Abstract: The Art of Design (2017–…): Season 1, Episode 6 - Paula Scher: Graphic Design - full transcript

[Paula] I walk outside
and I see typography everywhere.
New York City is a city of signs.
Sometimes things written by hand,
mismatched,
hung up in some peculiar way.
You think, "Oh my God, can I get up there
and please readjust that sign?
That's just absolutely awful!"
The way numbers are on doors.
No two the same down the block.
All messages are different,
and they're everywhere.
Typography is painting with words.
That's my biggest high.
It's my crack.
[funky music playing]
[Lupton] Paula Scher
is the goddess of graphic design.
Her stuff is everywhere!
[Bierut] Paula's been able to come up with
more ways to make type talk
than anyone else,
and to create a distinctive body of work
just with letters.
[Paula] When I go to work every day,
I feel like I'm navigating myself
through a maze.
-Hey.
-[colleague] How are you?
Look at this! A real type book!
-Can you bring this to Courtney?
-[colleague] Yeah.
[Paula] I sit nose to nose
with my partners.
My team is on the fourth floor.
I have to run up and down steps
to see them.
I actually like this.
I think you should move 'em lower.
It's very quick paced.
You're seeing something
that looks like this.
I'm solving things on scraps of paper.
Starting something, getting interrupted...
-[colleague] Paula?
-Yeah?
The interruption is great.
I like the way the icons
also interrelate with the thing.
Pentagram is a design cooperative.
There's the benefit of a large firm,
but everybody gets to act
like they're an individual.
There's no boss. Just friends.
[Bierut] Pentagram's a supergroup
of the most famous designers in the world
doing the best work in the world.
It's like an all-star team, and Paula is
the indispensable player on that team.
That one's my favorite so far.
[Bierut] We all have
our own individual style,
individual way of working.
[Paula] I could never walk into an office
and sit down at my desk to design,
I would accomplish nothing.
I can sit down at my desk
to read my e-mail.
You go through your junk mail...
A lot of crap.
You throw it all out,
you make a little order on your desk,
and then you go, "Oh, my God,
how am I going to solve this problem?"
Then, you walk up the stairs,
go into the ladies' room,
put on your lipstick and figure it out.
[colleague] It's...
I love it like that. It's very slurpy.
-Slurpy, yeah.
-Don't you think?
Yeah, I like that.
[Paula] Ideas can be triggered
by working with my team.
[Paula] ...optical illusion.
I see more than I would see
if I was just doing it all by myself.
It's fantastic.
I think that you have to make
"Girls" and "Boys" the same weight,
with the exception of the pointy things.
And then figure out
how the other type intersects.
And then we gotta figure out color.
We're working on the Summer Festival
posters for the Public Theater.
They put on free Shakespeare
in Central Park every summer.
So, like here it says,
Taming of the Shrew inside the wrap.
You don't have to do that work
with the whole name.
You're putting this
in a kind of lozenge shape.
-I think it'll be cool.
-Yeah, it looks really fun.
So, give it a shot!
I've been designing
for the Public Theater since 1994.
My first project was
creating an identity for the Theater.
When they hired me,
they had a name issue.
[Wolfe] One of the things
that was very challenging
about the Public Theater,
it had multiple identities:
it was the Public Theater,
and then some people called it
the Joseph Papp Public Theater,
and then there was
Shakespeare in Central Park.
I wanted everything
to feel like it was of one.
That it was breathing fully
as an institution.
[Paula] It had to be populous.
I knew it had to be New Yorkish,
meaning it had to be loud and proud.
I was flipping through one of my books
on American wood type.
I like American wood type because
it's powerful, and it has many forms.
On this particular page were these Rs,
and they go back to the skinniest form
or to the widest form,
and I realized I could make the word
"Public" in the same kind of weights,
and it would symbolize all of New York.
Every type of weight was included.
You can create
an identity for a whole place
based on a recognizability of type.
[Wolfe] Paula's work pulled people in.
You instantly knew, "The Public."
It's a language that could be dissected,
taken apart, put back together.
That's one the things
I think is thrilling about it.
[Paula] Typography can create
immense power.
You're working with things
that create character.
You're working with weight.
You're working with height.
