@odevisual
“Master conjurer of the instantly familiar.”
Zine for Paula Scher This is a zine about my design hero, I made this to honor her works that really inspire me. Also this is my first time of making an editorial design due to my uni project, so enjoy and hope you like the zine.
The Goddes of Graphic Design
Behance
About Paula Scher
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Paula’s Legacy
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Paula Scher is a GOAT
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Paula’s Awards
CONTENTS
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The Goddes of Graphic Design
ABOUT
Paula Scher
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WHO IS SHE? Get to know Before we get deeper into the zine, first for one of you who’s been sleeping under the rock, wake up! Let me introduce you to Paula Scher. She is one of the greatest female graphic designers in the world. She has a lot of fantastic works that made her so famous and influential. Paula Scher is popular in American contemporary design, she has worked to revolutionize the graphic design industry with the way she works and her style. She’s known as a Designer, Painter, and art educator in Design. Besides that, she’s also known as “The Goddes of Graphic Design”, that’s why that nickname I applied to the title of this Zine.
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“IT’S DONE IN A SECOND & 34 YEARS.” 5
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BACK TO ZERO She used to draw Paula Scher was born on October 6, 1948, in Washington, D.C. When she was a little girl she loves to make things, she used to drawing pictures to escape a turbulent home life or something that made her sad. When she was in high school she discovered that she has a very high IQ score called quantitative reasoning. It was the ability to synthesize a lot of information to become a conclusion.
She was the happiest when making things. In high school she was the school artist, she made a lot of poster events that she never went to them. In her Netflix documentary, she said that she was the person who went to art classes rather than football games. 6
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“I WAS TERRIFIED OF TYPE.”
This is Paula when she was in Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, USA.
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Design is her thing After high school, she went to college at Tyler School of Art in Pennsylvania, studying Illustration. In her Junior year, she found that Design is her thing and she was really into it. She wanted to be an Illustrator but she couldn’t draw very well also she had a problem with typography.
Stanislaw Zagorski Polish Illustrator & Designer
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Fell in love with Typography! When she was dealing with press type at that time the typeface that was available was Helvetica, she was struggling with Swiss-style typically on the grid. And then her teacher called Stainslaw Zagorski a Polish Illustrator said to her “Illustrate the type.” When she heard that, she realized that type had spirit and form, and then she fell in love with typography in a way that she didn’t expect to.
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AN ART DIRECTOR
Her first job She graduated from Tyler School of Art and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1970. After graduating she got a job in an advertising department at CBS, she learned about politics and many things in advertising. The art director at Atlantic Records saw her ads and liked them so they hire her to create both ads and record covers. After that, she got a job designing record covers at CBS records she became an art director where she made 150 covers a year. “I started that route at aged 22, and I had that big job at 25.”
“I was a kid with the best job in New York City.” Paula Scher
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PENTAGRAM Paula Scher at Pentagram Design
First female partner Fast forward to 1991 she joined the large design firm called Pentagram and it’s a design cooperative so there’s a benefit of a big company but everybody gets to act like they’re an Individual. When she joined Pentagram, she realized that Pentagram had an equivalent amount of men and it equalized her so the Idea of a woman handling a major
corporate account would seem less strange. In the mid-1990s she designed an Identity for the Public Theater then so many works that she did about corporate identities, branding, enviromental design and so much more. At the present, she still working on Pentagram and that being said she’s been working in that company for almost 30 years wow! 11
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Paula’s
LEGACY 12
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PAULA’S AMAZING WORKS
Paula has a lot of fantastic works, so in this chapter, I want to give you Paula Scher’s top 3 works of all time. This is purely in my opinion and it could be said that these works really inspired me to be who I’m right now.
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DESIGN IS M DESIGN IS M DESIGN IS M
MY CRACK MY CRACK MY CRACK
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ALBUM COVERS Art Director at CBS When she was an art director at CBS record in the ‘70s, she began designing album covers. The way she did combining illustrations, images, pictures, and typography on top of it. She made that the typography and with all those elements were connected. After she knew that typography has forms and spirit she made the album records were dominated by type and it became more important to her than the image because the type was the image.
“Especially record covers, those were the things that I really wanted to do.” Paula Scher
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Record Covers for many famous artist She had made many record covers for many famous artists, such as Bruce Springsteen, Cheap trick, Billy Joel, jazz artist Bob James’s label, and finally the Boston. The Boston cover was quite something for her because it sold 6 million copies in the first month’s sales. Paula Scher and her team brought the idea about futurism as the client requested, so she made the earth is blown away and the guitar is the spaceship. But she quite didn’t like it “The Boston Cover is dumb.”
The Spaceship of Boston Cover’s Album
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“I spent 3 hours in the record store, I stand and looked all the covers I’d be like wow I really like the way that covers looks. I turned it over and saw Paula Scher’s name over and over again.” Michael Beirut.
