A conversation with Pentagram partner and design legend Paula Scher. Interview by Patrick Mitchell & George Gendron

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Paula Scher isn’t really a “magazine person.”

But if you ever needed evidence of the value of what we like to call “magazine thinking,” look no further than Pentagram, the world’s most influential design firm. The studio boasts a roster of partners whose work is rooted in magazine design: Colin Forbes, David Hillman, Kit Hinrichs, Luke Hayman, DJ Stout, Abbott Miller, Matt Willey, and, yes, today’s guest.

Paula has been a Pentagram partner since 1991. She’s an Art Director’s Club Hall of Famer—and AIGA Medalist. She has shaped the visual landscape for iconic brands—Coca-Cola, Citibank, Tiffany, and Shake Shack—always with her instinctive understanding of how typography, design, and storytelling come together.

In other words, she plays the same game we do.

In 1993, Paula collaborated with Janet Froelich on a redesign of The New York Times Magazine and built a platform for pioneering editorial innovation that continues to this day. In 1995, she helped me decode Fast Company’s editorial mission, in her own distinctively reductive way: “It’s about the ideas, not the people,” she said. It was a game-changer.

But Paula isn’t just a design legend—she’s also a complete badass.

Starting out at a time when the industry was still predominantly male, Paula carved out space for herself by fighting for it. Her work at CBS and Atlantic Records redefined album cover design. Later, her rebranding for cultural institutions like The Public Theater and the Museum of Modern Art helped cement the importance of an unforgettable identity system for any organization.

And, as a longtime educator at New York’s School of Visual Arts, Paula has molded generations of designers who have gone on to shape the industry in their own ways—including our very own Debra Bishop.

We spoke to Paula upon the launch of her new, 500-plus page monograph, Paula Scher: Works.

**Scher’s new monograph weighs in at over 500 pages**

“In every profession, there are probably two different types of egos, and one of them is a cape wearer, and the other one isn’t.”

Patrick Mitchell: All right, well, so speaking of your book, I understand there’s a lesson you learned from Salvador Dalí, and I wonder if you would share that with us.

Paula Scher: When I was very young and I worked at CBS Records I used to take a subway up 3rd Avenue to get to work. And I’d walk across Park Avenue every morning to get down to CBS, which was on 52nd Street and 6th Avenue. So it was a long walk across town.

And one day I was on the corner of Park Avenue and 52nd Street, and I saw this man wearing a giant cape across the street and he had a mustache. And he looked very familiar to me. And then I recognized him and I realized it was Salvador Dalí. And I must have broken into a really big smile because he took his cape by his hand and flung it around in front of me, almost like a bullfighter, and bowed.

And, you know, he pulled it off because he was graceful. And he was completely self confident in doing that, and he knew he was a star. So from that moment on, I knew that in every profession, there are probably two different types of egos, and one of them is a cape wearer, and the other one isn’t. And that was my lesson from that.

Patrick Mitchell: Well, it seems like it’s influenced your career moving forward, especially when it comes to choosing Pentagram partners, right? There’s cape wearers and there’s non-cape wearers. Do you have those at Pentagram?

Paula Scher: You can’t. They won’t succeed. I mean, the thing is that they’ll always think they know better. They’ll always want to run everything. They’ll always have opinions on things and tell other people how to do it, even though they probably wouldn’t follow through. And Pentagram partners are people who are terrific at what they do. But they don’t mind being in a group and they don’t mind sharing.

Patrick Mitchell: How do you become a Pentagram partner? When does Pentagram decide it needs a partner, and then how do you go about finding that partner?

Paula Scher: A lot of it is social. For example, it’s funny because the partner who brought me in was Woody Pirtle, who died this past week. And I met him when I was on the board of AIGA as a very young designer. I think it was either 1979 or 1980, and he had just gotten on the board also.

And at that point in time, he knew my work because I was a record cover designer and the things were in shows. And I knew his work because he was the star of the land. You know, I mean, to me, there was Push Pin before him, but then there was Woody Pirtle. And he actually balanced Push Pin and modernism in this terrific way in his work. And I think he was the designer that made most of the United States aware of design.

Like if you ask somebody who comes out of the Midwest to name a logo, they would have named the “hair” logo, you know, that comb with the word ‘hair’ in it. I mean, he created icons. And he had left Texas and he had moved to New York. And Colin Forbes, who was the founder of Pentagram, had moved to New York City. And he had a partner named Peter Harrison, who is British, and he wanted to make it a New York office.

So the office grew by virtue of Colin at that point in time, since he was fairly alone in the situation, deciding how this thing would become an American office and not an outpost of Europe. So he invited Woody to join. And it took him a long time. I think Woody turned him down a couple times. And then Woody actually joined the partnership in 1988, and he asked me if I wanted to join, and he asked Michael Beirut if he wanted to join.

So he began to really forge what became the American office of Pentagram, because there were more New Yorkers in it. It was a New York office, and it became localized, and we began getting work that was from New York. I started designing the Public Theater in 1994, and I think around the same time Michael did BAM [Brooklyn Academy of Music]. So we were doing work that was very New York-centric, and that attracted other people.

So the people who were attracted to it, if you admired them, you would discover them at some kind of social event, usually tied to AIGA which was very active at that time, and you would determine that you were kind of like-minded in your interest in your work and your interest in other people.

And that has not changed in all the 35 years I’ve been a partner. It is how we grow. We find somebody, we meet somebody, we admire their work, we like the person. And my partner, Peter Harrison, once said, “If you like the person and you like their work, the money will follow.”