If you take an E,
and the middle bar is the same length
as the ends of the E's,
it feels different than if the little bar
is half the length of the E's.
If you lift the little bar up higher,
it will make the typeface look
like it was drawn in the 1930s.
The same thing as
if you drop the middle bar lower,
it will look moderne.
If a font is heavy and bold,
it may give you a feeling of immediacy.
If a font is thin and has a serif form,
it may feel classical.
So that, before you even read it,
you have sensibility and spirit.
And that, if you combine that
with a meaning,
then that's spectacular.
When I did the High Line logo,
the goal was to make it look more like
a railroad track than an H.
If you take the kind of weight that
might make the line for a railroad track,
and you put two horizontal bars across it,
it begins to look fairly industrial.
It totally changes the spirit
without having to create
any kind of illustrative narrative.
I used to paint my fonts by hand,
when I was a young designer,
and I really miss it.
When we became fully computerized
in the late '90s,
I didn't touch anything
and I didn't use my hands.
In the past, I cut things up,
I ripped things, I pasted things.
I touched art supplies.
That physical loss was huge for me,
and that's why I started painting.
Uh-oh. That's Utah.
I deliberately began painting the maps
because they would take me
a long time to accomplish,
in some very rote way,
and that's actually everything
that went away.
These dotted lines are the distances
between two given points
and the background is the zip codes.
It's not factual, it's emotional.
Like Wyoming doesn't have
very many people in it,
but you feel it instead of know it.
I'm not making
something designed to answer questions,
it's more a design to raise them.
This painting is
counties and zip codes.
Why do some little states
have a million counties,
and some big states have very few?
Now this one is a demographic map:
average age of people,
racial and ethnic breakdowns.
To actually have any sense of it,
you actually have to sit and read it.
But, the information is
equivalently complicated and ridiculous.
I used to make complicated,
nonsensical charts
and diagrams that were satirical.
Silly information. Fractured information.
And I did it to make points.
Then I started charting
things that were not chartable.
Mostly denigrating
my own physical appearance.
I find it funny.
Sometimes they're pithy
and more meaningful,
like all my numbers on my credit cards,
just to show how many numbers
were attached to my name
and they're
in some computer somewhere.
Later, they became political.
Or nonsensical.
Ultimately, it turned into my paintings.
That one has a period,
maybe they should have periods.
[director] So Paula, these paintings,
they seem to have
a little obsessional quality to them.
Yeah, I think they're quite obsessive.
It's the act of weaving little bits
of information to make a bigger thing.
That's definitely stronger than that.
This one needs to be stronger over here.
It started when I was very young.
I had this very high IQ score in something
called quantitative reasoning.
My family thought it was going to be Math,
but it wasn't.
It was the ability to synthesize a lot
of information
and come to a conclusion.
A self-portrait.
And I was happiest
when I was making things.
1956, orthopedic shoes,
1959, developed a contempt
for Girl Scouts,
1953, discovered I'm Jewish.
Every hairdo I ever had:
the Blunt Cut, the Sassoon, the Shag,
the Summer Blonde, the Platinum Blonde,
the Streaked Blonde, the Reddish Blonde,
and No Blonde.
I didn't really fit in very well
in high school.
I mean, I was
a person who went to art classes
instead of going to the football games.
There's something wrong with you
if you do that.
Then I was at the Tyler School of Art
studying Illustration,
and I fell in love with typography
in a way I didn't expect to.
I was influenced by contemporary culture.
Zig-Zag rolling papers,
Zap comics,
underground newspapers
and magazines and record covers.
Especially record covers.
Those were the things
that I really wanted to do.
They spoke to me.
I got a job designing record covers
at CBS Records in the '70s.
I'd combine the illustration
with typography that related
to the illustration or contrasted it.
[Bierut] I first became aware of
Paula's name in high school in the '70s.
I'd spend three hours in a record store.
I'd stand at those racks
and look at the covers.
I'd be like, "Wow,
I really like the way that cover looks."
I'd turn it over
and see Paula Scher's name,
over and over again.
[Paula] I was a kid with the best job
in New York City.
I had recording artists
and their managers,
all these people
coming in and out of my office.
And always trying
to keep these balls in the air
to get them to agree to some design
and get it to come to fruition.