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IDENTITY& BRANDING Her first brand identity project To designing an Identity for a brand it has to be adaptive with time, and the goal is to stand the test of time. The way Paula sees designing identity systems has to resonate and represent something. The job is to traverse these different roads and try to get either an Individual or group of people to be able to see. Her graphic identities are well known, Public Theater, Citibank, Highline, Microsoft, Tiffany and Co and so much more!
Public Theater, Newyork City.
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The Famous Public Theater Do you know Public Theater? Well, the Public Theater, in my opinion, is the most her Iconic work of all time and the fantastic fact is she’s been designing the theater since 1994 wow! Her first project was creating an Identity for the theater because they had a name issue. The theater director George C. Wolfe said, “one thing that was really challenging was, Public Theater had multiple identities, it was Public Theater and some people called the Joseph Pub Public Theater I want everything to be a one and breathing fully as an institution.”
Public Theater Logo
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Very Unique! I think the logo of Public Theater is really iconic where she played with the weight of the typeface and pronounce it as Public. Also, Paula’s Inspiration is the American wood type because it has many forms and that’s why she used it to symbolize all of the city in New York with those different types of forms.
The rough sketch that she did for the logo.
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BRING IN DA NOISE BRING IN DA FUNK “When Paula did Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk, it really signaled a paradigm shift a new moment for the Public Theater.” Michael Beirut.
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The Poster Screams The posters were filled with words dominantly rather than images, and her typography style, made the poster screaming for attention and that poster became viral. The Public poster all the identities appeared all over New York City. After this campaign two and three years it became the standard, The Public’s typographic style appeared everywhere from layout to advertising shows. 23
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NOISE FUNK WAS FANTASTIC! 24
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26 YEARS Still Continue This was such a milestone for Paula Scher, that she was able to build dynamic identities for the Public and still speaks the same spirit with the same style until now. A lot of Public Theater posters that I saw on my phone and I really get influenced by them. 25 25
WORDS HA
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TYPE HAS
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AVE MEANING SPIRIT. Goddes of Graphic Design
Type doesn’t have to be this clean mechanical thing that it’s simply doing it’s job. It can be this marvelous thing to engange with
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The Masterpiece
CITIBANK LOGO The Masterpiece Paula Scher has made a lot of brand identity and branding systems,The study case that really caught my eye after the Public Theater is the Citibank logo when in 1998 Citibank and Travelers group merged to become the largest financial company in the world. They wanted a logo to represent the merger and what Paula did was pretty brilliant, because she combined the logo from those two companies and it became unexpected.
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How she made it The traveler’s insurance company had a red umbrella, Citibank had a type that was in italic form, and then she used the “t” form as a handle of an umbrella and put a line that represent the top of the umbrella. She mentioned that the logo was pretty simple but the process to get by it was
really complicated. There were so many meetings to make the logo became applicable to the brand because there were so many considerations to it. Her graphic identities for Citibank have become case studies for the contemporary regeneration of American brands.
Both of them are the owner of each company, and those are their logos before they merged.
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“To Design the logo is never really the hard part of the job. It’s persuading millions of people
TO USE IT.” The result of Citibank’s Logo that Paula’s made.
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AND MORE.. Not just the Citibank logo, there is so much more branding and identities system that she has done, there’s a high line logo that her idea is using H of the font for Highline and representing a railroad track so it became the symbol. She also did for Microsoft company when the
brief was, they wanted to change the windows icon, so Paula came with the idea of making the logo with perspective. There are so much more if you want to discover her works about branding and identity systems that are gonna inspire you a lot more! 31
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Paula Scher’s
PAINTED MAPS Paula Scher used to paint the font by hand when she was a young designer, and then when it became fully computerized in the late 90’s she felt a physical loss and made a big impact on her and she began painting colorful and typographic
maps in the 1990s. That’s why she started painting deliberately because it took a long time to accomplish. The Maps contain a lot of categories of the map, for instance, continents, countries, islands, oceans, cities, streets, and neighborhoods. 32
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Finding a Good Balance She painted the map because she got influenced by her father which was a photogrammetric engineer who worked on areal photography, that being said her father was a mapmaker. Many of her original paintings are huge as tall as 12 feet, so there’s a book of it called Maps. In my opinion, I really like how she balances between work in Pentagram as an Art Director and then she went back to her house and continuing her paintings. It created the balance between graphic design and pure art and I really love that idea.
Paula’s painted map when it was on exhibition.
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Paula Scher is a
GOAT 34 34
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“Paula Scher is the most
INFLUENTIAL
Woman Graphic Designer on the planet.” Ellen Lupton 35
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GAME CHANGER She has made a huge impact After I’m telling you about Paula Scher, the works that she has done, and then maybe there’s a question that appears in your head, why she’s so influential and powerful as a graphic designer? Well, personally I would say that Paula Scher has made a huge impact on the work that she’s been doing as a graphic designer. Cited on Pentagram’s website Paula Scher is one of the most influential graphic designers in the world, and she is described as the “Master conjurer of the instantly familiar.”