Patrick Mitchell: The Pentagram model is not about bandwidth, right? Because each partner brings in their own work. So it’s not about covering work. It’s really more about influence, right?

Paula Scher: It’s all about influence. We want to be profitable. We talk about new business all the time. And the industry has changed a lot, so some of the conversations are different from 10 or 20 years ago, largely because the advertising agency is competing with design. And they put in rules that are advertising agency rules.

In other words, the things that an advertising agency does is advertise a product or service that already exists. What a design firm does, if they’re identity designers, they’re designing things usually that either are changing or haven’t existed. As Paul Rand said, “Design is an ambassador for a product or service.”

George Gendron: Were you surprised when you got the call from Pentagram?

Paula Scher: Woody called me up and invited me to lunch. And I found that surprising. Not because he invited me to lunch, because I could run into him and he’d say, “Let’s have lunch.” But it wasn’t like that. He called me—it was a formal call—and he invited me to lunch. And I went, “What’s going on here?”

And also my partner, Terry Koppel, and I had split up at that point. He was a magazine designer and this was during one of the worst recessions, it was the first Bush administration. And Terry lost all his magazine business and was not getting any billing, so he took a job at Esquire. And I was left running the business with a bunch of my students.

And the call came in, I guess, it must have been 1989. Michael Beirut got the call at the same time. He joined in 1990 because it took, kind of, a year to do that, and he had to get out of Vignelli, so he joined more quickly because he had to leave. I, on the other hand, had to close down a business. So I didn’t join until 1991.

Patrick Mitchell: Did you bring clients with you?

Paula Scher: Well, I had all these book jackets. And I worked for Champion Papers. I had done all these sorts of promotional pieces for Champion. They were things that were about typefaces and collections for designers. Like there was one that was a series of alphabets. And there was another one called Dingbats, which were all like little icons. You may remember them. They were sort of collected.

But I didn’t have high-paying clients. The only real identity I think I did, except for small little things, was for a Swedish candy company called Öola. And the designer who worked on that job was Debra Bishop, who was my student.

Patrick Mitchell: What’s interesting though—we’re not going to try to shoehorn this into a big magazine conversation—but you mentioned Deb and I was thinking about at least three that I know of—of your sort of newer partners—are all from magazine backgrounds: Luke Hayman, DJ Stout, and now Matt Willey. What does that say about—you know, we have bandied about this term “magazine thinking”—but what do you think it is about people who make magazines and how they think about the kind of work Pentagram does?

Paula Scher: Well, David Hillman was one of the best magazine designers of all time. He was a Pentagram partner for years. I mean, if you see the Pentagram book—you know, we had a 50th anniversary, which is unheard of in a privately owned design firm. They don’t last 50 years. But Pentagram lasts because of the partners.

David Hillman definitely had an editorial background. And so did John McConnell. John McConnell was doing publishing. He did all the Faber & Faber books. It was already embedded in the partnership when we joined. Alan Fletcher was an editorial designer, as well as a person who could illustrate. And also the boundaries weren’t that tight.

I thought when I left CBS Records, I wanted to design magazines. I worked in Time magazine development. The formats are different, but the thinking is the same. You’re explaining something. You’re telling stories. You’re making somebody interested in looking at it. You’re doing all of those things as a designer. It doesn’t matter if you’re designing a logo, a package, or a magazine, or a book—or even the interior of a building.

Squint your eyes and you can almost see magazine covers: Scher’s legendary work for The Public Theater.

Patrick Mitchell: Or the exterior.

Paula Scher: Or the exterior!

Patrick Mitchell: How is a building like a piece of paper?

Paula Scher: It’s a wall. I always found that environmental graphics had a lot to do with, like, tables of contents. And also package design. You’re walking somebody through a space, you’re giving them a narrative through it, you’re telling them where they’re going. You want it to work functionally and beautifully within a specific design space.

What’s changing is the timeframe and the materials. Sometimes it’s storytelling. When I did Scholastic—Scholastic was a children’s book publisher, and we made giant children’s book illustrations on the walls and you walked through it. It was like walking through a book. It was very editorial.

George Gendron: I’m curious about, within the context of Pentagram these days, obviously, how do you choose the people you want to work with on a particular project?

Paula Scher: Well, it isn’t quite like that. There are teams that collaborate that like to collaborate on certain kinds of work. And our billing structure is such that there has to be a very big budget on those jobs. Or no budget, and you’ve both determined to do it more or less pro bono.

Because if you have a project that doesn’t have a very large budget, and you share it with somebody, then you’re not reporting it. So the financial structure—because the partners all report their billings as part of the system, and nobody wants to be the lowest person.

So the likelihood is that they’ll structure it in such a way that if they have a job and it’s not terribly lucrative, they’re keeping it. On the other hand, the staff is dedicated to each partner. In other words, you pick your team. So I would say nearly a hundred percent of my work, I can’t think of an instance where it hasn’t really been a collaboration between me and my team.

Patrick Mitchell: And how do you pick them?

George Gendron: Can you describe who’s on the team and kind of what makes for a good team here?

Paula Scher: Well, I have three key players. The others, who come and go, are more interchangeable. And sometimes they’re just freelancers. But my project manager [Olivia] is absolutely necessary because there’s so many different things going on in so many ways.

