Paula Scher
 In Make in Bigger, Scher candidly reveals her thoughts on design practice, drawing on her own experiences as one of the leading designers in the United States, and possibly the most famous female graphic designer in the world. Pointed and funny, it is an instructive guide for all those who navigate the difficult path between clients, employees, corporate structures, artists, and design professionals. Make it Bigger provides a survey of Scher's groundbreaking work, from her designs as art director at Columbia Records, to her identity for New York's Public Theater, to her recent work for the New York Times, Herman Miller, and the American Museum of Natural History's Rose Center planetarium.
Paula Scher is a partner at the New York design firm Pentagram. She has served
as the president of the New York chapter of AIGA and in 2001 was honored with
the AIGA medal.
After I left CBS
Records, in 1982, Michael Vanderbyl invited me to lecture with some other designers
at the California Institute of Arts and Crafts. One of the speakers was Kathy
McCoy, who was then running the graphic-design program at Cranbrook. McCoy showed
work she had designed at Unimark in the sixties. The work was in the classic Swiss
international style that was popular at that time (and is now popular again).
She recounted how the greatest compliment one could pay any work was to say that
it was "really clean." Then she discussed Robert Venturi and company's 1972 treatise
Learning from Las Vegas. McCoy emphasized the breakthrough in this architect's
thinking and how it had affected graphic design in the subsequent decade. "Clean"
was no longer good enough; as a result, we were all becoming postmodernists. Postmodern
in this context meant employing some decorative graphic devices that may have
come from classical architecture or geometry, or the act of deconstructing typography
to alter meaning and create a more expressionistic layout. In the late sixties,
when I was in art school, I had not yet heard of Venturi. I had rebelled against
the Swiss international style because the act of organizing the Helvetica typeface
on a grid reminded me of cleaning up my room. Also I viewed Helvetica, the visual
language of corporations, as the establishment typeface and therefore somehow
responsible for the Vietnam War.
"Everything anyone ever needed to learn about graphic design was in those three
album covers."
My major influences in the sixties were Zigzag rolling papers and album covers,
particularly the Beatles' covers. Revolver is art nouveau-influenced; the illustrative
hair on the cover is drawn in the style of Aubrey Beardsley. I emulated the Revolver
cover for all of my Tyler School of Art illustration assignments. Sgt. Pepper,
my all-time favorite, inspired me because I kept finding more famous people and
hidden meanings in the imagery. Stylistically it fuses Victoriana and pop, but
what I liked most about it was the humor. The "White Album" is the ultimate in
high concept — only the Beatles could be that expressly arrogant. Everything
anyone ever needed to learn about graphic design was in those three album covers.
My other inspirations were Pushpin Studios, Victor Moscoso, and California psychedelia.
All of this influenced my work in the seventies, when my passion for eclectic
typography moved from Roman classicism through Victoriana, art nouveau, and art
deco — and finally to early modernism, constructivism, and all concoctions thereof.
I mostly employed historic typography to make some kind of point or to convey
a mood based on the subject matter of the records or books I was designing. This
was consistent with Pushpin's approach to design. Pushpin Studios brilliantly
married conceptual imagery (both illustration and photography) with eclectic,
often decorative typography. They did so to make a specific point or to tell a
joke. It seemed to me to be the most generous form of design. It told you what
you needed to know and entertained you at the same time. Seymour Chwast was my
hero. I met him when I was twenty-two and married him twice (the second marriage
worked).
"Graphic designers were the first postmodernists, not architects"
The McCoy lecture stunned me because it seemed to deny the existence of the Pushpin
form of eclecticism pre-Venturi. It ignored fifteen years of graphic-design culture.
Graphic designers were the first postmodernists, not architects; but when a famous
architect — in this case Venturi — was quoted, the design approach gained a
credibility that could not be attained by the work of graphic designers alone.
McCoy's was the first of many lectures I attended in the eighties in which there
was an apparent disconnect between theory and practice. Academic symposiums about
design in the eighties addressed such themes as semiotics, deconstruction, and
the vernacular as if designers worked in an ivory tower without the complex interaction
between client and designer. It led to the impression that design styles and methodologies
were hatched in art schools and then exported to the marketplace, where they were
purchased for mass production. Many academic symposiums were theoretically all
about process but never actually about the imperfect people who are the clients.
On the other hand, practitioner symposiums in the eighties were related to "business."
They discussed proposal writing, promotion, appropriate business attire, office
design, and other peripheral matters that were oriented toward appearance while
they ignored the true designer-client relationship, which is all about power,
personality, and human nature. It is the human factor — combustible client-designer
relationships coupled with marketplace accidents — that inevitably lead to the
visual gestalt of an era.
