Paula Scher

Paula Scher was born in Washington, D.C. in 1948 and trained at Tyler School of Art at Temple University, graduating in 1970. She moved to New York and began designing book covers at Random House before landing at CBS Records in 1972. Over the next decade she rose to art director of the cover department, producing an estimated 150 album covers a year — and, along the way, two Grammy nominations for cover design.

The CBS years were where she absorbed the visual vocabulary of postwar American commercial type: Victorian wood type, Art Deco display faces, hand-lettered pastiche. The collision of these references with a modernist typographic education produced what became her signature — expressive, historical, maximal.

In 1984 she co-founded Koppel & Scher with Terry Koppel. In 1991 she joined Pentagram as its second female partner and opened the firm up to a type of work it hadn’t previously done: not just corporate identity but cultural identity — theatres, museums, opera houses.

The 1994 Public Theater commission from George C. Wolfe is often treated as the before/after moment in American identity design. It also marked Scher’s full arrival as a voice independent of any single studio style.

Scher has taught at the School of Visual Arts, New York since 1992. Her work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Cooper Hewitt and the Library of Congress.

Scher’s working position is that design is the content — type choices, hierarchy, colour and scale are not decorations laid over meaning but the direct carriers of it.

“It’s through mistakes that you actually can grow. You have to get bad in order to get good.” — Paula Scher, Netflix Abstract: The Art of Design (2017)

She is suspicious of research as a substitute for craft judgement, and openly sceptical of design processes that aim to de-risk ideas by consensus. In Make It Bigger (2002), the title essay argues that design problems often don’t have “right” answers — only more or less interesting ones — and that a designer’s job is to have the nerve to pick one and stand behind it.

Her second premise: typography is alive. Letters have history, weight, cultural association, and a good designer uses those associations rather than smoothing them away. The Public Theater identity made that argument visible: late-nineteenth-century wood type reframed as a twenty-first-century civic voice.