We have to do accounting, and meetings with clients, and organization with my speaking and travel, and everything else that relates to a job, and my client relationships. She’s key and pivotal and, you know, she writes all my proposals. She is in every introductory meeting. Patrick dealt with her. Everybody deals with her. She’s great. And she runs my life.

And I think that’s equivalent on every team. That without that key person there to be the managerial person of the sort of craziness that ensues around it, you’re lost. I have a senior associate. She was my student 10 or 11 years ago at SVA. She interned with me at Pentagram for a year or two, and I sent her down to The Public Theater to be the in-house art director.

You know, I would design the look of the season, and then they would have lots of little communications they would have to do, like Joe’s Pub or all the individual theaters stuff that was going on, and she ran and did that. And then she left, and she went to work for an organization called The Wing—that my partner, Emily Oberman, designed—and they ended up laying everybody off during COVID. There was some scandal and everybody got fired.

So during COVID, I had a team set up and one person got hired away by Apple, Jeff Close, for huge amounts of money, which infuriated me. And then my other associate, Rory Simms, who was a combination of a 3D designer and an identity designer—he really could work both camps. He left to join my former associate in their own business. So they were running a business together.

And I was left in COVID without a senior person. And it was just scary. I still had two members of my team, but they were more junior. They were good and they were on their way up, but they were more junior. So I was really scared about what to do. And then I found out that Kirstin was laid off. So I hired her back and she’s been, she’s been back since COVID.

She’s terrific. She works on virtually every major identity I design. And then there are other people who work on signage. And the signage work goes on for longer periods of time, but there’s less new work in that capacity because it takes four or five years to complete one of those projects.

George Gendron: Speaking of COVID, Paula, what was it like when you and Seymour had to share an apartment and work out of the same place during COVID?

Paula Scher: We didn’t share an apartment. We lived in our big house up in Salisbury, Connecticut. And he has his own studio and I have my own painting studio upstairs. I painted a Porsche during COVID. That was a commission I got during COVID. This guy from Munich wanted me to paint a map on his 1977 Porsche. So I did. I actually have a video of it. We documented the painting.

George Gendron: What was the map of?

Paula Scher: It was a map of the United States on top of a German car. It’s actually on display. If you go to Munich, it’ll be open till May. The show opened—it’s not really a retrospective show, it was just a show about my work. And it was in a museum called the Alte Pinakothek, which is in Munich. It’s part of a museum system. They have three different branches of it. They have the one, der Alte, which has Hans Holbein paintings in it and things like that. And then they have a Moderne and that has contemporary artists. And then they have Sammlung, which is their design museum—it’s sort of like the Cooper Hewitt.

And they gave me an incredible space that had 35-foot ceilings. And I could design it any way I wanted. So I designed the exhibit and they didn’t want to have the car. And they didn’t want to have the car because it’s a design museum and they have other cars. And their cars are more interesting than the Porsches.

So then the collector was sort of upset that his car was rejected and I was still designing the exhibit and I had to do something about the floor. So I covered the floor with a kind of paper linoleum that had a map of Munich on it. And they saw the map on the floor and they said, “Well, then we need the car.” So the car got back into the exhibit.

**Scher’s Public Theater branding continues to evolve.**

George Gendron: Wow. You’re still a sassy broad, aren’t you?

Paula Scher: Yeah, I guess so. Fading with age.

George Gendron: I think Pentagram posted a video of part of that show, right?

Paula Scher: Yeah. Yeah, the show was posted. Also, the car was posted. I mean, it really is fun, because it took me a year-and-a-half to paint the thing, so you actually see the seasons change—like my hair’s up, you see my shoulders sticking out, I’m under the car, I’m around the cars. It’s very funny.

Patrick Mitchell: Back to your team. So, how does someone get on your radar and how do you size them up and how do you decide who to pull the trigger on?

Paula Scher: Well, everything is sort of trial and error. I mean, there’s no surefire way. I certainly can’t tell anything from a resume. I look at somebody’s work online, but I’m always a little mystified by it because I don’t know exactly what they did themselves and what somebody else instructed them to do.

Most of the people that have worked for me, historically, either they worked for me or they worked for somebody I knew well, who knew I would get along with them. Or I had them by accident. You know, like I hire some intern and the intern just grows into the position.

You know, like Rory Simms, who was the person who could work on both 3D and graphic design, came from Ireland. And he wanted an internship at Pentagram, and he had a friend who was working for Eddie Opara. And Eddie said, “Hey Ken has some friend—can you try him out?”

And I tried him out, and he was a perfectly great intern. And then I made him a junior designer, and then I made him a senior designer, and then he was an associate. You know, that’s the way that goes. And, you know, I’ve had some that have come and been useless and … goodbye!

I think everybody has some of that experience. There’s no formula for it. You have to like the person and you have to like their work. That’s all. If you don’t like the person, it doesn’t matter how good their work is, because it’s going to irritate you. If you don’t like their work, that’s a problem, too. It’s the middle that’s the trouble.

“Pentagram partners are people who are terrific at what they do. But they don’t mind being in a group and they don’t mind sharing.”

Patrick Mitchell: Has anybody ever graduated from being on a partner’s team to becoming a partner?

Paula Scher: Yeah, two people. Michael Gericke, who worked for Colin Forbes, he was an associate who became a partner. And Andrea (Trabucco-Campos), our newest partner. He worked for Luke Hayman.

Patrick Mitchell: So there is a dream.

Paula Scher: Yep. It’s possible. It’s rare, but it’s possible.

George Gendron: Does it ever happen that a partner just doesn’t work out?