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Revolutionized Graphic Design If you see how she use her typography style and then when she applied it into brand Identity such as The Public, for instance, she has done what no one else has done before. Her works that are iconic, smart, and accessible have entered into the American vernacular. Her obsession with typography became a basis for visual language and the way she solve problems. She is able to make the type speak and
Some of Paula Scher artwork for the Public
really communicate the message by using her style, so there’s an insight that Typography is not always purely precision, on the grid and then you should make it so systematic. It means that you have to understand the basic first but it doesn’t mean that you couldn’t do more with it. If you could combine what you tryna to say and with some experimental then that’s gonna be spectacular! 37
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Revolutionized Brand Identity Not just in typography or visuals, Paula has developed identity and branding systems, promotional materials, environmental graphics, etc. Those things that she has done, were mind-blowing, she handled a lot of big company, and she able to make each of that logos has their own identity. She created identities that resonate and represent something, and if you are keen to know more about this you can check “Living, Breathing Brand Identities with Paula Scher” on Youtube. She was given a lecture on Adobe Creative Cloud 2020 about brand identities that she has done. Adobe creative cloud 2020, on Youtube.
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YOU HAVE TO GET BAD IN ORDER TO GET GOOD 39 39
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Her Spirit
INSPIRES She’s also a teacher Besides her fantastic artworks personally for me, her spirit and desire for what she’s doing inspire me a lot and I’m sure that a lot of people especially in the creative industry very look up to her. She loves sharing and teaching, you can find a lot of talk shows, podcasts, or even some articles that she shares her experience and life lessons in the field. She is also a teacher Paula has taught at the School of Visual Arts and has held teaching positions at Cooper Union, Yale University, and Tyler School of Art.
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That’s me!
My Design Hero There’s one video that really hits me and makes her became my Design hero, it was her Netflix documentary “Abstract: The Art of Design”. When I saw that video my mindset changed, the way I see graphic design also changed and it became my passion since then. Typography became my favorite aspect of graphic design, and it helped me became a better design
student. There was a time when Pentagram Design announce that they had a free webinar when there was a Paula Scher on that webinar, I immediately open the link and joined the webinar. It was the luckiest day of my life, cause I was able to listen to her live on my laptop and absorb what she taught on that webinar.
Abstract the Art of Design on Youtube.
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AWARDS She is a legend During her career, Paula Scher has got so many awards especially industry honors awards. I’m not gonna mention it one by one because believe me, she got so many awards. But some of that you need to know are, She is a recipient of the National Design Award, the AIGA Medal, the Type Directors Club Medal, and is a member of the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame. You can check Paula Scher’s profile on Pentagram’s website if you are keen to know more about it. Her work has been exhibited all over the world and in many museums like the Museum of Modern Art, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and so much more.
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I’m driven by the hope that
I HAVEN’T MADE MY BEST WORK YET.”
Pentagram Design, New York, USA. It’s where Paula is working until now
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“WHAT CAN I MAKE NEXT?” Paula Scher
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THE DESIGN The Design Style Actually the design style that I made for this Zine 70% inspired by Paula Scher’s work for new campaign of Public Theater. Didn’t mean to copy it, I just love this her design style on that and the colors are amazing. Also this Zine is about her, so I thought why not make something that really “Paula Scher” because I want to honor that. The funny thing is, I also learn to play with colors because I’ve been using black and white too much, damn. 47
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Modern collage
SURREALISM The Design Brief For the graphics element, my team got Surrealism for design genre. Because every students got different genre, depends on the team. When I was brainstorming, I came up with this modern surrealism style, because I want this style still match with Paula Scher’s spirit. So here we are, I would say it’s not that bad :) 48
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Website and Videos Videos from Youtube: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ54aG0q4WE&t=1748s] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCfBYE97rFk&t=1473s] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md3-EQh2-CY&t=10s] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWE3yBrTaZY] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrBTLw1yPBk&t=931s]
RESOURCES
Websites: [https://www.pentagram.com/about/paula-scher] [https://www.creativeboom.com/features/paula-scher/] [https://www.behance.net/PaulaScher] [https://www.pentagram.com/work/citibank] [https://www.pentagram.com/work/the-public-theater] [https://www.pentagram.com/news/paula-scher-maps]
So many Images For images, I’m so sorry because in this Zine contains a lot of them. But mostly the Images that I download are from Google Image and Unsplash.com, however if you keen to know the links of those images. There you go, I already compiled it info one Pdf Links: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AV4Gm6X_Gz-_sXxVzDpHJEHjW5Xmg68/ view?usp=sharing
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Behance