Paula Scher

In 2012, Scher created a new logo for Windows 8 that takes the logo back to its roots as a window. The logo re-imagines their older four-colour symbol as a more modern geometric shape. Early in the development process, Scher asked Microsoft, "Your name is Windows. Why are you a flag?" Although Microsoft's original brand started as a window, its graphic evolved into a flag as computing systems became more powerful. As Scher assumed, the waving flag was most likely the result of comments that a plain window looked too static with severe straight lines. The old logo was flat and drawn in motion, while the new logo can convey actual motion by suggesting dimensionality using lines receding into space. This worked better with the brand, as the name Windows was originally used as a metaphor for seeing into screens.

In 2010, 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. Scher's festival promotional campaign focused on the reminiscent language in both plays by pulling lines from each production to meet in a dimensional expressive of words and typography. This campaign was awarded for Print Regional Design Annual 2011.

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 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.

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.

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.

Scher's Shakespeare in the Park campaign had become a seasonal tradition in the city. The identity has progressed over the years, and the Public Theater logo was redesigned in 2005 and 2008. The campaign in 2008 for the productions of Hamlet and Hair utilized the strict 90 degree angles of a De Stijl-inspired grid, a pattern in Manhattan's streetscape. The identity is like New York itself, constantly evolving.

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 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).

Based on the challenge to raise public awareness and attendance at the Public Theater along with trying to appeal to a more diverse demographic, Scher created a graphic language that reflected street typography and graffiti-like juxtaposition. In 1995, Scher and her Pentagram team created promotional campaigns for the Public Theater's production of Savion Glover's Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk that featured the wood typefaces used throughout The Public Theater's identity. Scher was inspired by Rob Ray Kelly's American Wood Types and the Victorian theater's poster when she created the cacophony of disparate wood typefaces, silhouetted photographs and bright flat colors for the theater's posters and billboard. Scher limited her colors to two or three while highlighted the play's title and theater logo that surrounded the tap artist in a typographical be-bop. The design was to appeal to a broad audience from the inner cities to the outer boroughs, especially those who hadn't been attracted to theater.

In 1994, 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.

In 1994, 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. This laid the foundation for the new overall identity and visual language that came to define the Public Theater for the rest of the decade and beyond. The designs for the Shakespeare in the Park campaign were seen across New York, including buses, subways, kiosks, and billboards.

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. As part of the anniversary campaign, the identity was redrawn using the font Akzidenz Grotesk. The word "theater" was dropped and emphasis was placed on the word "public". By 2008, the identity was even more definitive as it used a font called Knockout, created by Hoefler & Frere-Jones, which provided affordable and accessible productions.

In 1992, she became a design educator, teaching at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York. She received more than 300 awards from international design associations as well as a series of prizes from the American Institute of Graphic Design (AIGA), The Type Directors Club (NY), New York Art Directors Club and the Package Design Council. She is a select member of Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) and her work is included in the collections of New York Museum of Modern Art, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich and the Centre Georges Pompidou". As an artist she is known for her large-scale paintings of maps, covered with dense hand-painted labeling and information. She 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.

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

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.

She left Atlantic Records to work on her own in 1982. 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 didn't copy the early constructivist style but used its vocabulary of form on her works.

In 1972, she was hired by CBS Records to the advertising and promotions department. After two years, she left CBS Records to pursue a more creative endeavor at a competing label, Atlantic Records, where she became the art director, designing her first album covers. A year later Scher returned to CBS as an art director for the cover department. 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. (H.K)

Scher studied at the Tyler School of Art, in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1970.

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 Pushpin, 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.

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.

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.

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.