Paula Scher: Oh yeah. That’s not so much fun.

Patrick Mitchell: What happens?

Paula Scher: Avoidance. Nobody wants to deal with it, you know. It’s very, very difficult.

Patrick Mitchell: Can you un-partner?

Paula Scher: Well, I’m trying to think about how we’ve done that. Yeah, we’ve unpartnered. We’ve unpartnered. They read the writing on the wall, you know. I think that what’s very uncomfortable is that I felt, in almost all of the situations, that they should have been talked to directly at a specific point. But it’s a mostly male business and nobody feels comfortable doing that.

Patrick Mitchell: Because men can’t do it?

Paula Scher: Because men can’t be direct. I don’t want to do it. I would if I had to, but you know, nobody wants to do it.

George Gendron: Of course not. And in fact I can imagine, maybe I’m reading too much into this, but when you and Terry Koppel had your design studio I was thinking about the fact that I don’t think I know a single creative who really enjoys running the studio part of it. I was thinking about employees and how people like the idea of employees, but they don’t really like employees because it’s time taken away from the work. And so I’ve got to imagine, part of the appeal of Pentagram is that you’ve got this infrastructure behind you.

Paula Scher: That’s true. It’s a pre-designed business. It has real rules to it. It was designed pretty much by Colin Forbes and some of the founding partners. I mean, Colin got so specific with it that at one point he created a financial situation that he based on what happens when three roommates are using the milk in the refrigerator. How do you figure out who took the most and how much they’ve got to pay for the milk?

But it really sort of comes back to something like that. And he did amazing things. Like we’ve been serving lunch since long before it was fashionable to serve lunch. And it was because Pentagram in London moved to a neighborhood where the building was inexpensive, the rent was cheap. But the neighborhood was crappy because there weren’t any restaurants around.

So the staff would go out for lunch and they’d take an hour-and-a-half, you know, because they had to get there, and then they had to eat it, and then they had to get back. So what Colin did is he took the amount of staff and amortized it against the cost of finding a cook, and having the cook make lunch every day, and discovered it was cheaper to have the cook if you took the hourly rates and you looked at it that way. Because that’s the way his mind worked.

But we’ve had a cook ever since and no one would ever take it away. I mean, it’s not that we’re not that generous. It’s that they go up, they eat for 20 minutes, have a nice time together and get back to their work, which is great. And it actually makes the place really happy. We hire really good cooks, too. The lunches are fantastic.

Patrick Mitchell: So you moved to a new space on—what was it, 25th? On the park there.

Paula Scher: It was on 20th Street across from Madison Square Park.

Patrick Mitchell: Yeah. But now you’ve got space galore.

Paula Scher: Well, the other place was a confined building. We loved that space. You know, it was four floors. It was just great. And this space, there’s plenty of space, but it’s a little soulless. And I think we made some design mistakes when we laid it out, because we thought it’d be great to have all the designers together, and then the partners were upstairs, and our conference rooms, and the lunch area.

But really, it was better with the teams split up, because there’s so many designers sitting downstairs that it’s overwhelming, and it’s hard to know what team they’re on, or learn their names, you know. And I really used to know much more of the staff in the other space because I would say, “Oh, that’s Emily’s team,” or “That’s Natasha’s team,” or “That's Luke’s team.” And I would kind of know them in relationship to the partner.

Patrick Mitchell: I want to go back to what you were talking about—it’s interesting that you sort of made the art of confrontation a gender issue. But when I think about it, it really is. I would say you, as much as you’re known for your design skill and for your design reputation, I think probably the more immediate trait that people know about is you’re just so incredibly decisive. And I think why that resonates with so many people is because … we’re not. And we just aspire to that. But I wonder—I think I want to go at this from a few different angles—I want to know where it comes from. I mean, we always give our parents credit for that kind of thing. So let’s start there. Where does that come from? Was that something in your DNA, or was that something you learned from experience and dealing with people you didn’t like dealing with?

Paula Scher: I’m not totally sure about this. Because you don’t get born decisive, but I had … not a great childhood—not a very good relationship with my mother. She always wanted me to look a certain way, and dress a certain way, and behave a certain way. And she was exceedingly critical. And I had to defend myself. So, you know, I would take my position and I would stick to my position.

And I wanted to go to art school and nobody thought—they didn’t think I would succeed. They thought, “Well, why don’t you go to the University of Maryland and be a school teacher? You can teach art.” You know, that sort of thing. And,you know, I had to be firm about defending myself to allow myself to do the things I wanted to do.

I love this memory of this guy I had for basic design at Tyler School of Art. His name was Bob Stein. He was a modernist. He taught graphic design and sort of a Basel-type method, where you took a black square and you moved it around the white page, you know, to see tension and blah, blah, blah. And I never could figure it out—on top of which I was incredibly sloppy.

And this is back in the days when you put rubber cement on the back of something to glue it down, you know, and the rubber cement would be all sorts of bubbly and little crumbly things around the corner, and the things would—anyway, this guy thought I was just terrible. And he said to me when I had my review, he said, “Why are you here?”

And I said, “I want to be an artist.”

And he said, “Cooking is an art.” You know, just about the most sexist thing you can say to some woman who wants to do this thing. And I never forgot it.

But when I became a record cover art director and my work started being published, I got this call from him inviting me to come down to Philadelphia to give a lecture to his class. And I was totally amused because this is the guy who just thought I had no talent.

