PAULA SCHER:
INTRODUCING THE FAMOUS
TO NON-FAMOUS SCRIPT
Gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art
January 19th – February 5th 2007

authors: Olivera Batajić and Olivera Stojadinović
February 2007

translation into English: Danijela Tomazović
December 2009

We could have met Paula Scher and her work at least in this territory, as early as in November 2006, in the Belgrade Museum of Contemporary Art. That's when the promotion of Publikum Calendar on which she worked as the author was held. Last month, on January 19th 2007, Paula honored us with her presence as well. That day, starting at 18:00 PM in Belgrade Cultural Centre, she first delivered a lecture titled “I love letters: Paula explains her lifelong obsession with typography”. After that, in the Museum of Contemporary Art Saloon , an exhibition of her works was opened, displaying about sixty posters (previously analyzed to details in the above mentioned lecture). The exhibition ended on February 5th , and the calendar with her works will last until the end of this year for the ones who managed to get it. This year as well and besides the calendar, a book / publication was printed including presentation of the whole work process and something more. You could have gotten the publication in the lecture or in the exhibition opening ceremony.

Paula Scher completed studies at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and obtained a PhD in Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington . She started her career in the 1970s and created covers for Atlantic and CBS Records companies. In the very beginning she used illustrations but soon she moved to solutions and designs leaning exclusively on typography. She believed that such designs are the cheapest and she did not have to involve anyone else but herself in those. Back then as well as later, her letters were often drawn or collaged, same time using available typographic letters. She gladly uses enlargements, photocopies, rough textures and basic colors. Her posters are often inspired by art pieces from previous periods, belonging to art movements such as constructivism or expressionism, and the letters she uses while creating also origin in typography of that time. She claims that originality as an imperative is overrated and that design is inevitably based on intelligently applied extracts, which is quite noticeable in her early works. Comparing it to the work of some American or European designers of that time, one realizes that the approach is quite mannerist. Nevertheless, it is unquestionable that Paula Scher became a name worth of attention in the American continent long time ago.

She was always politically opinioned which is noticeable in her work. After finishing her studies, she moved from Philadelphia to New York where she actively protested against the war in Vietnam . Even now, she does not agree with Bush's politics and she publicly expresses her disagreement. She even gave up going to the White House in order to receive the National award for design there.

Since 1991, she has been a principal at the New York office of Pentagram, a famous international design agency. Within this agency, she was designing graphic identity for Public Theater in the mid 1990s, and this marked the beginning of a new approach in labeling the public premises that incorporates typeface characters of large dimensions in architecture and makes them its part. She wraps the old building of New Jersey Art School in typography, and for the Bloomberg L.P. corporate headquarters, she develops a dynamic system of graphic identification, which dominates the space while displaying the information on huge light panels.

Her contribution to development of new or redesign of the existing trademarks is also significant. The most famous example is the logo for City Bank as well as the subtle redesign of Tiffany logotype with the appropriate design applying on the packages as well.

The other important fields of her work are posters for theater and ballet shows and jazz concerts.

The interesting thing is that besides the projects with commercial purpose she also uses typography in her own work – art works in which her expression is more subtle and sensible, nevertheless still decorative. The series of posters with numbers as a theme visualizes the shapes of numbers through magnifications, minimizations and multiplications turning into patterned surfaces, with a sense of humor and in different ways. Each poster represents one typographic study in minimalist view. She became especially known for drawing her famous maps, on which besides the toponyms she features postal numbers, and even voting statistics… This specific interest is related to the scientific work of her father who worked in the field of cartography.

In parallel with her professional work, Paula Scher teaches in several different Art schools, and delivers lectures on design all around the world. She also regularly writes articled for design magazines, and recently she published a book named Make it Bigger in which she presents her works.

Besides a number of different awards, she received the Type Directors Club Medal award for lifetime achievement in 2006.

Besides her regular work, Paula Scher spent last year communicating with the team she worked with on Publikum calendar, now named Gobbledy-Gook, nonsense, balderdash. She accepted the challenge although, as she says herself, she didn't ever come across Cyrillic script until now, so those are “typographic experiments in domain of form and the meaning”. If someone is a typographer, then this person is interested in all scripts and all the shapes those scripts include. Paula also says this at some point. But the raising question is why she did not check some books, available catalogs and similar until the work on the calendar and in order to see how some of those scripts from all around the world look like. However, this ignorance made it possible for Paula to approach Cyrillic typeface in a “structural, almost architectonic way”, as she says.

Paula Scher confronts two language forms of expressing and writing throughout the whole calendar, using those two languages and two scripts – her own and the one she's a guest at – and brings them into interrelations. When browsing the calendar, it seems that the ideas for implementation of typographic design tasks are sometimes forced and sometimes completely artificial. It might seem interesting to someone researching an unfamiliar script, like an experiment , but to those that calendar is meant for, it seems more like an unfinished story and looks a bit empty and again only decorative – for example the illustrations for June and July. The right and truly typographic designs can be found on pages for April, October and December (moreover, the page for December is an excellent bilingual typographic design).

And here's what in the end Paula Scher said about her involvement with Cyrillic script. Lazar Džamić asked Paula what her first impression about this script was: “Strange. It seemed a bit archaic, a bit complicated and not too much perfected. But Cyrillic is not that different as Arabic script for example is. This really made it possible for me to research several levels of comparison between the two scripts, for example, formalistic and phonetic level of comparison. Also, it is very amusing when you try to unite these two scripts into one and then observe what happens. I enjoyed all of it.”

It is by all means commendable that typography as a topic found its place in Publikum calendar again and looking from this angle we support and appreciate the project of this printing house.

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At www.publikumcalendar.com you can download Publikum digital desktop calendar for 2007, designed by Paula Scher.