[0:14]I walk outside and I see topography everywhere.
[0:21]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.
[1:05]Paula Scher is the goddess of graphic design. Her stuff is everywhere.
[1:17]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.
[2:20]When I go to work every day, I feel like I'm navigating myself through a maze.
[2:34]Look at this, a real type book. Oh, can you bring this to Cortney? 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 them lower. It's very quick paced. You're really seeing something that looks like this. I'm solving things on scraps of paper, starting something, getting interrupted. The interruption is great. I like the way the icons also interrelate with the type. 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. Pentagram's a super group of the most famous designers in the world doing the best work in the world. They can all start team and Paula's the indispensable player on that team. That one's my favorite. So far, what you've done. We all have our own individual style, individual way of working. 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 email. You go through your junk mail, a lot of crap, and you throw it all out and 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.
[4:03]Oh, I love it like that. It's very slurpy. Don't you think? Ideas can be triggered by working with my team. I see more than I would see if I was just doing it all by myself. It's fantastic. Yeah, I think that you have to make girls and boys the same way with the exception of the, you know, pointy things. And then figure out how the other type intersects and then we got to 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 just putting this in some kind of a lost in shape. I think it'd be cool. So, give it a shot.
[4:58]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. One of the things at the time that was very challenging about the Public Theater, it had these multiple identities. It was the Public Theater. And then some people called it the Joseph Pap 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. It had to be populace. I knew it had to be New Yorkish, meaning it had to be loud and proud.
[5:42]I was flipping through one of my favorite books in American wood type. I like American wood type because it's powerful and it has many forms. On this particular page were these R's, 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.
[6:18]You can create an identity for a whole place based on a recognizability of type. 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 of the things that I think is really thrilling about it. Typography can create immense power. You're working with things that create character. You're working with weight. You're working with height.
[6:53]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'll look modern. If a font is heavy and bold, it may give you a feeling of immediacy. If a font is thin and has a seraph 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.
[7:40]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 a 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.
[8:20]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.
[8:43]I touched art supplies. The 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.
[9:23]I'm not making something designed to answer questions, it's more designed 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?
[10:08]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.
[10:27]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 turned into my paintings. That one has a period. I think they should have periods.
[11:00]Well, yeah, I think they're quite obsessive.
[11:05]It's the act of weaving little bits of information to make a bigger thing.
[11:17]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've ever had, the blunt cut, the Sassoon, the shag, the summer blonde, the platinum blonde, the street blonde, the reddish blonde, and no blonde. I didn't really fit in very well at high school. I mean, I was a person who went to art classes instead of going to the football game. You know, 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 Comix, underground newspapers and magazines and record covers, especially record covers. Those were the things that I really wanted to do. They spoke to me.
[12:50]I first became aware of Paula's name in high school in the seventies. 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. I was a kid with the best job in New York City. I had these recording artists and their managers and 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.
[13:34]Big recording artists were the things that 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.
[14:17]And then, of course, the monster illustration, Boston. 6 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. Guitarist shaped to spaceships, and they left the planet Earth and went up to the heavens.
[14:52]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 he must have hit a zeitgeist that was about to happen. But when I die, it will say design the Boston cover. And I've, 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.
[15:44]Over a period of four or five years, the typography came forward and the images moved to the back. I had made this radical shift and developed the way I would work for the next 30 years. I learned so much about typography and became known for it.
[16:12]Paula was always part of popular culture, but bringing a unique graphic design voice to that. Very much embodied in her use of typography.
[16:28]Ideas come all kinds of ways. I get my best ideas in taxi cabs, you know, like sitting in traffic, drooling.
[16:46]So that I can free associate. You have to be in a state of play to design. If you're not in the state of play, you can't make anything.
[17:09]Should really start like almost with that bar. You know, like if you drop it down about a 16th of an inch. And then when you put Pier on the end of it, it's really nice. 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.
[17:44]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. Like 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, and this is actually a more literal translation of the pier. And then it started to abstract and become opening.
[18:20]They have to exist in lots and lots of ways.
[18:27]I generally try to want to push something as far as it can be pushed. For me, that's the fun.
[18:42]I've started to trying to create a process in the identities I make where I go back and revisit them in 5 or 10 years because 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.
[19:00]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.
[19:12]When Paula did bringing the noise, bring the funk, it really signaled a paradigm shift, a new moment for the Public Theater.
[19:27]And I think what Paula did was she figured out a way how to take what she saw on stage and turned it into ink on paper. 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.
[19:52]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 the Noise, Bring in the Funk. Bring in the Noise, Bring in the Funk, really, really put her on the map.
[20:14]It was everywhere. And it was like, holy shit, you know, this is really good.
[20:21]It was awful because everybody began imitating it. It was like New York City ate the Public Theater's identity. It really in a matter of three to five years, it became the standard. It just made her crazy, you know, and she would be ranting around the office, you know, saying, can you believe they did this? 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 seraph typography, just to do something opposite to what I had done before. And I showed them to George Wolf. I was turning 50 at the time, and he said, okay, Paula's turning 50, let's have a year of depressing posters.
[21:04]I'm such a sure. Did I say that? She said, I said that. Let's just, let's just frame that.
[21:11]Okay, we're having soup. Soup with avocado. Oh wait. Me me, watch it. This is not for you.
[21:22]It's bean soup. Oh, a different design this time. Yeah, I put an extra country in. Things aren't going so well in Spain. What? Economy? I can tell, look. Oh, I thought you were telling me actual real news. The doggy, she's been amazingly well behaved. Yeah. Except for Mimi, who she attacks. The dog loves Paula and hates me. That's not true. Mimi really likes Seymour, but she jumps at him. Hugs you. She hugs you and she bites him. She jumps and bites him. I learned how to pronounce Seymour's last name in school. I thought it was, I thought it was funny. I thought it was a funny sounding name. But I thought Seymour was worse than Quast.
[22:10]It was a love story between Paula and Seymour. That's our Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton tale. Graphic designers love that story. 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 is a sensational designer. I thought his work was very funny. Some of it was exceedingly political. In the late '50s, Seymour founded Pushpin Studios with Milton Glaser and Ed Sorel. They developed a style of design and illustration that combined pop colors with and intellectual thinking.
[31:56]What are you looking to do now? I have an overall plan about how I 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. It was interesting as you see 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, you know, 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. 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?