"...and the style wars had begun."
During this period a growing number of university design programs and an expanding
academic design community — together with a plethora of graphic-design publications,
annuals, conferences, and historic compendiums — made design style, in and of
itself, highly visible and important. Mainstream journalists, sophisticated laypeople,
and corporate marketers began using terms like postmodern, new wave, retro, and
punk to describe design styles. Marketing departments made demographic associations
based on these looks and styles, and through increased focus testing, began to
determine what specific products should look like in order to appeal to specific
audiences. Clients had become more style savvy — and the style wars had begun.
I quit my job as senior art director of CBS Records in 1982. I began freelancing
and was retained to design two developmental publications for Time Inc. One was
a lifestyle magazine called Quality, the other a human-relations publication called
Together. These new magazines were typical of publications produced then and now.
Most publications fall into two basic categories: coping and craving. Coping publications
tell you how to do something: make money, run your business, lower your cholesterol,
save your marriage, clean out your closet, lose weight, use a computer, or hire
a nanny. Craving publications tell you what you should want: what to buy, where
to travel, what to wear, what to look like, and what sort of lifestyle to have.
"Most publications fall into two categories: coping and
craving"
Coping magazines tend to have lots of instructional information. It is often completely
useless, but it looks didactic all the same. Graphic devices used in coping publications
are:
- side bars
- decorative headings (early 1980s: in boxes with or without drop shadows; late
1980s: no boxes, but perhaps underscores, overscores, sometimes with teeny halftone
photos; 1990s: lozenges)
- dingbats
- icons
- elaborately illustrated charts and graphs with inset photos that are silhouetted
and have drop shadows or spot illustration
Craving magazines tend toward big, splashy, dramatic layouts of photographs filled
with people, places, and stuff. At the time I took on Quality they needed:
- widely spaced type (later the opposite: big type in capitals with little spacing)
- layering
- out-of-focus photos, photos of people or places that look wet
- big drop caps or big words (later no drop caps or big words)
- textured backgrounds (later white space)
- rough devices, like photographic contact sheets or grease-pencil marks
The mannerisms of these types of publication informed all other forms of graphic
design in the eighties and nineties, and are now the visual language of annual
reports, brochures, books, packaging, and fashion advertising. Coping devices
leaped right off magazine pages and became the language of computer screens. Most
Web sites today owe their styling and organization to the coping magazines of
the eighties and early nineties.
My ideal magazine has always been the Esquire of the sixties, when George Lois
produced his powerful "big idea" covers, and the seventies, when Jean-Paul Goude
art-directed and contributed brilliant illustrations. By the eighties no mainstream
magazine resembled the Esquire of the sixties and seventies. New York magazine,
which successfully combined a highly packaged design format with conceptual or
journalistic illustration and photography, assumed the Esquire mantle and became
a role model first for all city magazines and then for weekly news publications.
(The New York format was the mother of all coping publications.)
"Milton Glaser took the masthead title design director"
When Milton Glaser created the format for New York with Walter Bernard, he took
on the masthead title "design director" because he had had a hand in shaping the
editorial content of the publication along with Clay Felker, the magazine's editor
in chief. Previously the highest art title on the typical magazine masthead was
art director, followed by assistant art director, designer, design assistant.
In the twenties and thirties, art directors were called art editors. The art editor
was responsible for the look and visual content of a magazine and had true editorial
status.
Glaser's "design director" title was misconstrued in the eighties. Rather than
understanding it to mean a leading position in the editorial process, magazine
editors determined that the most important contributions to be obtained from the
senior art employee or consultant were simply oversight of the format, packaging,
and style of a publication. This consisted of little more than the choice of appropriate
design devices and a methodology for purchasing and displaying necessary artwork.
Most editors were comfortable with formats that were similar to other publications
that existed in the same genre. This remains true even today. If I receive a call
from the editor of, say, a travel magazine, he or she will ask to see all the
other travel magazines I have designed. So coping magazines look like coping magazines,
and craving magazines look like craving magazines. And coping magazines about
money look like other coping magazines about money, and craving magazines about
home decorating look like other craving magazines about home decorating. Once
every five years a brave editor and publisher break the paradigm, and if they
prove successful, shortly thereafter other publications follow suit.
Once an editor is comfortable with a designed format, which is very often purchased
from an outside consultant, the editor feels confident that he or she can hire
an inexpensive art director (sometimes an assistant to the consultant) to execute
the magazine. The art director purchases the necessary photography and illustration
that fit into the spaces allotted by the format and shows the layouts to the editor
for comment and revision. He or she then obtains the necessary changes from the
illustrator, shows it to the editor again, and fills in the format. This creates
an insipid climate for magazine design. Magazine editors ("word people") assume
that designers ("art people") don't read and are only concerned with stupid things
like drop caps and hairline rules — the very things the editors are so anxious
to purchase.
