Паула Шер: Американский дизайнер и художник.

American graphic designer and painter

Paula Scher (born October 6, 1948, Washington, D. C.) is an American graphic designer, painter and art educator in design. She also served as the first female principal at Pentagram, which she joined in 1991.

Scher studied at the Tyler School of Art, in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1970. During her eight years at CBS Records, she is credited with designing as many as 150 album covers a year. Some of those iconic album cover designs are Boston (Boston), Eric Gale (Ginseng Woman), Leonard Bernstein (Poulenc Stravinsky), Bob James (H), Bob James and Earl Klugh (One on One), Roger Dean and David Howells (The Ultimate Album Cover Album) and Jean Pierre Rampal and Lily Laskin (Sakura: Japanese Melodies for Flute and Harp). Her designs were recognized with four Grammy nominations. She is also credited with reviving historical typefaces and design styles. Scher developed a typographic solution based on Art Deco and Russian constructivism, which incorporated outmoded typefaces into her work. The Russian constructivism had provided Scher inspiration for her typography; she did not copy the early constructivist style but used its vocabulary of form on her works.

In 1984 she co founded Koppel & Scher with editorial designer and fellow Tyler graduate Terry Koppel. During the seven years of their partnership, she produced identities, packaging, book jackets, and advertising, including the famous Swatch poster. Since then, she has been a principal at the New York office of the Pentagram design consultancy, where she has developed identity and branding systems, promotional materials, environmental graphics, packaging and publication designs for a broad range of clients that includes, among others, Bloomberg, Microsoft, Bausch + Lomb, Coca Cola, Shake Shack, The New School, the Museum of Modern Art, the Sundance Institute, the High Line, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, the New York Philharmonic, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

Scher has contributed to numerous issues of Print. Her first Print cover was with her friend Steven Heller. Together they created a parody issue in 1985, a genealogy chart of graphic design.

Scher was profiled in the first season of the Netflix docu series Abstract: The Art of Design.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has one of the most recognizable logotypes in the museum world. In 1964, the Franklin Gothic No.2 logotype was originally designed by Ivan Chermayeff. By 2004, Matthew Carter had redrawn a new custom typeface named MoMA Gothic. Although MoMA's core identity is a well developed iconic museum, applications like the web, print, and physical environment have not been unified or visionary like the museum itself. In order to continually carry the spirit of the institution, the museum hired Pentagram to design a more powerful and integrated comprehensive system. To create a new approach that modernizes the institution's image, Paula Scher designed a complete methodology for the new system to work at any scale, from an exterior banner to a print advertisement in the newspaper. She designed a strong grid to uniform placement of images and types. The artwork is cropped to maximize visual impact, and each quadrant of a page or a banner has a specific function. A particular image is selected as the signature focus for an exhibit and list of upcoming events unrelated to the featured into a text block. The black on white logotype placed in a vertical position whenever is possible and always bleeds off an edge. Julia Hoffman, MoMA's creative Director for Graphic and Advertising, and her internal team have used the new system and brought the system to life in applications from larger banners and subway posters to the website.

Paula Scher and Julia Hoffman designed the new identity for the Metropolitan Opera. The Metropolitan general manager, Peter Gelb, proposed to rebrand the institution and reach wide audiences like the younger generation who had never set foot inside the opera hall. The identity was set in Baskerville and Avenir and the campaign featured a performance of Madama Butterfly. The print ad campaign launched on August 20, 2006 and according to Thomas Michel, the Metropolitan's marketing director, it was a successful sales day in the history of the organization.

