were escaping. Guitarists shaped as spaceships. And they left the planet Earth and went up to the heavens. The Boston cover is dumb. I am still mystified by how something like that really resonates in culture. I mean, it predated Star Wars. so he must have hit a zeitgeist that was about to happen. But when I die, it will say, design the Boston cover. And I've lived with this horror ever since, and I think it may wind up being true. However, if nobody cared about the album, that's where I did typography. And that was what I liked doing most, because I was the artist. I was the one that controlled what these things looked like. So Charles Mingus won in two, and he didn't care what was on the cover. This was a reissue of a whole pile of Yardbird songs. And these things I really, really loved making. Over a period of four or five years, the typography came forward and the images moved to the background. I had made this radical shift and developed the way I would work for the next 30 years. I learned so much about typography and became known for it. Paula was always part of popular culture, but bringing a unique graphic design voice to that. Very much embodied in her use of typography. Ideas come all kinds of ways. I get my best ideas in taxi cabs, you know, like sitting in traffic, drooling. I'm allowing my subconscious to take over so that I can free associate. You have to be in a state of play to design. If you're not in a state of play, you can't make anything. It should really start like almost with that bar. You know, like if you drop it down about a sixteenth of an inch. And then when you put pier on the end of it, it's really nice. This is an identity for Pier 55, which is the park they're building in the Hudson River. It is going to have three theaters on it, and the theaters are going to be outdoor festival spaces. I started working with these fives, and some of the fives are just made up of geometric shapes that come from the park itself. For example, the forms come from the amphitheater, and then they create the 55s. This notion Actually came from the fact that the park sits up on these pillars. So these are the original sketches. Like somewhere I knew that I wanted this thing to feel like it was on water or underwater. Built these platforms that this island's sitting on. This is actually a more literal translation of them here. And then it started to abstract and become open. These are really good sketches. Mostly what I design are identity systems. They have to exist in lots and lots and lots of ways. I generally try to want to push something as far as it can be pushed. For me, that's the fun. I've started trying to create a process in the identities I make where I go back and revisit them in five or ten years, because sometimes they need tweaking. It's hard to make that a guess, and so you want to design something that can be adapted to its time. I've redesigned the Public Theater logo three times, and nobody even knows it. I've tightened it up, moved it apart, changed the font. I've had, like, a love affair with the Public Theater. When Paula did Bring the Noise, Bring the Funk, it really signaled a... Paradigm shift, a new moment for the public theater. And I think what Paula did was she figured out a way how to take what she saw on stage and turn it into ink on paper. The type in those posters, from top to bottom, filled with words. It's crazy. It's in your face. It's just like New York. Noise, funk, it was everywhere. It was aggressive, it was urban, it was elegant, it was evocative. And the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical goes to... Bring in the noise, bring in the funk. Bring in the noise, bring in the funk. Really, really put her on the map. It was everywhere. And it was like, holy shit, this is really good. It was awful because everybody began imitating it. It was like New York City ate the public theater's identity. Literally, in a matter of three to five years, it became the standard. It just made her crazy. And she would be ranting around the office, you know, saying, can you believe they did this? I had to change the theater to not make it only that kind of typography. I remember I made these very dark. posters that had serif typography just to do something opposite to what I had done before. And I showed them to George Wolfe. I was turning 50 at the time, and he said, OK, Paul is turning 50. Let's have a year of depressing posters. I'm not sure. Did I say that? She said I said that. Let's just frame that. OK, we're having soup. Soup with avocado. Get away from me. Watch it. This is not for you. Bean soup. Oh, a different design this time. You gotta put an extra country in. Things aren't going so well in Spain. What? Economy? I can tell, look. Oh, I thought you were telling me actual real news. The doggy. She's been amazingly well behaved. Yeah. Except for me, who she attacks. The dog loves Paul and hates me. That's not true. Mimi really likes Seymour, but she jumps at him. She hugs me. She hugs me. She jumps and bites him. I learned how to pronounce Seymour's last name in school. I thought it was funny. I thought it was a funny-sounding name. Is it Schwast? Is it Quast? All of that. But I thought Seymour was worse than Quast. The whole love story between Paula and Seymour, that's our Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton tale. Graphic designers love that story. Seymour was my design hero when I was in art school. He must have been 39, 40. I was 21. Seymour was an illustrator, but he was a sensational designer. I thought his work was very funny. Some of it was exceedingly political in the late 50s. Seymour founded Pushpin Studios with Milton Glaser and Ed Sorrell. They developed a style of design and