33 Facts About Paula Scher

Paula Scher was born on October 6,1948 and is an American graphic designer, painter and design educator.

Paula Scher served as the first female principal at Pentagram, which she joined in 1991.

Paula Scher started her career as an art director in the 1970s and early 1980s, gaining recognition for her eclectic approach to typography, which became highly influential.

Paula Scher moved to New York City and took her first job as a layout artist for Random House's children's book division.

Paula Scher is credited with reviving historical typefaces and design styles.

Paula Scher left Atlantic Records to work on her own in 1982.

Paula Scher developed a typographic solution based on Art Deco and Russian constructivism, which incorporated outmoded typefaces into her work.

In 1991, after the studio suffered from the recession and Koppel took the position of Creative Director at Esquire magazine, Paula Scher began consulting and joined Pentagram as a partner in the New York office.

Paula Scher received more than 300 awards from international design associations as well as a series of prizes from the American Institute of Graphic Design, The Type Directors Club, New York Art Directors Club and the Package Design Council.

Paula Scher has taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York for over two decades, along with positions at the Cooper Union, Yale University and the Tyler School of Art.

Paula Scher was interviewed for the 2007 Helvetica film where she discussed her dislike of Helvetica.

Paula Scher was profiled in the first season of the 2017 Netflix docu-series Abstract: The Art of Design.

In 1994, Paula Scher was the first designer to create a new identity and promotional graphics system for The Public Theater, a program that became the turning point of identity in designs that influence much of the graphic design created for theatrical promotion and for cultural institutions in general.

From 1993 to 2005, Scher worked closely with George C Wolfe, The Public's producer, and Oskar Eustis, who joined as artistic director during the fiftieth anniversary in 2005, on the development of posters, ads, and distinct identities.

In 1994, Paula Scher created the first poster campaign for the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park production of The Merry Wives of Windsor and Two Gentlemen of Verona, and was borrowed from the tradition of old-fashioned English theater style.

In 2010, Paula Scher designed the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park poster which presented powerful productions of The Winter's Tale and The Merchant of Venice, starring Al Pacino as Shylock.

Paula Scher designed a strong grid to uniform placement of images and types.

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.

Paula 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.

Paula Scher cropped the images of City Ballet dancers to create more tension and drama.

Paula Scher worked with associate designer Courtney Gooch to create the identity for Period Equity, a non-profit that is dedicated to providing affordable and safe access to menstrual products in the United States.

Paula Scher 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 Paula Scher saw Period Equity as less off-putting.

Paula Scher used the typeface New Rail Alphabet, designed by Margaret Calvert, for its neutral appearance, but replaced its square-edged punctuation with round.

In 2012, Paula Scher created a new logo for Windows 8 that takes the logo back to its roots as a window.

In 2001, Paula Scher designed environmental graphics and a large-scale typographic mural for the Cathedral House, a historic 1941 rectory building owned by New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, New Jersey.

Paula Scher enlarged these concepts into super-graphics that help define the interior spaces.

Paula Scher started painting geographic maps in late 1990s, gaining gallery representation a few years later.

Paula Scher exhibited and sold copies of her Maps paintings as screenprint reproductions.

The success of the 2006 show at Maya Stendhal Gallery led Paula Scher to produce silkscreened prints of The World painting that contained large-scale images of cities, states, and continents blanketed with place names and other information.

In 2007, Paula Scher created limited edition prints of her NYC Transit and Manhattan paintings, printed on Lanaquarelle watercolor paper, hand-made in the Vosges region of France.

Paula Scher portrayed the island of Manhattan as a busy destination crisscrossed by loopy, color-coded subway lines and stations, and included names of famous local neighborhoods.

In January 1970, Paula Scher met Seymour Chwast when she was a senior at the Tyler School of Art.