A Life in Her Work: Pentagram's Paula Scher on Ideas, Invention, and Learning

By Julia Gamolina

Paula Scher is one of the most acclaimed graphic designers in the world. She has been a principal in the New York office of the distinguished international design consultancy Pentagram since 1991, where she has designed identity systems, environmental graphics, packaging and publications for a wide range of clients that includes, among others, the Public Theater, the Museum of Modern Art, the High Line, the Metropolitan Opera, Tiffany & Co., Citibank and Microsoft.

Scher has been the recipient of hundreds of industry honors including the National Design Award and the AIGA medal. She is an established artist exhibiting worldwide, and her designs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, the Library of Congress, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other institutions. A documentary on Scher and her work can be seen in the Netflix series “Abstract: The Art of Design.” In her interview with Julia, Paula talks about being in a place where one can allow mistakes to happen, advising those just starting their careers to pick a place to work where they can truly learn.

JG: How did your interest in all things design first develop?

PS: I didn’t really understand what design was - I was just making things and making up things. I was the school publicity chair in high school, and I used to make all the posters for proms and football games and all these events I myself never went to [laughs]. That was my role in life, and I just thought I was good at art.

How did you decide to study it and what did you learn in doing so?

I never had any question about what it is that I wanted to do - I always knew that I wanted to be an artist. I was drawing and painting from the time I was a little kid, so I applied to art school. I didn’t really learn about design - I had a basic design course based on the Swiss methodology, the Bauhaus method of teaching, you know the black square on white space. I hated it, and was pretty terrible at it! Then, I realized that I was pretty terrible at almost everything I did in art school - there were people who drew better than me, painted better than me, sculpted better than me, everything.

In the second semester of my sophomore year though, I took a course called Graphic Design! I didn’t know what it was - I thought it was about being neat, which is what my first basic design course was about, and I was sloppy, so I wasn’t very good at it. But I found out that graphic design wasn’t about that, it was about ideas.

You’ve lived a few “career lives” before Pentagram. Tell me about how you got your start.

I had a pretty charmed existence, though I didn’t know it at the time. When I started out, I was actually an illustrator, and I went to New York with an illustration portfolio that combined illustration with design. My design was good, my illustration was terrible, but I didn’t really know the difference at the time. I wanted to design and illustrate children’s books, so I went to see a children’s book publisher at Doubleday, and told him an idea for a book. He said, “Go write one.” I did, and I gave him the story and the illustrations - and he lost everything! I felt decimated by that experience.

But I got a job designing the inside of children’s books at Random House. While I was there, an illustrator named Stan Mack, who later did the Village Voice Real Life Funnies, hung around in my office. I told him I had written a children’s book that this publisher and editor had lost, and he said, “Tell me the idea.” I told him - it was about a bunch of animals that were moving into an apartment house, it was called “The Brownstone,” and the animals had to switch apartments because there was a bear who moved in who wanted to go to sleep for the winter [laughs]. Stan said, “If you let me sell it, I want to illustrate it.” I said, “I already illustrated!” But we decided for him to illustrate it, and he did, and then he sold it. It’s still in print to this day - I wrote it when I was twenty-two, it came out when I was twenty-three, so it was really a very amazing and charmed way to start my career.

What happened next?

I was at Random House and thought I was about to lose my job because my boss was leaving. So he called up a friend who was working in the promotion department at CBS Records, and told his friend that if they had an opening, they should hire me! They did and I designed ads and posters for CBS. I did that for two years, and then there was an art director at Atlantic Records who liked my ads, so he hired me. I got to do record covers there, and they won awards!

I got hired back by CBS a year later, as their East Coast Art Director, and I ran a department that oversaw 150 covers a year, at only twenty-five years old.

“...the work that I do, for the most part, is best when the ideas are instinctive and fast, and the results are best when they’re accomplished fast.”

Wow.

And I thought that was normal! I look back at it now, and I think, “How did that happen?” I mean, I was a spicy little kid [laughs], but it was also sort of an open profession - you could go see anybody and show anybody your portfolio. Graphic design was on the cusp of commercial art. I was basically a little kid, but I became active in AIGA very early, then I was married to a very famous artist - who founded Pushpin Studio - named Seymour Chwast.

