Paula Scher

An interview with Paula Scher on Design Boom.

DB: please could you tell us about your background and how you came to do the work you do now?

PS: I was an illustration major at tyler school of art.  I really didn’t draw well, but I learned to illustrate with type. I began designing for the music business in the 1970 when i got out of school and was senior art director at CBS records (now sony) when I was 26. I was responsible for the design and production of about 150 albums (12 x12 format) a year.  I learned how to work in every style and became obsessed with period typography. a lot of the work was later referred to as ‘postmodernism’ but I didn’t know what that was at the time I did the work.  I was merely experimenting with early modernist typography. I can trace almost every project I work on back to the music business.  so much of my work is for theater or dance or other forms of popular culture.  even when I am designing identities for corporations, I seem to operate through the lens of the entertainment industry.

- Scher instinctively used popular culture to influence the aesthetic of her work. She also took inspiration from modernist typography, this was something she simply liked, and used it in a new way, which was labeled postmodern, of which Scher was not aware.

Poster for CBS records (1979)

DB: what were your first significant projects?

PS: a series of album covers for the best of jazz where I experimented with russian cobstructivism.  the in-store posters were the best part of the series. I also still like my poster for elvis costello. another would be a series of jazz albums that relied of large scale objects for bob james (tappan zee records) and a number of intricate typographic albums.

- Jazz in America was considered as a modernist music genre, and jazz captured the mood of the time, though Scher looked toward Russian Constructivism for her inspiration, which was unrelated to jazz. Taking an eclectic mixture of cultural references was how Scher worked, and this wasn't a conscious effort to make anything postmodern.

Swatch Swiss campaign (1984)

The Diva is Dismissed (1994)