"Ambiguity worked stylistically because it is apolitical
and noncommittal"
In the eighties, the age of Ronald Reagan, style triumphed over substance. I was
often retained as a publication "cover consultant" to help "design directors"
who did not have enough power to persuade their editors that a given solution
was appropriate. The entwined priorities of telling an entire story on the cover
yet not offending some faction of the magazine's readership made it almost impossible
to commission intelligent illustration or conceptual photography. Editors read
all kinds of mysterious things into imagery that were never intended. The big-image,
big-idea album covers I designed and art-directed in the seventies were impossible
to achieve in the eighties. The images that would be accepted with relative ease
tended to be nonspecific, impressionistic, blurry, or moody. Ambiguity, a postmodern
approach, worked stylistically because it is apolitical and noncommittal. It became
incredibly fashionable.
I began to discover that it was easier and less compromising to persuade editors
to rely on type treatments for subject matter that was cerebral in nature. Editors
were naturally more comfortable with words than with images and liked to be involved
in fairly arbitrary decisions like color choice. Most strong type treatments (if
they work in black-and-white) work in a plethora of color combinations, so when
an editor would indicate that he or she didn't like blue, green was possible.
It allowed for a controlled area of harmless input. I employed this practice in
all forms of design: poster design, book design, packaging, and sometimes advertising.
Illustrative typography became my trademark out of necessity.
"In the eighties design and style were confused"
Design is an art of planning. A problem is presented, a conceptual blueprint is
formed in response, a solution is achieved. Style is a matter of appearance —
the way something looks or feels. In the eighties design and style were confused
and conflated by the people who purchased design, by the design press, and finally
by designers and design educators. When I recall all the hot-button topics of
the eighties, I see that they are all about style: the personal typographic approaches
of Neville Brody and later David Carson; the deconstructed typography produced
at Cranbrook; the postmodern catalog of substyles: new wave, high-tech, retro,
and punk. They were commodities in competition with one another. They were purchased
and dealt out to demonstrate all things coping or craving. The planning aspect,
the conceptual aspect — the very thing Milton Glaser meant when he introduced
the term design director — was commandeered by product managers, marketing departments,
sales divisions, and editorial departments — by vast committees of people who
assumed that when they hired a designer they were purchasing style.
My least favorite clients in the eighties were advertising agencies. Mediocre
advertising agencies often wanted to be persuaded that they had the right "look"
for an ad campaign that had been preconceived by an art director. Sometimes the
agency wanted me to contribute logo designs for a pitch to a prospective client.
I found that working for agencies usually meant breaking every important rule
I learned at CBS Records. The art director who hired me was rarely a strong patron,
and there was never direct access to a key decision maker, because the agencies
simply would not allow it. My work had to pass through several layers of creative
directors before it would finally be presented on the client side. It rarely made
it there. The structure of advertising agencies creates a system of continually
selling up.
"I have a profound difficulty with how advertising agencies
make money."
I also have a profound difficulty with how advertising agencies make money. Profit
is made by retaining a percentage (17.65 percent is the standard industry rate)
of the money allotted by the client for purchasing advertising space. That means
that if the client purchases, say, a full-page, full-color ad in the New York
Times, the client will advance the roughly $100,000, for the purchase and the
agency will make $17,650 on the buy. If the client is purchasing lots of print
ads and television advertising, the amount of money becomes enormous. Copy and
design are thrown in for free. And if they're free, they're worthless. There is
nothing to defend or protect, no standard to bear, no paradigm to change, nothing
to elevate. There is no extra value in something intelligent or well crafted.
If the "creative" is thrown in for free, then all that has value is the media
space itself. If you take that thought to its logical conclusion, what fills the
media space is essentially irrelevant, as long as the client feels satisfied enough
to continue purchasing it. That creates a completely amoral design climate.
My favorite clients, other than design-related businesses, have always been entrepreneurs.
I like working with entrepreneurs because they create products, take risks, and
are prepared to make decisions. One or two entrepreneurs are better than three.
Three entrepreneurs are a committee, and all committees have power struggles.
I have never made a design presentation to three or more people of equal decision-making
power and had all three like the design equally. Usually there is one strong opinion
leader who rules and persuades the others. If two people have equally strong opinions,
there will be a power play for the third. The following dynamic is typical
- At the beginning of the meeting, expectations are high.
- The presentation is well received; it reaches the moment of highest appreciation.
- One person in the group raises a few concerns not addressed in the presentation;
another adds a few qualms and so on until the level of appreciation dips below
the initial starting point.