Then it all busted apart when I was twenty-eight and got divorced, and didn’t know what I was going to do. I quit my job at CBS, began freelancing, and then started my own company.

Tell me about that.

The company was called Koppel and Scher, and I did it with a friend of mine from the Tyler School of Art, where I went to college. My business partner, Terry Koppel, was a magazine art director, and I was a promotional and record cover designer, so the first account we got was Manhattan Records. The record company was too small to have their own art department, so we were really functioning as their art department. And then all of the sudden we had all of these employees, and that was crazy, and finally imploded. The business was better and better each year until we hit the first Bush recession at the end of the 80s.

Talk about a prolific start! In architecture studio we’re taught to produce, produce, produce, and it sounds like that’s how you started your career - and what good practice, to just keep iterating.

I was sort of fearless. I was always very independent - I worked my way through college, and had always had jobs and worked and wasn’t afraid of it. Some of it wasn’t founded on very solid grounding, and there was arrogance and smart-ass behavior, especially for a woman. But it worked in the record industry very well. Later though, it didn’t [laughs].

International Air Routes Painting by Paula Scher

How did Pentagram come about for you?

In that recession, Terry didn’t get any work for eight months, and took a job at a company to have a salary. This meant that I was peddling a studio myself, with debt, since we moved into a fancy new space. At that point, I was into my late thirties, and I realized that what one year in my life had been better and better in terms of my own career development, I had felt like I hit this plateau that I was only going to go down from. I knew I reached a level of working where I was competing with people younger than me, and I couldn’t compete for the big identity projects that the “big boys” got because I was a woman alone in business. I realized that I was at this moment in time where everything was going to get a little bit worse.

One day, in this period, Woody Pirtle, who I knew from AIGA and who was a partner at Pentagram, came over and asked if I would be interested in joining! I was kind of thrown by it because I thought their work was much more corporate than mine. I thought they did very high level and high-quality work, but I didn’t relate as much to the work they were doing out of their New York office. But, I thought it would be a really good move, and it seemed like the right time to do it, so I closed down my business and joined.

I really appreciate you talking about some of those tough moments, because I think a lot of people, when just starting out, think that it’s all upwards from here and success will build and build and build - when in reality, it’s peaks and troughs, all throughout.

Oh, you always have to reinvent. When I left CBS Records, I had to really learn how to run a business, and learn how to charge. I mean, I was a staff employee before! I made all this work, but never worried about how it got made or what the cost of it getting made was.

How did running a business influence your creative output, and vice versa?

You invent what works for you. I found that the work that I do, for the most part, is best when the ideas are instinctive and fast, and the results are best when they’re accomplished fast. The worst for me is a lot of time and indecision because it makes the work weaker. I’m much more insightful, even when there are mistakes in the work, the work is better for the mistakes. Sometimes mistakes are the only interesting things that happen in the process.

“The things that make work interesting, and create invention, are accidents. You want to be in a position where you’re capable of making accidents.”

I’m the same way with Madame Architect. The less time I have, to edit the interview, the more precisely I do so, and zero in a lot better.

You always do a project in the longest amount of time you have - so when you don’t have any time, that’s how long it takes [laughs]!

Let’s talk a little about your tenure at Pentagram.

When I joined, I was the only partner that was a woman. There had been a partner before, but she came in as a merger and was married to one of the partners, so I was really the first partner who joined, and was an independent designer. I was very intimidated by these guys - they were high rollers, and the London men were a tough bunch. I had a rough couple of years those first few. At the beginning I didn’t even know why I was doing this, and thought I had made the biggest mistake of my life. By my third year though, I started to get better projects, and the projects became more visible. That really changed by sense of self, my reputation within and outside of Pentagram.

Where are you in your career today?

I’m very thrown by the circumstances of course, because I can’t pretend like I’m young anymore! I’ve been working for nearly fifty years. I still love it though, I still love making things, and I never get tired of it.