illustration that... combine pop colors, wit, and intellectual thinking. It's where I really started to understand that type had spirit and did not have to be some clean, mechanical-like thing that was simply doing its job. It could be this marvelous thing to engage with. Seymour has a studio above me. It's a bigger studio and he makes more paintings. He can wake up and always seem to be able to work. You guys are kind of historic as a couple. Well, that may be, but we don't really work together. That was actually my first question. Never. Never, we can't collaborate. Washington looks a little pale. Well, it'll look more vibrant when it gets a WA on it. I don't think so. We can't collaborate. He can't work on my stuff and I can't work on his stuff. I don't want to. That's why we're not apart. There you are. Good one, miss. Okay. I loved leaving New York City. You jinxed it. Okay, here we go. But I couldn't stay out of town that long. I have to come back to town. Yay! Otherwise I wouldn't have any ideas. When I started designing environmental graphics, it let me design in the physical world. And that was at a time when the most interesting design had become digital. I was making large-scale lettering on buildings to create a sense of place as well as to get somebody to navigate their way through it. Design exists beyond screens. It has an impact in real life. After Hurricane Sandy, the whole economy of Rockaway Beach was devastated. The boardwalk was destroyed, and the beach was fenced off. So I was hired to create what I'd call an emotional science system. Beaches like the Rockaways invoke a memory of a bygone era of wooden boardwalks and roller coasters. It had to be brought into the 21st century. While the boardwalks were destroyed, what the neighborhoods still had were the beaches. And that the beach looked unique from every place that you entered it. If you entered it at 96th Street, it looked different from 101st Street because the view was different. We created these large standing posters with photographs that would help orient people once they reached the beach. They helped emotionally connect the community while functioning as directional signage. There was so much pride from the signs that the city government made these series of postcards so every town could have their own picture of their own beach. You're getting your own icon, your own logo, and it would give them identity. There's an emotional aspect to it. Design needs to take human behavior into account. An example of terrible design would be the Palm Beach Ballot of 2001. I actually did an article in the op-ed page of the New York Times where I made a little diagram that showed why the ballot design was wrong. For the woman who designed Palm Beach County, Florida's election ballot, life has changed. I keep thinking it's a nightmare and I'm going to wake up one day and it's all going to be gone. It was a butterfly ballot. The list of the names broken into two columns. The designer could not make one long vertical list because the names would be too small and in the area of Palm Beach County there are a lot of elderly people and they wouldn't be able to read the small text. So she thought she was doing a service. When the first column, George Bush was first, and Al Gore was second. And then on the other side was Pat Buchanan. She had the holes that you punched in the center, except for the holes weren't where you thought they were going to be. You assume that if the first hole belonged to George Bush, that the second hole right below it would belong to Al Gore. But in fact... It belonged to Pat Buchanan because the holes were staggered. So in Palm Beach County, one of the biggest Jewish residences of the world, a big part of the population voted for an anti-Semite. I can't go back and say, well, you know, if I would have done something else differently, maybe the election would have been different because you don't know. Absolutely graphic design through an election. Right now, because I'm trying to make an exhibit opening, I'm working really intensely. Like, I'll typically start around 9 in the morning, and I can work to midnight or 1 or 2 in the morning. I used to paint to jazz, and I got sick of all my records. So then I started playing old movies on television. And I can do dialogue right along with it, sort of like singing while you work. When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it. All About Eve. Fantastic. Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night. The women, that's really good. That's really good. Really good dialogue. When anything I wear doesn't please Steven, I take it off. I take it off. There were no artist models in my family. The family was... very well educated. All the women were school teachers. And my father was actually a mapmaker. He invented a measuring device so that maps would be more accurate. When I was a little girl, he taught me that maps were distorted, that they never accurately depict a place. My father actually thought art was stupid and serious people became engineers. Paula has created a typographic language that is popular, it's American, it's New York, that makes sense to people and it's part of everyday life. It's not an art form that is in some other place. It's in the street, it's on the shelf at the supermarket. Paula is the most influential woman graphic designer on the planet. I never thought about myself as a feminist. Yet, when I was working at CBS Records in the 70s, women in the design business at that time were agents. They were reps. You'd sit there and think, oh my God, what are they going to do with me? What am I going to do with them? It's quite wild when you see it firsthand. All of a sudden you turn around and go, oh my