So I went down there and he was so gracious. He said he wanted to introduce me. And he said, “I can take absolutely no credit for her success.” And that was his introduction. It was really sweet. It was very nice.

But I think that the fighting built within me a certain kind of self confidence about the decisions I wanted to make for myself. So I became confident about the decisions I wanted to make for my work.

Patrick Mitchell: It’s interesting, in the context of young Paula—Gladys’s daughter—that would be described as bratty and stubborn, right? And as an adult, it’s a powerful tool and something that people admire. You started your professional career at a time when women weren’t treated as well as they are now—although they’re still not treated as well as they should be. How did your superpower do for you in those times? Did you ever have, like, really bad confrontations with men?

Paula Scher: Oh yeah. There was sexism all over the place. And you know, rude, you know, grabbing, you know, stuff like that. I mean, this was the seventies. And I think about it—I mean, I had married and divorced Seymour during that period also.

I met him when I was still at Tyler, and we started dating in the early seventies. We got married for—I think we were married for five years and split up. And I was really too young to marry him at that time, but I remember what my life was like at CBS records with that. And there was nothing to do but have a sense of humor about it. If you pushed back or you tried to be moralistic about it, it would backfire in your face.

It was sex, drugs, and rock and roll. That was the home of where I was working. And I developed a really good, strong sense of humor. And I used it on people I work with. I used it with my clients who were the artists that I was making covers for. And I got good at it. That’s where I really learned how to present and sell, to a degree. It changed later. I had to relearn it for identity-type work and work with corporations. But I really learned how to work with those guys.

Early in her career, Scher designed album covers for CBS and Atlantic Records.

“I want to do things that people see and interact with and I want to do things that I haven’t designed before.”

George Gendron: I want to go back to Pentagram, not so much about how the place functions, but something that Pat and I are both really interested in, for someone of your stature, whose opinion matters the most to you in terms of response to your work?

Paula Scher: The people whose work I like the best.

Patrick Mitchell: Are you naming names? Who’s your favorite partner? Say it! Say it now for the record!

Paula Scher: Well, I mean, there are different favorites. And there are different people I admire, and for different reasons. My longest partner whom I cherish is Michael Beirut. We’ve been partners for 35 years.

George Gendron: What is it about, Michael?

Paula Scher: He’s brilliant.

George Gendron: Okay. Explain.

Paula Scher: Michael has amazing talents. His design is exceedingly elegant, always smart, sometimes irreverent when it needs to be. But he is also a master of explanation. He can explain to almost anybody why something is going to work for them and why it’s going to be terrific. And he does it in a very generous way.

And some of it is his ability to inherently empathize with what the other person knows so that he sort of gears the conversation to be able to explain something that the person wouldn’t naturally understand without being demeaning or sounding like he’s talking down to them.

It is an extraordinary talent when you see him in interaction. And he can switch, you know, if he meets a guy who’s like a baseball fan, he’ll use baseball analogies—you know what I mean? It is, it is magic.

George Gendron: I’ve always thought of him as somebody who has this almost unlimited capacity to talk about design to non-designers—

Paula Scher: Right.

George Gendron: —In a way that is unbelievably engaging and not the least bit condescending.

Paula Scher: No. But when I first joined, and I’ve told this story a few times so forgive me if you’ve already heard it, but the first thing I really saw Michael design and present—and this is way before computers—was a packaging system for a company that I think came out of Tennessee, and they were making some kind of pre-computer electronic device. And he was packaging it.

And what his packaging did, which was not a new idea, was to make the box itself a manual, and print the information about what the product was on the outside of the box. So he had to show two versions of it, and the versions were just two different type choices. So one version was Helvetica, and the other version was Times Roman.

And he had the boxes piled up, and you could see that one had a Serif font, and one had a Sans Serif font. There’s nothing interesting about this, except there were little signs that were leaning up against each set, and one set says, “This series of boxes has the typeface Helvetica. It is a Sans Serif font. It doesn’t have the little feet.” And then the other one said the same thing and it said, “It has the little feet.”

And when I first saw it, I just started laughing because it seemed so dumb. But then I realized it was brilliant. Because he knew a group of people were coming and he was showing typography and that they didn’t have enough knowledge to notice what the difference was between the choices.

And people became much more sophisticated because of the computer. So many ordinary people have become aware of typefaces, but back at that period of time—and that had to be 1991 or 1992—he’s doing this thing. And they ask questions about it. Which one do you think is the best one? You know, they got into the conversation about typography that they probably never had.

George Gendron: Speaking of typography, you’ve worked with so many different typefaces, in so many different contexts, have you ever been tempted to design your own?

Paula Scher: We are doing it now. We’ve been doing it this past year. We designed every font that we used on anything. Because I sent my team to Type@Cooper. They do wonderful courses on drawing typography and how to work with the software to create fonts and to program them. And we’ve been doing that. And it’s so much fun. We’ve had a great time with it.

George Gendron: Is this for a particular project?

Paula Scher: I had worked on a new identity for Adobe before COVID that didn’t get made. And I worked with a type designer, and I’m sorry I’m blanking on his name right now, but the guy was terrific. And he taught courses at Type@Cooper and I thought this would be great for everybody on my team.

So I was sending even before COVID a couple of people took the course. But the equipment got better and the knowledge base got better. And I just, if somebody comes and works for me, even if they’re an intern or freelancer, I’ll send them there.

Because if you have an eye and you can understand the form—if you can understand how the form has to be consistent, yet different for each character. If you can emotionally understand that, you can develop typefaces and program them.

