Paula Scher: Works
PaulaScher
Paula Scher is one of the most influential graphic designers in the world. Described as the ‘master conjurer of the instantly familiar’, Scher straddles the line between pop culture and fine art in her work. Iconic, smart and accessible, her images have entered the American vernacular.
Paula Scher: Works is the definitive visual record of the groundbreaking graphic designer and Pentagram partner. Published by Unit Editions, the 522-page book presents the most extensive monograph of Scher’s career to date, featuring over 300 projects from from her early days in the music industry as an art director with CBS and Atlantic Records, through the launch of her first studio, Koppel & Scher, to her 25-year engagement with Pentagram.
Co-edited by Tony Brook and Adrian Shaughnessy, the book organizes Scher’s work chronologically into several thematic sections. It opens with a long interview with the designer, then moves into her record covers from the 1970s and 80s. Central chapters look at her innovative approach to identity design and environmental graphics and its impact on contemporary New York’s urban fabric — as seen in work for clients from MoMA to Charter Schools; from the High Line to Shake Shack — as well as her logos for global corporations and cultural institutions.
A large section on authorship is devoted to the designer’s socially and politically-motivated posters, New York Times Op-Ed illustrations and campaign work. The book also provides the most up-to-date look at Scher’s idiosyncratic hand-painted maps, a prolific artistic practice that complements her still-growing graphic legacy, as well as her longstanding collaboration with The Public Theater, which spans over twenty years.
Paula Scher has been a partner in the New York office of Pentagram since 1991. She began her career as an art director in the 1970s and early 80s, when her eclectic approach to typography became highly influential. In the mid-1990s her landmark identity for The Public Theater fused high and low into a wholly new symbology for cultural institutions, and her recent architectural collaborations have re-imagined the urban landscape as a dynamic environment of dimensional graphic design. Her graphic identities for Citibank and Tiffany & Co. have become case studies for the contemporary regeneration of American brands.
Her work has been exhibited all over the world and is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
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