God, that was sexism. You know, there it is. And it's like any other ism. If I'm sitting with a new client, I can see in the first glance that he's wondering why he's got this old lady. I mean, I just thought, I'm a designer. Look at it. Hi. Nice to meet you on the phone. I got your materials that I've been looking at. What are you looking to do now? I have an overall plan about how I approach work. Some of it is strategic and some of it is intuitive. Are you promoting the institution or are you promoting the show? The strategic part is absorbing information from the client. How many plays do you put on in a season? And do you have other kinds of festivals or smaller programs or things like Under the Radar? I want to understand why they look the way they look. What's interesting is you seem, from what I see here, to be a little bit all over the map. I think you should develop a visual language. That's what we did with the public and Atlantic. You don't need to see the logo to know what it is. You should be... you know, as powerful, visible, understandable, recognizable as anything in town. You're not changing somebody. You're making them a more perfect vision of where they started. So the job is to traverse these different roads and try to get either an individual, a group of people, or a whole corporation to be able to see. In 1998, Citibank was merging with Travelers Insurance Company. They wanted the logo that reflected the merger and they wanted to launch it in the newspaper three weeks after hiring us to do it. Travelers Insurance Company had a red umbrella. Citibank had type that was an italic form. It took only a moment of time to design the logo. There's a T. The bottom of the lowercase T has a little hook on the bottom. It's a straight line. If you put an arc on the top, that's an umbrella. There are two I's in city. It means the edge of the arc can line up with the two I's. There were a million meetings trying to get buy-in. What if you do it this way? What if you do it that way? Show it to me on stationery. Show it to me on a card. It's got to be red on the top and blue on the bottom. What do you do with the blue waves? Is the blue wave something you use in retail? What if you put that back on the credit card? Those were all the things that were being worked out. For nearly, I think, two years before the thing launched, the design of the logo was never really the hard part of the job. It's persuading a million people to use it. So this is a diagram of a meeting. You are giving a presentation. This line... is the line of the reasonable level of expectation that everyone has when you walk into the room. I've got to say that, to my surprise, I very much like the black and white. You begin to present, and you come above the reasonable level of expectation. Everybody gets enthusiastic. People begin to start asking questions. A whole extra outline, right? The others only have three. And about... Right here you've reached the height of the appreciation that you're going to get for this presentation. You would be putting them on top of images where they create labels. So it's like a label that's smacked over a photograph. That's the, and we have a, we have a bus, the buses are behind you. And at this point, somebody's going to make a rebuttal to your presentation. The contrast between the two is more fun for me here than it is here because it's just, I feel the separation more. This, I kind of don't notice the contrast. You're going to sink a little bit low that line of expectation. You grab it back and you make some concessions. You know, I may have to pull this down a bit. Maybe it has to just touch it. The thing is that the horizontal read is always better. Yeah, see, these are great. The horizontal, you get up. The horizontal, it pops. I love that. And you get up to about here. And at this point, this is as high as you're ever going to get. It's not as high as here. But it's good. Will this actually play, this color? What, you don't think you... I mean, I love it, but boy, you're going to change it when you actually do it. No, I wanted that. Just to say, I'm not to say that's the thing that I'm most concerned about. I just think it needs to be larger. The meeting must end here, because what will happen is a counter-rebuttal to your offer. It will go down below the reasonable level of expectation, and then come back only nearly above it, and will continue on. Until you reach sudden death. They want proof that this is really, really going to work. The problem is there isn't proof. It's how do people see and perceive and accept things. I feel like as usual, once I sit with them for a while, they really start to shout in a very specific way and it just feels like, of course, this is the public. Of course it's grabbing the attention that Shakespeare in the Park always does. I think they're awesome. Fantastic. It's gonna be a black summer. Cheers. Alright, bye. Good work. Thank you. Thank you. I notice it more and more as I get older. How important the act of making stuff is to me. My father saw two of the paintings I did before he died. I was sort of embarrassed to show it to him, because of course it's totally inaccurate. And I brought him in and showed him the map, and I said, I guess you think I'm crazy. And he said, no, I never did anything that creative. There's a moment and it's in every job. It's like this incredible elation and high. It's like you made magic for a moment. How you doing, sweetheart? I'm staying. I'm very well. Paula's inexhaustible. 40-plus years of continuous effort. There's a virtuosity to that. I'm driven by the hope that I haven't made my best work yet. Making stuff is the heart of everything. That drive never goes away. What can I make next?