- The designer reiterates the initial presentation, addressing points in the expressed
concerns by proposing certain revisions. The sponsoring client reinforces this,
and the level of appreciation rises to a point lower than the initial high but
respectably above starting expectations.
- It is then time to end the meeting. If the meeting does not end, a counter rebuttal
may ensue, which will bring the appreciation level down to a new low point, and
the design will gradually become unsalvageable.
Here's another design-committee axiom: If the design presented is simple and contains
a limited amount of information and imagery, there are likely to be far more amendments
and revisions than if the presentation has a great deal of copy and conveys lots
of complicated information. This is because approval committees don't have the
discipline, patience, or fastidiousness to concentrate on the details of complicated
information. They can focus on anything reasonably simple, and will amend it until
all the interest and joy are removed or until they are out of time.
A correlative to this rule is that apparently simple jobs are rarely that. When
a client once tried to persuade me to cut my fee on a "simple" job, I told him
that I needed the money to pay for all the changes he was going to make. He insisted
that the project was uncomplicated and that there would be few revisions. I offered
him a deal: the design would be free, but every revision made — no matter how
minor — would cost a thousand dollars. He refused the deal.
"If you work with a dumb person with energy, therein lies
the seed of disaster."
George Lois had this to say about the personality types of collaborators, and
I have found it to be invariably true:
"There are smart people and dumb people. There are people who have energy and
people who are lazy. They exist in combinations. If you work with a smart person
with energy, that's your best collaborator. If you work with a smart person who's
lazy, well, that's a bit of a waste, but it does no harm. If you work with a dumb
person who's lazy, that's sad but not problematic, because they will simply be
ineffectual. But if you work with a dumb person with energy, therein lies the
seed of disaster."
By the late eighties I had begun to understand that the fact that something was
well designed, or even just well styled, was irrelevant if it was being presented
to a group that did not understand what they were looking at or were embroiled
in their own power struggles. I had begun to find it increasingly difficult to
control the quality of my work and to develop as a designer unless I was working
on a pro bono basis or for a minimal fee for a design organization or design-industry
client. This was depressing, because I believed that the whole point of graphic
design was to bring intelligence, wit, and a higher level of aesthetics to everyday
products, the articles of mass culture. I did not want to be an ivory tower designer;
I had little interest in theoretical exploration. My goals were to design things
that would get made, to elevate popular taste through practice, and to make graphic
breakthroughs on real projects.
I realized that my position in relationship to corporate committees with approval
power was essentially weak. I was not famous or considered a guru. My entire reputation
was within the design community, not in any specific business except possibly
in the entertainment industry — and my reputation there was getting weaker as
time went on. I was hired on most projects for nominal fees. Very often I would
be hired by a low-level marketing person who had to sell up. When my design failed
to make it through the bureaucratic gauntlet, I found that the project would be
reassigned to a large, powerful design firm for a large, powerful fee. I discovered
that clients tended to respect an opinion in direct proportion to what they paid
for it. The quality of the design was often irrelevant.
Most clients hired me based on previous work. That meant that if I tried to design
something in a new way, they were uncomfortable with it and generally forced me
to retreat to a previous solution. This made personal growth almost impossible.
The type of work I had gotten would be the type of work I would get, in subject
matter as well as in style; and as more design publications, books, and conferences
made styles readily available for adaptation, there were more designers to compete
with. Design and respect for design were devalued.
"Reinvention is personal growth."
The rapid growth of the design industry and the introduction of desktop publishing
in the eighties precipitated an equally rapid lifecycle for design styles. Designs
appeared dated in astonishingly short order. It was easy for a designer to be
considered ?good? by his peers for five years, harder for ten, nearly impossible
for fifteen. To maintain any creative longevity a designer today must reinvent
his or her work every five years. This does not mean simply changing style. It
means reassessing one's approach — again, design is an art of planning — and
finding a way that is new yet still reflects on one's core ethic and aesthetic.
This entails a reevaluation of one's visual vocabulary, new technologies, the
cultural zeitgeist, and the scale on which one works. Reinvention is personal
growth.
More history, criticism, and professional writing about design occurred in the
eighties than in any previous decade. Ironically that writing also breaks down
into those two basic categories, coping and craving. Coping design writing was
about professional style: dress, office design, and proposal crafting. Craving
writing was about design style: the myriad visual affectations that became popular
through postmodernism. Neither addressed the complicated symbiotic relationship
between designer and client. The designer was portrayed as either businessman
or artist, the latter made personal work, with the client as patron; the former
solved the clients' problems and made money. It seemed to me that there had to
be another alternative.
Excerpt from MAKE IT BIGGER by Paula Scher
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