How Pentagram’s Paula Scher Defines Success
Following the publication of her new monograph, the legendary designer still isn’t satisfied.
How would it feel to flip through a glossy coffee-table book of your own design work? One might imagine it would feel like the ultimate validation, permission to go retire in peace, safely canonized. But Pentagram partner Paula Scher insists she experiences no such self-satisfaction while browsing the 522 pages of Paula Scher: Works, her new monograph from Unit Editions, edited by Tony Brooks and Adrian Shaughnessy. “Success isn’t about the finished piece,” Scher says. “I don’t think you’re ever done.”
Chronicling Scher’s groundbreaking 40-year graphic design career, Works features more than 300 projects, including early album covers for the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan; identities for MoMA, the Public Theater, and the Metropolitan Opera; and recognizable corporate logos for Citibank, Microsoft, and Shake Shack. Fellow graphic designer Ellen Lupton anointed Scher “the most influential woman graphic designer on the planet.”
Then there are her personal artworks — huge painted maps that use bits of data the way a pointillist uses dots, and gems like “The Truth Behind the Overused Publicity Photo (Circa 1985),” a self-portrait Scher made for the AIGA in 1992. She defaced the that publicity photo with a colorful hand-lettered timeline of her adolescent humiliations (i.e., “1964: Rejected as a cheerleader”) and regrettable hair choices (“1957: The page boy”).
Now 68, Scher is as self-deprecating as ever: “I don’t think I’ve done anything in that book really well yet,” she says. “If you were in my shoes, if you knew how lousy I sometimes feel — I’m just like anybody else. What matters is the process of making.”
We caught up with Scher about this mysterious process of making; compulsive email-checking as a substitute for smoking; and why she’s jealous of some of her Pentagram colleagues.
“Most influential woman graphic designer”?
Does that mean that I’m number 15 when you factor in men? What number does that make me overall? I don’t know what that means.
Being a woman has nothing to do with the work itself. I don’t like pink more. There was a group of feminists very active in the ’80s who believed that women actually made different kinds of work [than men]. I don’t buy that.
Morning routine
I get into the Pentagram office around 9 or 9:30. Usually I have junk on my desk I gotta deal with, stuff left over from yesterday, a pile of mail that came in, or administrative things my coordinator tells me I have to respond to.
Then I usually go up to my team and go through what we’re working on. There are usually five to six projects going on in a given day, split between a team of eight people. Sometimes we’re refining something, sometimes we’re trying to make a presentation work, sometimes we’re figuring out financial or schedule-oriented aspects of a project.
Cigarettes vs. email
I’m an early riser. I do two hours of email in the morning. I don’t flag things, so if I don’t answer an email within a 24-hour period, it’ll probably get lost. Throughout the day, I use email the way I used to smoke. It’s like taking a break. I’ll finish a task and then read my email. I’ll go to the bathroom at a party and read my email. But smoking is much sexier.
The perfect outfit
I have a really bad day if I don’t like what I’m wearing. I take a lot of care in the morning, because if I feel fat or don’t like the way my hair looks, or if I feel old, it’ll affect the entire day. But it’s not about the clothing itself. There are things that I’ll put on and will look terrific some days and terrible others. It has to do with how I’m feeling about myself when I put it on.
Colleague envy
My partners are pretty good designers, in case you don’t know. I envy parts of everybody’s work. Michael Bierut seems to have the best dialogues with his clients. It seems so effortless for him to explain something to the client and get them to feel like he’s masterful and in control, which is harder for me to do. Michael Gericke is organized in a way I can’t be. Abbott Miller comes to the most elegant of solutions, which I find hard to attain.
First is best
I do things in spurts. My first ideas are always my best, which can be a problem, because the client always feels most comfortable if you’ve shown them three to five options. I have a hard time after the first idea coming up with something as good.
Greatest hits
I have enormous amount of empathy for my work in the music business, because I was so young. When I see it, it makes me smile. It was so long ago. You’re talking about 1975.
I have a lot of empathy and pride in going the distance for the Public Theater for 24 years. As a distinct body of work, there were good periods and bad periods, breakthroughs and big hits.
And I have a lot of pride in The New School identity, even though it got trashed when it first came out. I like things in retrospect when I see how they live.
Design bibles
Different books at different times have been bibles for me. For example, the Robert Roy Kelly book, American Wood Type, 1828–1900. Other books I regularly flip through because they help me solve certain problems. A German book called Culture Identities Design for Museums, Theaters and Cultural Institutions that came out a number of years ago, mostly featuring European identities, is a great book for looking at identity systems. I use it all the time. It’s sort of a magic book. And lately I’ve been looking at ’60s political poster art. It looks good to me all over again.
Soundtrack
In the office, I don’t listen to music at all. But in the country, for painting, I had a big long playlist of about 3,000 songs — a combination of rock n’ roll, blues and classic jazz like Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Now I paint while listening to old classic movies from the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s. I’ve seen them so many times, I can just listen. Like Lawrence of Arabia — I’ll hear the music in the desert and know where he’s standing.
Finding the possibility
I have an endless appetite for seeing the possibility in something. When I don’t see the possibility, I get depressed. There’s always a moment in any project when sometimes the project just feels so boring you might want to shoot yourself in the head, or you’ll think, “God, I hate this client,” or whatever it is that you feel — but then there will be a moment when I see a way through, that makes it possible, that this thing is really a terrific possibility.