I walk outside and I see typography everywhere. New York City is the city of signs. Sometimes things written by hands, mismatched, hung up in some peculiar way.

You think, oh my God, can I get up there and please readjust that sign? That's just absolutely awful. The way numbers are on doors, no two the same down the block.

All messages are different, and they're everywhere. Typography is painting with words. That's my biggest tie.

It's my crack. Paula Sher is the goddess of graphic design. Her stuff is everywhere. Paul has been able to come up with more ways to make tight talk than anyone else and to create a distinctive body of work just with letters.

When I go to work every day, I feel like I'm navigating myself through a maze. Hey. How are you? Look at this, a real tight book. Oh, can you bring this to Courtney?

I sit nose to nose with my partners. My team is on the fourth floor. I have to run up and down steps to see them.

I actually like this. I think you should move them lower. It's very quick-paced. You're really seeing something that looks like this.

I'm solving things on scraps of paper. Starting something. Getting interrupted. The interruption is great.

I like the way the icons also interrelate with the thing. Pentagram is a design cooperative. There's the benefit of a large firm, but everybody gets to act like they're an individual.

There's no boss, just friends. Pentagram's a super group of... The most famous designers in the world doing the best work in the world. It's like an all-star team.

And all is the indispensable player on that team. That one's my favorite so far. We all have our own individual style, individual way of working. I could never walk into an office and sit down at my desk to design.

I would accomplish nothing. I can sit down at my desk to read my email. You go through your junk mail.

A lot of crap. And you throw it all out and you make a little order on your desk. And then you go, oh my God, how am I going to solve this problem?

Then you walk up the stairs, go into the ladies' room, put on your lipstick and figure it out. Oh, I love it like that. It's very slurpy.

Slurpy, yeah. Do you want anything? Yeah.

Ideas can be triggered by working with my team. Maybe an optical illusion. I see more than I would see if I was just doing it all by myself. It's fantastic. I think that you have to make girls and boys the same weight, with the exception of the, you know, pointy things, and then figure out how the other type intersects, and then we've got to figure out color.

We're working on the summer festival posters for the public theater. They put on free Shakespeare in Central Park every summer. So, like here... It says Taming of the Shrew inside the wrap. You don't have to do that work with a whole name.

You're just putting this in some kind of Lawson's shape. I think it would be cool. Yeah, it's really fun. So, give it a shot.

I've been designing for the public theater since 1994. My first project was creating an identity for the theater. When they hired me, they had a name issue. One of the things at the time that was very challenging about the public theater, it had these multiple identities. It was the public theater, and then some people called it the Joseph Pepp Public Theater, and then there was Shakespeare in Central Park.

I wanted everything to feel like it was of one, that it was breathing fully as an institution. It had to be populist. I knew it had to be New Yorkish, meaning it had to be loud and proud.

I was flipping through one of my favorite books in American wood type. I like American wood type because it's powerful and it has many forms. On this particular page were these R's, and they go back to the skinniest form or to the widest form. And I realized I could make the word public in the same kind of weights, and it would symbolize all of New York. Every type of weight was included.

You can create an identity. for a whole place based on a recognizability of type. Paul's work pulled people in. You instantly knew the public. It's a language that could be dissected, taken apart, put back together.

That's one of the things that I think is really thrilling about it. Typography can create immense power. You're working with things that Create character.

You're working with weight. You're working with height. If you take an E and the middle bar is the same length as the ends of the E's, it feels different than if the little bar is half the length of the E's. If you lift the little bar up higher, it will make the Thai face look like it was drawn in the 1930s.

The same thing as if you drop the middle bar lower. Look modern. If a font is heavy and bold, it may give you a feeling of immediacy. If a font is thin and has a serif form, it may feel classical.

So that before you even read it, you have sensibility and spirit. And that if you combine that with a meaning, then that's spectacular. When I did the Highline logo...

The goal was to make it look more like a railroad track than an H. If you take the kind of weight that might make the line for a railroad track and you put two horizontal bars across it, it begins to look fairly industrial. It totally changes the spirit without having to create any kind of illustrative narrative.