And I just became very good at it.
Big recording artists were the things
the company cared about the most.
So I would do pretty much what
the recording artists wanted me to do.
Like for example,
here on this Bruce Springsteen cover.
It was shot by a friend of his
who was a butcher,
and I put
this typewriter typography on it.
Cheap Trick was a little bit different.
They weren't as big as Bruce Springsteen,
so I had a bit more control.
With jazz artists,
they got to be a little artier.
Like, this is a series of covers I did
for Bob James's label,
Tappan Zee Records,
and they were all single objects
that were blown up out of scale.
My favorite was always this matchbook.
And then, of course,
the monster illustration, Boston.
Six million copies, I think,
in the first month of sales.
It was quite something.
They wanted it to be something futuristic,
so we came up with this half-baked idea
that the Earth was blowing up
and all these spaceships were escaping.
Guitar-shaped spaceships.
And they left the planet Earth
and went up in the heavens.
[Boston's "More Than A Feeling" playing]
♪ When I hear that old song
They used to play ♪
[song stops abruptly]
The Boston cover is dumb.
I am still mystified by how something
like that really resonates in culture.
I mean, it predated Star Wars.
So we must have hit a zeitgeist
that was about to happen.
But when I die, it will say,
"Designed the Boston cover,"
and I've lived
with this horror ever since,
and I think it may wind up being true.
However, if nobody cared about the album,
that's where I did typography.
And that was what I liked doing most
because I was the artist,
I was the one that controlled
what these things looked like.
So, Charles Mingus, One and Two,
and he didn't care what was on the cover.
This was a reissue of a whole pile
of Yardbird songs,
and these things
I really, really loved making.
Over a period of four or five years,
the typography came forward
and the images moved to the background.
I had made this radical shift
and developed the way I would work
for the next 30 years.
I'd learned so much about typography,
and became known for it.
[Lupton] Paula was always
part of popular culture,
but bringing a unique
graphic design voice to that,
very much embodied
in her use of typography.
[Paula] Ideas come all kinds of ways.
I get my best ideas in taxicabs, you know,
like sitting in traffic, drooling.
I'm allowing my subconscious to take over,
so that I can free associate.
You have to be
in a state of play to design.
If you're not in a state of play,
you can't make anything.
It should really start
like almost with that bar,
like if you drop it down
about a sixteenth of an inch
and then, when you put "Pier"
on the end of it, it's really nice.
Mm-hmm.
This is an identity for Pier 55,
which is the park they're building
in the Hudson River.
It is going to have three theaters on it,
and the theaters are going to be
outdoor festival spaces.
We started working with these fives
and some of the fives are just made up
of geometric shapes
that come from the park itself.
For example, the forms come from
the amphitheater
and then they create the 55s.
This notion actually came from the fact
that the park sits up on these pillars.
So these are the original sketches.
Somewhere I knew
that I wanted this thing to feel
like it was on water or underwater.
Built these platforms
that this island's sitting on.
This is actually a more literal
translation of them here.
And then it started to abstract
and become open.
These are really good sketches.
[director chuckling]
Mostly what I design are identity systems.
They have to exist in lots, and lots,
and lots of ways.
I generally try to want to push something
as far as it can be pushed.
For me, that's the fun.
I've started trying to create
a process in the identities that I make,
where I go back and revisit them
in five or ten years,
'cause sometimes they need tweaking.
It's hard to make that a guess,
and so you want to design something
that can be adapted to its time.
I've redesigned the Public Theater logo
three times, and nobody even knows it.
I've tightened it up, moved it apart,
changed the font.
I've had, like, a love affair
with the Public Theater.
When Paula did
Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk,
it really signaled a paradigm shift,
a new moment for the Public Theater.
[tapping]
And I think what Paula did
was she figured out a way,
how to take what she saw on the stage
and turn it into ink on paper.
[tapping becomes faster]
The type in those posters,
from top to bottom, filled with words.
It's crazy, it's in your face,
it's just like New York!
[Wolfe] Noise Funk was everywhere.
It was aggressive, it was urban,
it was elegant, it was evocative.
And the Tony Award for Best Direction
of a Musical goes to....
Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk!
[cheering, applause]
Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk
really, really put her on the map.