Patrick Mitchell: But these ultimately become the property of the client and they keep them in house.

Paula Scher: Absolutely. I’m not in the type business. That’s not what I’m doing. We’re not selling it. Matt sells his fonts. He’s been doing that for a while. He was doing that while he was at the Times. I don’t really have any interest in doing that. I’m interested in the proprietary aspect of it for a specific client that they own it. And also what we’ve been doing is trying to control use, because my biggest frustration with the identities I design, even if we make a very explicit manual, is that somebody always screws it up.

You know, like the cultural institution or the corporation doesn’t really know how to hire, and they’re not coming back to get the recommendation, so somebody takes something and it just doesn’t look anything like it’s supposed to look.

So we did this version—this is the first time I’ve done this—and the person hasn’t been hired yet who’s going to do it, but we designed a manual with the type accompanying it for the Memphis Art Museum, which is called MAM. And it’s got these extending and contracting Ms and things like that.

And we did all kinds of crazy stuff with it, but we are afraid of anybody else doing too crazy a thing with it. So we've sort of limited what it’ll do in the program that we made. Which was deliberate. You know, it was a way of trying to keep the thing sane.

Patrick Mitchell: You did a book called Make It Bigger—which inspired everybody—and I made everything bigger immediately. I didn’t even read the book. I just read the title and I was like, “Okay!” But let’s talk about big projects versus small projects. Everybody knows your massive projects, but do you have some special smaller projects that you’re passionate about?

Paula Scher: Well, I love working on cultural identities. Some of them are for small places.

Patrick Mitchell: What do you mean “cultural identity”?

Paula Scher: Art museums, small opera companies, the Atlantic Theater Company, as well as the Public Theater—the Public Theater is big because it's funded in a large way. And it has a lot of different theaters. And they do Shakespeare in the Park, so everybody knows it.

The Atlantic Theater actually does better on Broadway. They’ve made a lot of plays that have gone to Broadway that have been tremendously successful, but they’re really small theater groups. They have a very small theater.

And you know, working for art museums is terrific. All cultural identities, they’re all not for profit, so they don’t have any money unless you’re doing Broadway. And I never had success with that.

Patrick Mitchell: So how do you decide? I mean, you’ve got to cover your overhead, but you are at a place in your career where you should be able to work on what you love. So how do you calculate that?

Paula Scher: It doesn’t always work that way. But I try to get a couple of big-paying projects in the course of a year and then get a lot of little ones. And do the little ones fast. What’s holding me up is I’m having a hard time with my clients, getting the little ones to move. They’re acting like big ones, you know, even though they’re not paying very much money, they don’t make decisions. They got too many people on the team.

Scher has had a lifelong passion for maps: “I’m a driving nut. I’m always looking for a new shortcut nobody’s discovered.”

Patrick Mitchell: That’s a great way to put it: “When a small client acts like a big one.” How do you handle that?

Paula Scher: You know, I was a record cover designer. I used to design, I don’t know, 150 covers a year or something like that. I’d do them in a day. It isn’t that hard. You know what’s harder? People. You know, we figure out money by hours. And if I do a project for a small client and I complete it in a day, it’s going to be profitable. If I complete it in a week it’s less profitable, but still a profit. If I complete it in a month, I might break even, but if they sit on it for another month, I’m fucked. That’s just the way it is. They can reduce my ability to earn money on their job just by being slow and crappy.

George Gendron: Do you ever fire clients?

Paula Scher: I’m trying to think of an experience. I mean, there are people that I won’t work for, or there are things where I got into it and I just get out of it. But I can’t really think of anything where I actually fired somebody when I was in the middle of a project, because usually I’ve invested too much into it that I feel like it’s worth it to, you know, complete it.

George Gendron: Do you ever have a client, a small client in particular, come back to you let’s say a year after a project that you’ve done and talk about the impact that it’s actually had on the business externally or internally?

Paula Scher: Sure.

George Gendron: I mean, these identities can have profound effects.

Paula Scher: Listen I did a startup, I did a startup now 20 years ago—it just had its 20th anniversary—for a guy named Danny Meyer, who started a business called Shake Shack. You know, they haven’t changed that logo in 20 years. It’s on every building. It was designed so it would change in relationship to the architecture of the area.

They just built a new one—I hope it’s still standing—in Beverly Hills where the Shake Shack logo was in gold. It was the first time the type was in gold, but it’s in Beverly Hills, you know, like, I mean, it’s sort of, it’s appropriate. And you recognize them wherever you are. The one in Tokyo is enormous, it’s just amazing. My friend Tony Brook in London had one open in his neighborhood, and he sent me a photo right away. It’s all over the world, and that’s kind of great. I love it.

George Gendron: He must have been an ideal client too, and partner.

Paula Scher: Oh, he’s great. And he also bought some of my maps. He keeps them at home. He had them up in Union Square Cafe for a long time.

Patrick Mitchell: That’s a good segue. I do want to go back to Salvador Dalí. But so we know about the maps, I know you spend a considerable amount of your weekend time painting. But I want to ask you, Monday through Friday, nine to five, do you consider yourself an artist? Is what we do art?

Paula Scher: This is not my quote, but I remember this artist being interviewed, and he said something I thought was right. “An artist is not what you call yourself. An artist is what other people call you.” I’m a designer and a painter. Art is a judgment. You can make your own judgment about it.