I used to paint my fonts by hand when I was a young designer and I really miss it. When we became fully computerized in the late 90s, I didn't touch anything and I didn't use my hands. In the past, I cut things up, I ripped things, I pasted things.

I touched art supplies. That physical loss was huge for me, and that's why I started painting. Uh-oh. That's Utah. I deliberately began painting the maps because they would take me a long time to accomplish in some very rote way.

And that's actually everything that went away. These dotted lines are the distances between two given points. And the background is...

the zip codes. It's not factual, it's emotional. Like Wyoming doesn't have very many people in it, but you feel it instead of know it. I'm not making something designed to answer questions, it's more designed to raise them. This painting is counties and zip codes.

Why do some little states have a million counties and some big states have very few? This one is a demographic map. Average age of people, racial and ethnic breakdowns. To actually have any sense of it, you have to actually sit and read it.

But the information is equivalently complicated and ridiculous. I used to make complicated, nonsensical charts and diagrams that were satirical. Silly information, fractured information, and I did it to make points. Then I started charting things that were not chartable, mostly denigrating my own physical appearance. I find it funny.

Sometimes they're pithy and more meaningful, like... all my numbers on my credit cards, just to show how many numbers were attached to my name and they're in some computer somewhere. Later, they became political.

Nonsensical. It ultimately turned into my paintings. Well, that one has a period. Maybe they should have periods. So, Paula, these paintings, they seem to have a little obsessional quality to them?

Well, yeah, I think they're quite obsessive. It's the act of weaving little bits of information to make a bigger thing. OK, that's definitely stronger than that. Does this need to be...

It started when I was very young. I had this very high IQ score in something called quantitative reasoning. My family thought it was going to be math, but it wasn't. It was the ability to synthesize a lot of information and come to a conclusion.

A self-portrait. And I was happiest when I was making things. 1956, orthopedic shoes. 1959, developed a contempt for Girl Scouts. 1953, discovered I'm Jewish.

Every hairdo I ever had. The Blonde Cut, the Sassoon, the Shag, the Summer Blonde, the Platinum Bond, the Street Blonde, the Reddish Blonde, and no blonde. I didn't really fit in very well at high school.

I mean, I was a person who went to art classes instead of going to the football games. You know, there's something wrong with you if you do that. Then I was at the Tyler School of Art studying illustration, and I fell in love with typography in a way I didn't expect to. I was influenced by contemporary culture. Zigzag rolling papers, zapped comics, underground newspapers and magazines, and record covers, especially record covers.

Those were the things that I really wanted to do. They spoke to me. I got a job designing record covers at CBS Records in the 70s. I'd combine the illustration with typography that related to the illustration or contrasted it.

I first became aware of Paula's name in high school in the 70s. I'd spend three hours in a record store. I'd stand at those racks and look at the covers.

I'd be like, wow, I really like the way that cover looks. I'd turn it over and see Paula Cher's name over and over again. I was a kid with... The best job in New York City.

I had these recording artists and their managers and all these people coming in out of my office and always trying to keep these balls in the air to get them to agree to some design and get it to come to fruition, and I just became very good at it. Big recording artists were the things that the company cared about the most. So I would do pretty much what the recording artists wanted me to do. Like, for example, here on this Bruce Springsteen cover, it was shot by a friend of his who was a butcher, and I put this typewriter typography on it.

Cheap Trick was a little bit different. They weren't as big as Bruce Springsteen, so I had a bit more control. With jazz artists, they got to be a little artier. Like, this is a series of covers I did for Bob James' label, Tappan Zee records and they were all single objects that were blown up out of scale. My favorite was always this matchbook.

And then, of course, the monster illustration, Boston. Six million copies, I think, in the first month of sales. It was quite something. They wanted it to be something futuristic, so we came up with this half-baked idea that the Earth was blowing up. And all these spaceships were escaping.

Guitarists shaped as spaceships. And they left the planet Earth and went up to the heavens. The Boston cover is dumb. I am still mystified by how something like that really resonates in culture.

I mean, it predated Star Wars. so he must have hit a zeitgeist that was about to happen. But when I die, it will say, design the Boston cover.

And I've lived with this horror ever since, and I think it may wind up being true. However, if nobody cared about the album, that's where I did typography. And that was what I liked doing most, because I was the artist.

I was the one that controlled what these things looked like. So Charles Mingus won in two, and he didn't care what was on the cover. This was a reissue of a whole pile of Yardbird songs.

