Paula Scher’s storied life in design
A celebrated graphic designer looks back at a lifetime of groundbreaking work, from brands to bands to burgers
There’s a running joke among the partners at Pentagram, the celebrated design agency, sparked by a recent AGM, where they all piled into a bus. “We’re being driven up a mountain and it’s very bendy,” recalls Angus Hyland, when we meet at its London HQ. “When we get to the top someone said, ‘I imagined the headlines: “Fatal Road Crash: Paula Scher, and others…”’”
Pentagram designs architecture and interiors, books, branding and corporate “identities”, films, products, posters and websites and has five international offices, including London and New York. It is the world’s largest independent design consultancy and maybe unique. By its own admission it was established by “three hippies” and remains owned and run by 21 partners. They have equal say. There is no CEO, CFO or COO. Profits are shared equally. They have designed London taxis, Paracetamol packaging for Boots, The Guardian and logos for Claridge’s and The Savoy. It turns 50 in 2022.
Yet while all partners are equal, some partners are more equal than others. Paula Scher became its first female partner in 1991 and has been described as “the most influential woman graphic designer on the planet”. At 71, she is about to complete what is arguably her most successful year, at least in terms of recognition. In June, she was honoured as a fellow by the Society of Experiential Graphic Design (SEGD). In October, she received the Pratt Institute Legends Award, which celebrates “individuals… whose works have helped shape the cultural landscape”. In November, she headlined Design Manchester. She also had a show in Netflix’s series, Abstract: The Art of Design.
“She’s the first lady of design,” Hyland says. “She’s a force of nature with an amazing, diverse portfolio. And she keeps doing amazing work.”
Scher brushes off the attention. “I seem to be getting a lot of it,” she says, down the line from New York. “Maybe people think I’m going to die soon.”
There’s probably more to it than that. If you’ve used Microsoft Windows, eaten at Shake Shack or paid money into Citibank, you have interacted with Scher’s work. But it is in New York where she has had the greatest impact. It’s no exaggeration to say she has changed the landscape of that city. She rebranded the Museum of Modern Art as MoMA. She redid the signage for all the city’s parks, replacing a dog’s dinner of instructional signs (“No bare feet”, “No glass bottles”, “No explosives, firearms or weapons”, “No airplane, hot air balloon, parachute, hang gilder or other aerial craft”, and,
indeed, “No dogs”) with a slotting system of unified, celadon-coloured plaques that are neatly ordered and can be read without feeling like you’re being told off. She is also in no small way responsible for The High Line, the 1.45-mile elevated rail trail on Manhattan’s West Side that is now one of the city’s most visited attractions. Before they shopped around for funding, its two backers, operating as Friends of the High Line, begged a logo from Scher. She came up with an “H” with double horizontal lines that recalled train tracks, then politely persuaded them that their counter-suggestion (an “F” for “Friends”) kind of missed the point.
“We didn’t have any money to build it, we didn’t know what it should be,” Robert Hammond, one of the pair, says. “One of Mayor Giuliani’s henchmen, at a public hearing, said, ‘All this project is, is two guys... and a logo’. But you can do a lot with ‘two guys… and a logo’. It was critical.”
Scher has produced countless posters for theatre productions all over the city, while her powerful Shakespeare in the Park campaigns have become a seasonal tradition. “It’s very gratifying, I love working in New York,” she says. “Design lives, and it lives in all kinds of different forms.”
Always the same but always different, if Scher has a go-to style it is to illustrate with type — she’s fond of 45° lettering and De Stijl-inspired grids, though like any designer, she resists pigeonholing. “I use typography to convey spirit. Something silly, something serious, something happy, something stupid. Any point can be made with a word; or a letter form.”
She dislikes the idea that design should be clean (art speak for minimal). “When I was young I rebelled against the International Style, particularly the font Helvetica, because everybody uses it. They’re still using it now! If everybody is using it, how can it be distinctive?”
Before Pentagram, Scher was East Coast art director at CBS Records. Her work for jazz star Bob James’s H, a giant hotdog complete with zippy mustard squiggle, and Sunny Side Up for rocker Wilbert Longmire, a fried egg, remain pop art archetypes. They’re in the permanent collections at the
V&A and MoMA. Later, she created Michael Jackson’s Bad cover. “I was 26 years old. I made 150 covers a year,” she says. “I was just this little brat running around doing things. I didn’t even know I had a good job.”
Today, one of her talents is creating unifying templates: MoMA is a good example. It’s hefty black logo, in the Franklin Gothic font, is so impactful you can display anything behind it: abstract expressionist paintings, black and white photography or a disparate group show; there is cohesion.
“Pentagram is a great place to work,” says Scher, who was born in Virginia, and whose father worked for the US Geographical Society (handpainted maps, artworks really, are one of her sidelines). “If you share profit, it’s excellent because not everybody is likely to have a bad year. And you don’t want to be doing bad work in this group. Because the group is terrifically talented. You feel terrible if you’re making terrible work.”
Still, switching off is a problem. “I’m bothered by bad design. I was in a hotel last night and thought, ‘Why is the shower curtain like this?’ Me walking around complaining about the crappy [park] signs was real. Why do I do this? Given the political nightmares in my country, I really shouldn’t care about the typeface on a billboard. But, you know,” she says, “it’s my job to notice.”
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‘I’m always bothered by bad design. I was in a hotel last night and thought, “Why is the shower curtain like this?”’