Patrick Mitchell: I’ve started reading a lot of books about artists. I’m in the middle of this massive one about Andy Warhol, and I’m actually seeing through their processes and people like you and your process, a lot of similarities. It’s helping me see myself as something more than just a magazine designer. I think it’s less about the output and more about the process.

Paula Scher: Well, I don’t know why you say “just” when you’re saying magazine designer. I mean, you’re a maker. You’re a maker of stuff that has editorial content. How fantastic.

Patrick Mitchell: That’s a word we love too, “making.”

George Gendron: A big part of our relationship, Patrick and mine, has to do with this mutual obsession we have with the making of things for their own sake. What an amazing way to live a life.

Paula Scher: I think at its best, we’re all so lucky. And at its worst, it’s really grim. I mean it really depends upon the relationship. If you’re doing something pro bono—and I’ve had people interfere with it—even when it’s a gift, you know, they’ll ask me to do something and I’ll do it. And then all of a sudden they’re making changes. I just want to hit the ceiling.

But I’ve had an enormous amount of pleasure with projects that were pro bono, especially when they work. And I felt great when I was working with Kenneth Cole on the Mental Health Coalition, which is, you know, an organization that helps people communicate about their mental health issues and take the stigma off of it.

And I did it for free. I loved him. I thought the project was useful. I was really happy about the way it came out. I was really delighted that the people who worked on it, beyond my own team, followed the rules and that was a great experience. And then I’ve had other situations that have been exactly the opposite, doing the same thing.

George Gendron: This is going to sound like a random question—and it is—but when you and Seymour invite Patrick and myself over for dinner at your apartment, what are we going to find on the walls of your living room?

Paula Scher: Well, you’ll see a lot of artwork. Seymour has the biggest display, because he has the series of heads that he did that were from an old Brylcreem ad where he put different stuff on these black and white heads. And it consumes the biggest, most central wall in the living room. But I have more stuff up.

He has another piece from something he did called “Sam’s Bar” in the kitchen, which is sort of long and narrow. In his workspace is one of my maps, and then in another side wall is another one of my maps, and then in my study are two maps. But he has the dramatic display.

Patrick Mitchell: What’s the design style in your house?

Paula Scher: Well, we just redid it. It was originally a furrier loft. It’s in an area that was crappy when we moved into it. Now it’s called NoMad and it’s got all kinds of restaurants, and it’s very cool. And what I love about it is we live next door to two really edible restaurants, so that’s pretty amazing.

The apartment’s a loft. It was originally a cold-water flat. It had a heating pipe that went up to the ceiling, a crappy floor from 1876. And the kitchen we designed actually quite small because I probably do more cooking upstate. We bought an extra hundred square feet, and Seymour has a workspace in there that is probably close to 200 square feet.

And then I have a study that also doubles as a guest room that is probably the same size. The living room is very big. The ceiling height is about 12 feet. So the windows are—I think they must be 10 feet high because it goes down only 2 feet above the ground. When we renovated we took out the radiators and got central heat and air, which took a million years to do because of the rules in the building.

And we made the living room completely white, very beautiful, with very big windows with doors on it so that, you know, it has a loft feeling, but it really houses the artwork nicely. We moved all the furniture to the middle of the room. We have a big dining table in front of where Seymour’s work is displayed—you see that right when you walk in the door—and new floors and new bathrooms.

Patrick Mitchell: What should we bring?

Paula Scher: Wine! Red, please.

Patrick Mitchell: Paula, is there a project that you were desperate to get but you didn’t—and you regret it?

Paula Scher: Every day. No, there are a lot of things I wished I’d gotten that I didn’t get.

Patrick Mitchell: Can you name one?

Paula Scher: I wanted to do the Tennessee Titans. I wanted to do that design. I want to do things that people see and interact with and I want to do things that I haven’t designed before. It really depends upon what they’re for. But there are things that I think weave into the culture, and I’d really like to work on those.

George Gendron: With the Tennessee Titans, were you looking for a sports franchise or is there something about the Titans or Tennessee that really appealed to you?

Paula Scher: Neither. What appealed to me was football. And the reason I bring them up has nothing to do with the team is that they called me and I was on the list. And I was really hoping I was going to get the job, you know, that somebody there was a fan and they wanted me to work on it. But in the end I didn’t make the list. I don’t think I even made the shortlist.

Patrick Mitchell: Had the [New York] Jets project already happened?

Paula Scher: Yeah. Michael did the Jets. I always admired that.

Scher’s 2001 work for NJPAC in Newark, New Jersey

“I wanted to design magazines. The formats are different, but the thinking is the same. You’re explaining something. You’re telling stories. You’re making somebody interested in looking at it. You’re doing all of those things as a designer.”

Patrick Mitchell: So who do you compete with? Who is your competition?

Paula Scher: Probably Wolf Olins, who is now owned by Publicis, which is an advertising agency. A bunch of small studios, like Porto Rocha, you know, like new guys who are coming up and probably can charge less money. Who else? 2x4, Gretel, Collins, you know.

Patrick Mitchell: That’s some legit competition. So it’s not always a slam dunk for Paula.

Paula Scher: No. Not at all.

George Gendron: Even the big consulting firms are buying and acquiring design firms now.

Paula Scher: Well, I have a theory about what happened, which I think is really, really detrimental to graphic design. The advertising agencies lost revenue—they essentially lost a lot of television advertising because of streaming media. If you watch the news, you know, if you watch MSNBC, you’ll see a commercial and it’ll be for medicine.