And these things I really, really loved making. Over a period of four or five years, the typography came forward and the images moved to the background. I had made this radical shift and developed the way I would work for the next 30 years. I learned so much about typography and became known for it.

Paula was always part of popular culture, but bringing a unique graphic design voice to that. Very much embodied in her use of typography. Ideas come all kinds of ways.

I get my best ideas in taxi cabs, you know, like sitting in traffic, drooling. I'm allowing my subconscious to take over so that I can free associate. You have to be in a state of play to design.

If you're not in a state of play, you can't make anything. It should really start like almost with that bar. You know, like if you drop it down about a sixteenth of an inch.

And then when you put pier on the end of it, it's really nice. This is an identity for Pier 55, which is the park they're building in the Hudson River. It is going to have three theaters on it, and the theaters are going to be outdoor festival spaces.

I started working with these fives, and some of the fives are just made up of geometric shapes that come from the park itself. For example, the forms come from the amphitheater, and then they create the 55s. This notion Actually came from the fact that the park sits up on these pillars.

So these are the original sketches. Like somewhere I knew that I wanted this thing to feel like it was on water or underwater. Built these platforms that this island's sitting on.

This is actually a more literal translation of them here. And then it started to abstract and become open. These are really good sketches.

Mostly what I design are identity systems. They have to exist in lots and lots and lots of ways. I generally try to want to push something as far as it can be pushed. For me, that's the fun.

I've started trying to create a process in the identities I make where I go back and revisit them in five or ten years, because sometimes they need tweaking. It's hard to make that a guess, and so you want to design something that can be adapted to its time. I've redesigned the Public Theater logo three times, and nobody even knows it. I've tightened it up, moved it apart, changed the font.

I've had, like, a love affair with the Public Theater. When Paula did Bring the Noise, Bring the Funk, it really signaled a... Paradigm shift, a new moment for the public theater. And I think what Paula did was she figured out a way how to take what she saw on stage and turn it into ink on paper.

The type in those posters, from top to bottom, filled with words. It's crazy. It's in your face. It's just like New York.

Noise, funk, it was everywhere. It was aggressive, it was urban, it was elegant, it was evocative. And the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical goes to... Bring in the noise, bring in the funk.

Bring in the noise, bring in the funk. Really, really put her on the map. It was everywhere.

And it was like, holy shit, this is really good. It was awful because everybody began imitating it. It was like New York City ate the public theater's identity.

Literally, in a matter of three to five years, it became the standard. It just made her crazy. And she would be ranting around the office, you know, saying, can you believe they did this? I had to change the theater to not make it only that kind of typography.

I remember I made these very dark. posters that had serif typography just to do something opposite to what I had done before. And I showed them to George Wolfe. I was turning 50 at the time, and he said, OK, Paul is turning 50. Let's have a year of depressing posters.

I'm not sure. Did I say that? She said I said that. Let's just frame that. OK, we're having soup.

Soup with avocado. Get away from me. Watch it.

This is not for you. Bean soup. Oh, a different design this time. You gotta put an extra country in.

Things aren't going so well in Spain. What? Economy?

I can tell, look. Oh, I thought you were telling me actual real news. The doggy. She's been amazingly well behaved. Yeah.

Except for me, who she attacks. The dog loves Paul and hates me. That's not true. Mimi really likes Seymour, but she jumps at him. She hugs me.

She hugs me. She jumps and bites him. I learned how to pronounce Seymour's last name in school.

I thought it was funny. I thought it was a funny-sounding name. Is it Schwast?

Is it Quast? All of that. But I thought Seymour was worse than Quast. The whole love story between Paula and Seymour, that's our Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton tale. Graphic designers love that story.

Seymour was my design hero when I was in art school. He must have been 39, 40. I was 21. Seymour was an illustrator, but he was a sensational designer. I thought his work was very funny. Some of it was exceedingly political in the late 50s.

Seymour founded Pushpin Studios with Milton Glaser and Ed Sorrell. They developed a style of design and illustration that... combine pop colors, wit, and intellectual thinking. It's where I really started to understand that type had spirit and did not have to be some clean, mechanical-like thing that was simply doing its job.

It could be this marvelous thing to engage with. Seymour has a studio above me. It's a bigger studio and he makes more paintings. He can wake up and always seem to be able to work.