I work on all different kinds of projects - the field of identities, promotion, and then also environmental graphics on buildings and architecture. It’s a broad-based practice, and I love working on projects with a lot of possibilities that affords me the opportunities to make something more unusual. And usually, what makes something unusual is not the way I design it, but what I’m designing it for.

How does one cultivate and exercise their creativity? If I wanted to become more creative, what should I do first?

Well I would tell you not to use the word creativity [laughs]. You don’t get up and say, “Now I’m going to be more creative.” It doesn’t work like that. Creativity is something that is really within the subconscious, and mysterious. To invent something, it requires this period of time, of trial and error, and making mistakes so you can make a discovery.

It’s really about invention - bringing something new into the world.

Right. All of us sit down and we can immediately do whatever we already know how to do. And the problem with that is we become very proficient at it, and we may even be hired for it, but we don’t make any mistakes doing that. And the things that make work interesting, and create invention, are accidents.

You want to be in a position where you’re capable of making accidents. Sometimes it’s about accidentally making an extra mark while you’re sketching, and you look at it and feel like you’re failed, but actually there’s something in it, and you use it. Sometimes you’re presented with something terrible, like a parking garage, and you have to figure out how you’re going to make it interesting, or resurface it in some way that becomes surprising, and that invents the whole project. Those kinds of problems and constraints, that push you out of your comfort zone and make you do something else, those are the things that make you more inventive.

“It’s not about career, it’s not about a job - it’s about a life choice that you’ve made, and how you can make a life in your work.”

I love that, that it’s really about inventiveness, especially when so many are focused on things like “design-thinking” today…

Oh, all that is terrible. That stuff is horrible [laughs].

[Laughs] I agree. I can’t hear someone use the term “design thinking” anymore without cringing.

You should hear my partner Natasha Jen on this - she does a wonderful talk called “Design Thinking is Bullshit.” And she actually proofs it out because of all the things that it doesn’t enable.

I heard recently that taxi rides are a time of inspiration for you - I don’t know if this is the right word, to your point about the word creativity, but where do you get your inspiration?

For taxi rides, it’s because I’m utterly bored [laughs]! If you’re stuck in New York traffic, you are bored out of your mind, but the thing that’s great about it is that you start daydreaming, and that’s how you get ideas - because you’re not being totally conscious, you’re just sitting there drooling in the cab.

However - this has been ruined for me, because I started reading my emails in taxi cabs. And I think I’m less creative because I do that!

I’ll tell you one other thing - I used to smoke. And smoking was great for what you’re calling creativity, because you’re just standing there on the street smoking, and your mind is empty. So you get an idea. Now, I stand out in the street and read my emails.

We better find alternatives to smoking breaks and phone addictions. In my case, I run, and running is actually a great time of being on, but not totally, for me, which leads to a lot of daydreaming and brainstorming.

Spending time on your phone won’t provoke any new ideas, that’s for sure. All I want to do is be able to zone out and not operate the equipment.

Social Distancing Guidelines on The High Line

What advice do you have for architects to continue to push their inventiveness, especially given all of the constraints that we deal with?

This is a difficult one to answer because there are so many roles at an architecture firm. I see the rigidity and the discipline required in project management in architecture, because you really have to pay attention to details. I’m certainly not suited for that, but I also don’t know what I’d do without people like that. I question a lot of what the software has done. What’s interesting is when you go to the old TWA Saarinen building, and you see the genius of the guy that designed that skin, and shape, and form, without a computer. He just had to make it up. I wonder if just once in a while, architects would walk away from their computer programs and make it up.

And finally with that, what advice do you have for those starting their careers?

For people starting their careers, go to a place where you can learn, and then learn. Learn from other people just by seeing how they work, how they behave, how they make decisions, all that. It’s all very eye-opening and can inform you on how to live a life in your work. That’s what you’re doing! It’s not about career, it’s not about a job - it’s about a life choice that you’ve made, and how you can make a life in your work.

All things are related, so figuring out what kind of culture you’re going to absorb, where you’re getting your inspiration, who you talk to, who your friends are, even, is all about that. If you hang out with people smarter than you, you always grow up faster than if you don’t. It’s good to be the dumbest person in the room - it’s a painful experience on one hand, but on the other hand, you walk away with a tremendous advantage.