It’s always medicines and dogs. I think that’s all that gets advertised. You won’t see big-time commercials for big brands because all that was the virtue of hit television programs. But with Netflix and Apple TV and everything streaming, there’s no advertising.

So what these guys did is they call themselves a “design agency.” And they set it up that way. And they sell identity design to gain everything else that might be done by that company. And the thing that seems to drive the process is not the notion of creating this memorable thing that can define the future of the company, but something that exists in the here and now.

And if you think about the way they work, just think about what a mood board is. A mood board is something that they put together to show clients to get the overall feeling of what something should be. And what’s on a mood board? Things that already exist. So they’re already selling the client what’s already there.

And what are they selling it for? They’re selling it to put it on Instagram, which is a backwards way of developing how people understand things. And this is really what’s fucked up the industry. I mean, there haven’t been any huge panels where they’re talking about it. But if you look closely—even The Wall Street Journal wrote a review of the Pentagram Marks book.

I don’t know if you know about that book. It’s got a thousand marks in it and they did some really beautiful writing about what an identity is. And they got it. That’s not what’s being sold. You’re supposed to be doing mission statements. You’re supposed to be doing messaging styles. You do that after that’s what comes after you don’t do that before. That’s not the front end of the job.

Patrick Mitchell: Wow. I think that’s really important and I’m really glad you brought that up.

George Gendron: You should write about that.

Paula Scher: I’m lazy.

George Gendron: You should get that person you talked about to write about it for you.

Paula Scher: You know, when I wrote Make It Bigger, I really wrote about the industry, the way I had experienced it. It’s an old book now. I think 2002. And it’s missing a chapter—that chapter is what belongs in that book, because it’s really talking about behavior and businesses. But it’s sort of hard to write about it because it’s now become so ingrained in people’s minds as that’s what you’re supposed to be doing. And you’re not.

Patrick Mitchell: I noticed in your new book—there’s an old photo album of your parents where your mother is essentially performing as an Instagram influencer, showing her baby bump. I don’t know if your dad put that together or your mom.

Paula Scher: My dad.

Patrick Mitchell: But there’s a series of photos of her showing off her bump. Your brother, I assume, was in her belly?

Paula Scher: Yeah, I thought it was very funny. My father, you know, is very witty. And he invented a device—he worked for the government. He was a photogrammetric engineer. That’s the science of cameras and lighting. And he was working for the TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] in the forties, after the war. And they were dynamiting an area to dam the Tennessee River.

And my brother was actually born in Chattanooga because that’s where he was at that time. And every time they dynamited and the thing blew up, it was always two feet wrong in the positioning. So he studied it all through the dynamite thing about why is this always hitting in the wrong spot? What are we doing wrong? How are we measuring it wrong? And then he figured out that it probably was the camera lenses taking the aerial photography from the air. Because it probably did not take into account—in the shot, because it was aerial photography—the curvature of the earth.

So he invented a device called stereo templates. It’s a measuring device. There are these three circles that make the lens correct course. Like when you go to the eye doctor and they do the thing with the eyes—that’s sort of what it does, like a pair of glasses for a photographer. And it’s based on a formula that he devised that can adjust for the height. So there would be no Google maps, there would be telescopes that wouldn’t function, without my dad.

**Scher at Pentagram’s former space on Fifth Avenue.**

George Gendron: There’d be no GPS Lady.

Patrick Mitchell: Yeah. You talked about the “GPS Lady.” What did you say, “She’s a liar”?

Paula Scher: Yeah.

Patrick Mitchell: But I think there’s maybe a bigger-picture sentiment there that I might want you to expand on. We know you love maps.

Paula Scher: Oh, he was a mapmaker. I grew up with maps around the house. He worked for the geological survey in the United States government after he got out of working for the TVA and he was coordinator of nations mapping. And they made all these really incredibly gorgeous maps. They were so beautiful, which is why I’m obsessed with them. And I’m also a driving nut. I’m always looking for a new shortcut nobody’s discovered and things like that. My brother’s like that too.

Patrick Mitchell: It’s the journey, not the destination, right?

Paula Scher: The destination is irrelevant to the journey.

Patrick Mitchell: That’s exactly right! But let’s get philosophical a little bit. “GPS Lady” is just a metaphor for a much bigger issue. Like, you know, hearing today that they want to sell TikTok to Elon Musk. You talked about how these massive companies are premiering their rebrands on Instagram and Facebook. How did we get here—and how do we get out of here?

Paula Scher: Well, it’s a lot of stupid, isn’t it? I mean from the moment Facebook started—which I guess was the first platform that was sort of recognized—I just thought it was stupid. I don’t want to talk to people that way. I want to talk to them in person. I want to have a direct conversation with them.

And the kind of messaging, “I’m proud to announce my blah, blah.” You know, I mean, really, come on, you don’t need to do that! You show somebody something and if they think it’s nice, they’ll tell you. But you don’t have to say, “I’m proud to ….” I’m humiliated by that. I find it really offensive and creepy, you know, collecting people but not really relating to it.

It’s not true human interaction. It’s this artificial metaphor we’ve set up, and it creates all kinds of problems. It creates perceptual problems in terms of what matters in the world, and you can see it affected in our government. Sorry to be a downer.

Patrick Mitchell: Oh, that’s okay. But then you think about these big brands and all of the millions they’re investing in work they hire you for, and then hand it off to 10,000 18-year-old influencers and say, “Unleash our brand to the world.”

Paula Scher: Good luck!