You guys are kind of historic as a couple. Well, that may be, but we don't really work together. That was actually my first question.

Never. Never, we can't collaborate. Washington looks a little pale. Well, it'll look more vibrant when it gets a WA on it. I don't think so.

We can't collaborate. He can't work on my stuff and I can't work on his stuff. I don't want to. That's why we're not apart.

There you are. Good one, miss. Okay.

I loved leaving New York City. You jinxed it. Okay, here we go.

But I couldn't stay out of town that long. I have to come back to town. Yay! Otherwise I wouldn't have any ideas.

When I started designing environmental graphics, it let me design in the physical world. And that was at a time when the most interesting design had become digital. I was making large-scale lettering on buildings to create a sense of place as well as to get somebody to navigate their way through it.

Design exists beyond screens. It has an impact in real life. After Hurricane Sandy, the whole economy of Rockaway Beach was devastated. The boardwalk was destroyed, and the beach was fenced off.

So I was hired to create what I'd call an emotional science system. Beaches like the Rockaways invoke a memory of a bygone era of wooden boardwalks and roller coasters. It had to be brought into the 21st century. While the boardwalks were destroyed, what the neighborhoods still had were the beaches.

And that the beach looked unique from every place that you entered it. If you entered it at 96th Street, it looked different from 101st Street because the view was different. We created these large standing posters with photographs that would help orient people once they reached the beach.

They helped emotionally connect the community while functioning as directional signage. There was so much pride from the signs that the city government made these series of postcards so every town could have their own picture of their own beach. You're getting your own icon, your own logo, and it would give them identity.

There's an emotional aspect to it. Design needs to take human behavior into account. An example of terrible design would be the Palm Beach Ballot of 2001. I actually did an article in the op-ed page of the New York Times where I made a little diagram that showed why the ballot design was wrong. For the woman who designed Palm Beach County, Florida's election ballot, life has changed. I keep thinking it's a nightmare and I'm going to wake up one day and it's all going to be gone.

It was a butterfly ballot. The list of the names broken into two columns. The designer could not make one long vertical list because the names would be too small and in the area of Palm Beach County there are a lot of elderly people and they wouldn't be able to read the small text.

So she thought she was doing a service. When the first column, George Bush was first, and Al Gore was second. And then on the other side was Pat Buchanan. She had the holes that you punched in the center, except for the holes weren't where you thought they were going to be.

You assume that if the first hole belonged to George Bush, that the second hole right below it would belong to Al Gore. But in fact... It belonged to Pat Buchanan because the holes were staggered.

So in Palm Beach County, one of the biggest Jewish residences of the world, a big part of the population voted for an anti-Semite. I can't go back and say, well, you know, if I would have done something else differently, maybe the election would have been different because you don't know. Absolutely graphic design through an election. Right now, because I'm trying to make an exhibit opening, I'm working really intensely. Like, I'll typically start around 9 in the morning, and I can work to midnight or 1 or 2 in the morning.

I used to paint to jazz, and I got sick of all my records. So then I started playing old movies on television. And I can do dialogue right along with it, sort of like singing while you work.

When a man's partner is killed, he's supposed to do something about it. All About Eve. Fantastic.

Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night. The women, that's really good. That's really good.

Really good dialogue. When anything I wear doesn't please Steven, I take it off. I take it off.

There were no artist models in my family. The family was... very well educated. All the women were school teachers. And my father was actually a mapmaker.

He invented a measuring device so that maps would be more accurate. When I was a little girl, he taught me that maps were distorted, that they never accurately depict a place. My father actually thought art was stupid and serious people became engineers.

Paula has created a typographic language that is popular, it's American, it's New York, that makes sense to people and it's part of everyday life. It's not an art form that is in some other place. It's in the street, it's on the shelf at the supermarket. Paula is the most influential woman graphic designer on the planet. I never thought about myself as a feminist.

Yet, when I was working at CBS Records in the 70s, women in the design business at that time were agents. They were reps. You'd sit there and think, oh my God, what are they going to do with me? What am I going to do with them?

It's quite wild when you see it firsthand. All of a sudden you turn around and go, oh my God, that was sexism. You know, there it is. And it's like any other ism. If I'm sitting with a new client, I can see in the first glance that he's wondering why he's got this old lady.

I mean, I just thought, I'm a designer. Look at it. Hi. Nice to meet you on the phone.