It was everywhere, and it was, like,
"Holy Shit! This is really good."
[Paula] It was awful because everybody
began imitating it.
It was like New York City ate
the Public Theater's identity.
Literally, in a matter of three
to five years, it became the standard.
It just made her crazy.
She would be ranting around the office,
saying, "Can you believe they did this?"
[laughs]
I had to change the theater to...
not make it only that kind of typography.
I remember I made these very dark posters
that had serif typography,
just to do something opposite
to what I had done before.
And I showed them to George Wolfe,
and I was turning 50 at the time,
and he said, "Okay, Paula is turning 50.
Let's have a year
of depressing posters." [laughs]
[laughs]
I'm not sure... Did I say that?
She said I said that,
that's just framed bad.
Okay, we're having soup.
Soup with avocado.
[dog whines]
[both] Go away, Mimi!
-Watch it.
-[Paula] This is not for you.
It's bean soup.
[Seymour]
Oh, a different design this time.
Yeah, I put an extra country in.
Things aren't going so well in Spain.
-What, the economy?
-You can tell, look!
Oh! [laughs]
I thought you were telling me
actual real news.
Good doggy!
She's been amazingly well behaved.
Yeah, except for me who she attacks.
[both laughing]
The dog loves Paula and hates me.
That's not true. Mimi really likes
Seymour, but she jumps at him.
-She hugs me.
-Hugs you and she jumps on me.
And she jumps and bites him.
I learned how to pronounce
Seymour's last name in school.
I thought it was funny.
I thought it was a funny-sounding name.
Was it "Schwost," is it "Kwost"?
All of that.
But I thought "Seymour"
was worse than "Kwost."
[Lupton] The whole love story
between Paula and Seymour,
that's our Elizabeth Taylor
and Richard Burton tale.
Graphic designers love that story.
[Paula] Seymour was my design hero
when I was in art school.
He must have been 39, 40? I was 21.
Seymour was an illustrator,
but he's a sensational designer.
I thought his work was very funny.
Some of it was exceedingly political.
In the late '50s,
Seymour founded Push Pin Studios
with Milton Glaser and Ed Sorel.
They developed
a style of design and illustration
that combined pop colors,
wit and intellectual thinking.
It's where I really started to understand
that type had spirit
and did not have to be some clean,
mechanical-like thing
that was simply doing its job.
It could be this marvelous thing
to engage with.
Seymour has the studio above me.
It's a bigger studio,
and he makes more paintings.
He can wake up
and always seem to be able to work.
[director] You guys are kind of historic
as a couple.
Well, that may be,
but we don't really work together.
That was actually my first question.
-Never.
-Never. We can't collaborate.
Washington looks a little pale.
Well, it'll look more vibrant
when it gets a WA on it.
I don't think so.
[Paula] We can't collaborate.
He can't work on my stuff
and I can't work on his stuff.
I don't want to. [laughs]
That's why we're not apart.
[laughs] There you are.
-[Seymour] Throw a good one this time.
-[Paula] Okay.
[sighs]
I love leaving New York City.
You jinxed it.
Okay, here we go.
But I couldn't stay out of town that long,
I have to come back to town.
[both] Yay!
Otherwise, I won't have any ideas.
[traffic]
When I started designing
environmental graphics,
it let me design in the physical world
and that was at a time when the most
interesting design had become digital.
I was making large-scale lettering
on buildings to create a sense of place,
as well as to get somebody
to navigate their way through it.
Design exists beyond screens.
It has an impact in real life.
[indistinct shouting]
After Hurricane Sandy,
the whole economy of Rockaway Beach
was devastated.
The boardwalk was destroyed
and the beach was fenced off.
So I was hired to create what I'd call
an emotional sign system.
Beaches like the Rockaways invoke
a memory of a bygone era
of wooden boardwalks and rollercoasters.
It had to be
brought into the 21st century.
While the boardwalks were destroyed,
what the neighborhood still had
were the beaches.
And that the beach looked unique
from every place that you entered it.
If you entered it at 96th Street,
it looked different from 101st Street,
because the view is different.
We created these large standing posters
with photographs
that would help orient people
once they reached the beach.
They helped emotionally connect
the community,
while functioning as directional signage.