Paula Scher designed a new identity and promotional campaign for the New York City Ballet, one of the largest and well known dance companies, founded in 1933 by Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine. Scher designed with Lisa Kitchenberg of Pentagram and the NYCB's Luis Bravo, to create an identity that linked the company's legacy and location to a modern and dramatic new aesthetic. The logo was set in the font DIN, which appears slightly stacked on each layer. The palette was composed of black, white and silvery grays, resembling how the buildings of New York appear sometimes. It has a softened transparency and a subtle gradation of color that includes shades of blue blacks, green blacks and red blacks. Scher also cropped the images of City Ballet dancers to create more tension and drama. The new identity and graphics appeared on bus shelter, subway poster, magazines and newspapers ads, in the company's programs and website, and in environmental graphics at the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, where the company performs. She worked with Period Equity co founders, Jennifer Weiss Wolf and Laura Strausfeld, to create the identity. Weiss Wolf and Strausfeld initially wanted to call their organization "Menstrual Equality", but Scher saw Period Equity as less off putting. When the organization achieves its goal, the name can be shifted to "Equity, Period". This will allow them to later extend their work beyond menstrual inequality into other issues. The logo re imagines their older four colour symbol as a more modern geometric shape.

In 2000, Paula Scher designed an interior design for the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. In the design, there are words running along the walls, tubes and balconies reflecting with vast letters that gives a joyful effect to represent the show's performance in the building. It was signature and environmental graphics for the Lucent Technologies Center for Arts Education, a school affiliated with NJPAC.

For the Achievement First Endeavor Middle School at Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, a charter school for grades 5 through 8, Scher created a program of environmental graphic that helps school interiors to become a better learning environment. She created a vibrant space with bold typography font of Rockwell and simple paint to change the life of its students. With the help of Rogers Marvel Architects, who designed the school as a refurbishment and expansion of the existing building. The design was based on Endeavor's teaching philosophy and a series of motivational slogans used by its teachers. Scher enlarged these concepts into super graphics that help define the interior spaces. The graphics appear as an equations form ("Education = Choice", "Education = Freedom") in the hallways and quotations running around the wall of gymnasium and staircase, to encourage students to do better and create a unique environment of their own.

In 2006, an exhibition at Maya Stendhal gallery in New York City, Paula Scher painted two 9 by 12 foot maps that resembled patchwork quilts from afar, but contain much textual detail. She created lines that represented the separation of political allies or borders dividing enemies. Scher created the maps into layers that reference what we think when we think of Japan, Kenya, or the Upper East Side. For instance, The United States (1999) was painted in blocky white print and full with a list of facts that we comprehend when we think about cities. Africa (2003) is represented in a stark black and white palette, hinting at a tortured colonial past. The land of the red rising sun is represented when we think of Japan (2004). This was Scher's first solo exhibition as a fine artist and she sold every piece between $40,000 to $135,000. The Maya Stendhal's owner decided to extend the exhibition for four weeks, until January 21. Therefore, Scher decided to produce silk screened prints of The World that contained large scale images of cities, states, and continents blanketed with place names and other information. It is full of mistakes, misspellings, and visual allusions to stereotypes of places such as South America, painted with hot colors and has two ovaries on the sides. It was not created to be a reliable map but convey a sense of the places that are mediated and mangled. Scher has been described as a "maximalist", stating, "Less is more and more is more. It's the middle that's not a good place". Scher is currently represented by Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery.

In 2007, Paula Scher created screen prints of NYC Transit and Manhattan that were printed on hand made deluxe Lana Quarelle paper. NYC Transit portrays the island of Manhattan as a busy destination crisscrossed by a subway system of loopy, color coded lines and stations. It also shows the Manhattan night famed neighborhoods.

In 2008, Maya Stendhal released a limited edition print map of China and renowned artist Paula Scher. The map is 48.5 x 40 inches, printed on deluxe Lanaquarelle paper, hand made in the Vosges region of France. Scher collaborated with Alexander Heinrici to convey the hand painted map to represent the rapid economic growth, booming industry, the success of Olympic bid, and superpower status on China.

In January 1970, Paula Scher met Seymour Chwast when she was a senior at the Tyler School of Art. They met through an interview at Push Pin Studios, arranged by an art director named Harris Lewine, where she took her portfolio to him. In 1973, she and Chwast married, and divorced five years later. They remarried in 1989. Scher and Chwast live and work in New York City.