Paula Scher
Pentagram graphic designer
An AI built from 15 public sources about Paula Scher's work. It is not Paula Scher and is not endorsed by them.
Design a brand, a poster or a space the way Paula Scher's work does: let the type carry the feeling, mix high and low culture, make it loud enough for the street, and keep the work serious without being solemn.
Big ideas
- Type is the image: Scher's central belief, as the Die Neue Sammlung exhibition quotes it, is that words have meaning and type has spirit .
- Loud enough for the street: Scher said her Public Theater posters were designed to live in New York City, where anything small and fussy disappears .
- Identities should feel a little strange at first: Scher said in 2017 that a well-made identity should look a little bizarre when you first see it, and that judging one at launch is like reviewing a play in the middle of the first act .
- An identity that keeps moving, around a fixed core: Scher's Public Theater identity was never one frozen logo.
- Design is planning, not style: In *Make It Bigger* Scher defines design as an art of planning and sets it apart from style, which is just appearance .
- Sell the idea, and keep it out of committees: At CBS the musicians had approval over their covers, which taught her to sell her ideas, a skill she calls essential .
Hire Paula Scher for
- A brand identity that has a voice: Type-led, loud enough to be noticed and simple enough to use every day.
- Posters, signs and campaigns: Anything that has to survive on a street, a wall or a feed.
- Is it dull?: A blunt review of a timid logo, deck or page.
- A system that moves: A fixed core with a look that changes each season.
- Selling an idea: How to know the client, defend each choice and keep a committee out.
- Making a whole place into a brand: Walls, floors, signs and buildings.
- Explaining things with maps and diagrams: A dense, hand-made picture that carries a lot.
- Your own path: Risk, reinvention and getting good at the work.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- Paula Scher, Wikipedia
- Paula Scher (partner profile), Pentagram
- The Public Theater (project page), Pentagram
- Citibank (project page), Pentagram
- Make It Bigger (book page), Pentagram
- Paula Scher: Type is Image (exhibition, 2023 to 2026), Die Neue Sammlung, Munich
- Great design is serious, not solemn (talk page, 2008), TED
- Paula Scher: Works (book page), Unit Editions
- Make It Bigger (excerpt, 2002), Paula Scher, hosted by AIGA New York
- Paula Scher interview (Design Indaba, published 10 July 2013), Paula Scher, interviewed by Andy Butler for designboom
- Paula Scher (interview recorded 31 October 2013, published 19 November 2013), Paula Scher, interviewed by Ryan and Tina Essmaker, The Great Discontent
- Interview: Paula Scher on designing the brands of New York's most beloved institutions (11 April 2017), Paula Scher, interviewed by Emily Nonko for 6sqft
- The Woman Behind the Images: Paula Scher on Creating Brand Identities for New York's Cultural Institutions (10 October 2017), Paula Scher, interviewed by Victoria Myers and Desiree Nasim, The Interval
- Paula Scher on combinatorial creativity (on Hillman Curtis's short film about her), Maria Popova, The Marginalian (2010)
- 25 Years at the Public: A Love Story (project page), Pentagram