There was so much pride from the signs
that the city government made
this series of postcards
so every town could have
their own picture of their own beach.
You're getting your own icon,
your own logo,
and it would give them identity.
There's an emotional aspect to it.
Design needs to take human behavior
into account.
[people chanting]
Re-vote! Re-vote! Re-vote!
[Paula] An example of terrible design
would be the Palm Beach Ballot of 2001.
I actually did an article
on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times
where I made a little diagram that showed
why the ballot design was wrong.
[man on TV] For the woman who designed
Palm Beach County, Florida's ballot,
life has changed.
I keep thinking it's a nightmare
and I'm going to wake up one day,
and it's gonna be gone.
[Paula] It was a butterfly ballot.
The list of the names broken
into two columns.
The designer could not make
one long vertical list
because the names would be too small,
and in the area of Palm Beach County,
there are a lot of elderly people,
and they wouldn't be able
to read small text.
So she thought she was doing a service.
In the first column, George Bush was first
and Al Gore was second.
And then on the other side
was Pat Buchanan.
She had the holes that you punched
in the center,
except for the holes weren't
where you thought they were going to be.
You assume that if the first hole
belonged to George Bush,
that the second hole, right below it,
would belong to Al Gore.
But in fact, it belonged to Pat Buchanan,
because the holes were staggered.
So in Palm Beach County,
one of the biggest
Jewish residences in the world,
a big part of the population
voted for an anti-Semite.
I can't go back and say,
"Well, you know, if I would have done
something else differently,
maybe the election
would have been different,"
because you don't know.
Absolutely.
Graphic Design threw an election.
Right now, because I'm trying
to make an exhibit opening,
I'm working really intensely.
Like, I'll typically start
around nine in the morning,
and I can work till midnight
or one or two in the morning.
I used to paint to jazz
and I got sick of all my records.
So then I started playing
old movies on television.
I can do the dialogue right along with it.
It's sort of like singing while you work.
[TV and Paula]
"When a man's partner's killed,
he's supposed to do something about it."
All About Eve. Fantastic!
[TV and Paula] "Fasten your seat belts,
it's going to be a bumpy night."
The Women, that's really good,
it's really good.
Really good dialogue.
When anything I wear
doesn't please Steven...
[TV and Paula] "... I take it off!"
There were no artist models in my family.
The family was very well educated.
All the women were schoolteachers.
And my father was actually a mapmaker.
He invented a measuring device
so that maps would be more accurate.
When I was a little girl,
he taught me that maps were distorted,
that they never accurately depict a place.
My father actually thought art was stupid
and serious people became engineers.
[upbeat piano music playing]
[Lupton] Paula has created
a typographic language
that is popular, it's American,
it's New York,
that makes sense to people.
And it's part of everyday life.
It's not an art form that is
in some other place.
It's in the street,
it's on the shelf at the supermarket.
Paula is the most influential
woman graphic designer on the planet.
[Paula] I never thought about myself
as a feminist.
Yet, when I was working
at CBS Records in the '70s,
women in the design business
at that time were agents, they were reps.
You'd sit there and think, "Oh, my God,
what are they going to do with me?
What am I going to do with them?"
It's quite wild when you see it firsthand.
All of a sudden, you turn around
and you go, "Oh, my God, that was sexism!"
You know, there it is.
And it's like any other -ism.
If I'm sitting with a new client,
I can see in the first glance
that he's wondering
why he's got this old lady.
I mean, I just thought,
"I'm a designer. Look at it."
Hi! Nice to meet you on the phone.
I got your materials
that I've been looking at.
What are you looking to do now?
I have an overall plan
about how I'd approach work.
Some of it is strategic
and some of it is intuitive.
Are you promoting the institution
or are you promoting the show?
The strategic part
is absorbing information from the client.
How many plays do you put on in a season?
And do you have other kinds of festivals,
or smaller programs,
or things like under the radar, or...?
I want to understand
why they look the way they look.
What's interesting is you seem,
from what I see here,
to be a little bit all over the map.
I think you should develop
a visual language.
That's what we did
with The Public and Atlantic.
You don't need
to see the logo to know what it is.
You should be as powerful,
visible, understandable,
recognizable as anything in town.
You're not changing somebody.