I got your materials that I've been looking at. What are you looking to do now? I have an overall plan about how I approach work. Some of it is strategic and some of it is intuitive.

Are you promoting the institution or are you promoting the show? The strategic part is absorbing information from the client. How many plays do you put on in a season?

And do you have other kinds of festivals or smaller programs or things like Under the Radar? I want to understand why they look the way they look. What's interesting is you seem, from what I see here, to be a little bit all over the map.

I think you should develop a visual language. That's what we did with the public and Atlantic. You don't need to see the logo to know what it is.

You should be... you know, as powerful, visible, understandable, recognizable as anything in town. You're not changing somebody.

You're making them a more perfect vision of where they started. So the job is to traverse these different roads and try to get either an individual, a group of people, or a whole corporation to be able to see. In 1998, Citibank was merging with Travelers Insurance Company. They wanted the logo that reflected the merger and they wanted to launch it in the newspaper three weeks after hiring us to do it.

Travelers Insurance Company had a red umbrella. Citibank had type that was an italic form. It took only a moment of time to design the logo. There's a T.

The bottom of the lowercase T has a little hook on the bottom. It's a straight line. If you put an arc on the top, that's an umbrella.

There are two I's in city. It means the edge of the arc can line up with the two I's. There were a million meetings trying to get buy-in. What if you do it this way? What if you do it that way?

Show it to me on stationery. Show it to me on a card. It's got to be red on the top and blue on the bottom.

What do you do with the blue waves? Is the blue wave something you use in retail? What if you put that back on the credit card? Those were all the things that were being worked out.

For nearly, I think, two years before the thing launched, the design of the logo was never really the hard part of the job. It's persuading a million people to use it. So this is a diagram of a meeting.

You are giving a presentation. This line... is the line of the reasonable level of expectation that everyone has when you walk into the room. I've got to say that, to my surprise, I very much like the black and white. You begin to present, and you come above the reasonable level of expectation.

Everybody gets enthusiastic. People begin to start asking questions. A whole extra outline, right?

The others only have three. And about... Right here you've reached the height of the appreciation that you're going to get for this presentation. You would be putting them on top of images where they create labels. So it's like a label that's smacked over a photograph.

That's the, and we have a, we have a bus, the buses are behind you. And at this point, somebody's going to make a rebuttal to your presentation. The contrast between the two is more fun for me here than it is here because it's just, I feel the separation more. This, I kind of don't notice the contrast.

You're going to sink a little bit low that line of expectation. You grab it back and you make some concessions. You know, I may have to pull this down a bit. Maybe it has to just touch it.

The thing is that the horizontal read is always better. Yeah, see, these are great. The horizontal, you get up. The horizontal, it pops.

I love that. And you get up to about here. And at this point, this is as high as you're ever going to get. It's not as high as here. But it's good.

Will this actually play, this color? What, you don't think you... I mean, I love it, but boy, you're going to change it when you actually do it. No, I wanted that. Just to say, I'm not to say that's the thing that I'm most concerned about.

I just think it needs to be larger. The meeting must end here, because what will happen is a counter-rebuttal to your offer. It will go down below the reasonable level of expectation, and then come back only nearly above it, and will continue on. Until you reach sudden death.

They want proof that this is really, really going to work. The problem is there isn't proof. It's how do people see and perceive and accept things. I feel like as usual, once I sit with them for a while, they really start to shout in a very specific way and it just feels like, of course, this is the public. Of course it's grabbing the attention that Shakespeare in the Park always does.

I think they're awesome. Fantastic. It's gonna be a black summer. Cheers. Alright, bye.

Good work. Thank you. Thank you.

I notice it more and more as I get older. How important the act of making stuff is to me. My father saw two of the paintings I did before he died.

I was sort of embarrassed to show it to him, because of course it's totally inaccurate. And I brought him in and showed him the map, and I said, I guess you think I'm crazy. And he said, no, I never did anything that creative. There's a moment and it's in every job. It's like this incredible elation and high.

It's like you made magic for a moment. How you doing, sweetheart? I'm staying. I'm very well.

Paula's inexhaustible. 40-plus years of continuous effort. There's a virtuosity to that.

I'm driven by the hope that I haven't made my best work yet. Making stuff is the heart of everything. That drive never goes away. What can I make next?

Transcript for:Paula Scher and Typography

Transcript for:
Paula Scher and Typography