Paula Scher

Paula Scher, an American illustrator, graphic designer, painter, and teacher, was born in Washington, D.C., on October 6, 1948.

A graduate of the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1970, she is one of the most influential graphic designers in the world.

After graduating, she moved to New York and began her career as a layout artist for the children's book division of Random House.

In 1972, she entered the music industry, working for CBS Records, designing album covers for artists such as Boston, Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, and others, designing up to 150 covers each year during her eight-year tenure at CBS. She also worked for Atlantic Records as an art director. Her typographic approach, which draws on Art Deco and Russian Constructivism influences in an original way, distinguishes her and influences contemporary graphic design.

In 1984, she co-founded the Koppel & Scher agency with Terry Koppel, producing visual identities, packaging, and book covers, including celebrated works such as posters for Swatch.

In 1991, she became the first female partner at the Pentagram design studio in New York, where she continues to work today.

Since 1994, she has created the celebrated visual identity for The Public Theater in New York, a benchmark for theater graphics, characterized by a typographic language reminiscent of street signs and having a profound impact on cultural participation.

She works for high-profile international clients, including Bloomberg, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Citibank, Tiffany & Co., Adobe, the Walt Disney Company, and numerous cultural and artistic institutions such as the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and others.

Paula Scher's work is known for its bold use of typography, formal eclecticism, and the integration of graphic elements drawn from both pop culture and fine art. Her graphic design often blends different styles, such as Art Deco and Russian Constructivism, creatively adapting them rather than copying them. She is also known for elevating visual communication to a narrative level with a strong emotional impact.

Her work as a graphic designer is characterized by her unconventional use of typefaces, viewing them not only as writing tools but, above all, as images and expressive forms. This is evident, for example, in the development of a new visual identity for the Public Theater in New York in 1994 and in the series of posters for the Noise Funk festival.
In the first case, she uses letters of different thicknesses and sizes, referencing the variety of activities offered by the theater. In the second, the same concept is found, also developed through contrasts between different blocks of text; the whole forms a single visual composition that interacts with a single image of a dancer, underscoring the image's dynamism.
This compositional model, based on the concept of typography as image, is also found in the maps she paints.

Paula Scher has received approximately 300 awards throughout her career, including the prestigious Gold Medal, and her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Design in Zurich, and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

The daughter of a cartographer and engineer, Paula Scher became interested in cartography at a young age, particularly when her father showed her some aerial maps of the Rocky Mountains. From then on, she began to view those maps as true masterpieces, from which she would draw strong inspiration. During a period of demoralization and despair, caused by the long and monotonous process of creating the new logo for City Bank, Paula drew her first map, reproducing the map of the United States from memory, so much so that she forgot some states.

She began to paint other maps, some of which depicted the entire world, others still with city names in deliberately incorrect places. These paintings were thus conceived with a playful intent, designed to separate the artist's mind from the world that prevented her from fully expressing her creativity.

Paula exhibited her canvases at the Maya Stendhal in New York, and seeing how quickly they were appreciated and purchased, she was asked to produce more for a new exhibition. Despite the faster pace of production, mapmaking remained a source of escape for Scher from her commissioned works; her personal map project is therefore still very much alive. Paula Scher's graphic maps are not merely intended to describe the geography of the chosen country; the artist chooses to emphasize the dynamic nature of each territory, seeking to synthesize the identity of a given geographic region.