You're making them a more perfect vision
of where they started.
So the job is to traverse
these different roads
and try to get either an individual,
a group of people,
or a whole corporation to be able to see.
[applause]
[Paula] In 1998, Citibank was merging
with Travelers Insurance Company.
They wanted a logo
that reflected the merger
and they wanted to launch it
in the newspaper
three weeks after hiring us to do it.
Travelers Insurance Company
had a red umbrella.
Citibank had type
that was in italic form.
It took only a moment of time
to design the logo.
There's a T.
The bottom of a lowercase T
has a little hook on the bottom.
It's a straight line.
If you put an arc on the top,
that's an umbrella.
There are two Is in Citi.
It means the edge of the arc
can line up with the two Is.
There were a million meetings
trying to get by 'em.
"What if you do it this way, or that way?
Show it to me on stationery,
show it to me on a card.
It's got to be red on top
and blue on the bottom.
What do you do with the blue wave?
Is it something you use in retail?
What if you put that
back on the credit card?"
Those were all the things
that were being worked out
for nearly, I think, two years
before the thing launched.
The design of the logo is never really
the hard part of the job.
It's persuading
a million people to use it.
So this is a diagram of a meeting.
You are giving a presentation.
This line is the line of the reasonable
level of expectation that everyone has
when you walk into the room.
I got to say that, to my surprise,
I very much like the black and white.
[Paula] You begin to present,
and you come above
the reasonable level of expectation.
Everybody gets enthusiastic,
people begin to start asking questions.
...a whole extra outline, right?
The others only have three.
And about right here,
you've reached the height
of the appreciation
that you're gonna get
for this presentation.
You will be putting them
on top of images where they create labels.
So it's like a label
smacked over a photograph.
That's the... And we have...
The buses are behind you.
And at this point,
somebody's going to make
a rebuttal to your presentation.
The contrast between the two
is more fun for me here than it is here,
because it's just...
I feel the separation more.
This, I kind of don't notice the contrast.
[Paula] You're going to sink a little bit
below that line of expectation.
You grab it back
and you make some concessions.
You know,
I may have to pull this down a bit.
Maybe it just has to touch it.
The thing is that the horizontal read
is always better.
Yes, see these are great,
the horizontal pops. I love that.
[Paula] And you get up to about here.
And at this point, this is as high
as you're ever gonna get.
It's not as high as here, but it's good.
Will this actually play in this color?
-[Paula] What, you don't think--
-I mean, I love it.
But I'm worried
you're going to change it
when you actually do it.
No, I wanted that.
Just to say, that's the thing
I'm most concerned about.
I just think it needs to be larger.
The meeting must end here,
because what will happen
is a counter-rebuttal to your offer,
it will go down
below the reasonable level of expectation,
and then come back only nearly above it
and will continue on,
until you reach sudden death.
They want proof that this is really,
really gonna work.
The problem is there isn't proof.
It's how do people see and perceive
and accept things.
I feel like, as usual,
once I sit with them for a while,
they really start to shout
in a very specific way
and it just feels like, of course,
this is The Public.
Of course, it's grabbing the attention
that Shakespeare in the Park always does.
-I think they're awesome.
-Fantastic.
It's going to be a black summer.
[laughter]
-All right. Bye.
-Good to see you.
-Terrific. Good work. Thank you.
-Thanks.
-[Patrick] Perfect.
-Thank you.
[Paula] I notice it more and more
as I get older.
How important
the act of making stuff is to me.
My father saw two of the paintings I did
before he died.
I was sort of embarrassed to show him,
because, of course,
it's totally inaccurate.
And I brought him in
and showed him the map
and I said, "I guess you think I'm crazy,"
and he said,
"No, I never did anything that creative."
[funky music playing]
There's a moment, and it's in every job.
It's like this incredible elation
and high.
It's like we made magic for a moment.
-How you doing, sweetheart?
-I'm standing! My feet don't hurt yet.
[Bierut] Paula's inexhaustible.
Forty-plus years of continuous effort.
There's a virtuosity to that.
[Paula] I'm driven by the hope
that I haven't made my best work yet.
Making stuff is the heart of everything.
That drive never goes away.
What can I make next?
[upbeat music playing]