Paula Scher

In short

Podcast Notes: Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Episode Featuring Paula Scher

Overview In this episode of Tetragrammaton hosted by Rick Rubin, graphic designer Paula Scher discusses her influential career in design, spanning over four decades. Scher shares her insights into the evolution of graphic design, the relationship between design and branding, and her own experiences working with significant artists and brands.

Key Themes and Discussions

The Transition from Commercial Art to Graphic Design

Definition Shift: Scher entered the profession during a transition from the term "commercial art" to "graphic design," which was seen as a more respectable profession.
Cultural Context: She reflects on the 1960s design environment, characterized by political posters and counter-culture influences, and notes the importance of key figures like Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast.

Work Environment and Corporate Culture

Comparison with Advertising: Scher distinguishes between graphic design and advertising, highlighting how graphic design aims for timelessness while advertising targets immediate attention.
Corporate Influence: She describes the differences between working in corporate environments such as CBS Records and independent labels like Atlantic Records, emphasizing the hierarchy and the impact of corporate culture on creativity.

Design Philosophy

Timeless vs. Trendy: Scher explains that good design should be inherently recognizable and endure over time, contrasting it with the fleeting nature of advertising campaigns.
Brand Identity: She discusses the importance of creating a foundational identity for brands, using examples like Coca-Cola's logo, which has evolved but maintained its core recognition.

Notable Projects and Collaborations

Album Covers: Scher recounts her early work designing record covers for artists like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, mentioning the collaborative dynamics with artists who had a say in their cover designs.
Pentagram Partnership: As a partner at Pentagram since 1991, Scher underscores the collaborative environment of the firm and how it differs from other design firms in its profit-sharing model and partnership structure.

Branding and Identity Design

Branding Complexity: Scher addresses the complexities of branding, stating that a brand is defined not just by its design but also by public perception and experiences, including negative incidents.
Shake Shack Design: She shares her experience designing the Shake Shack identity, emphasizing how the brand aimed to elevate fast food through better quality and design.

Creativity and Mistakes

Embracing Mistakes: Scher discusses the importance of being open to mistakes in the creative process, suggesting that some of the best ideas may emerge from unexpected errors.
Timeliness in Design: She reflects on the balance between timely and timeless work, asserting that successful design transcends mere trends.

Evolution of Design Education and Technology

Impact of Technology: Scher notes how advancements in technology have changed the design process, emphasizing that while tools have improved, the demands from clients have increased as well.
Design Education: She highlights her role in teaching design and finding young talent, noting how the design landscape has evolved with new generations of designers.

Key Takeaways

Graphic Design vs. Advertising: Graphic design seeks to create lasting identities, while advertising focuses on immediate impact.
Collaboration is Key: Successful projects often arise from collaboration between designers and clients, as well as among design team members.
The Role of Mistakes: Mistakes can lead to unexpected breakthroughs in design, illustrating the importance of flexibility in the creative process.
Identities Must Evolve: While maintaining core elements for recognition, brands must evolve with changing perceptions and trends to remain relevant.

Conclusion Paula Scher's insights provide a deep understanding of the design profession, highlighting her influential role within it. Her experiences illustrate the importance of collaboration, the balance of timelessness and trends, and the significance of embracing creativity's inherent uncertainties.

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Transcript

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0:02Tetragrammerton Tell me about the world that you entered. As a designer, describe the work environment that you came into when you were starting. I was entering a world where there was a movement from calling commercial art graphic design. And that was something that I learned at Tyler's School of Art. Now, when I was in high school, I thought that was called commercial art. Things that were signs, things that were record covers, things that were book jackets, that was all part of a thing. And there was something in the word commercial that was a little bit of a put down. There was a designer named Dwaygens from the 20s who had coined the term graphic design.

1:14And that if you were making graphic design, you were a graphic designer. So in entering that, there was an understanding that you were moving to a higher level profession in terms of the way you might be perceived, though most people didn't know that yet. And that the world that I entered was the world of the 60s. And there were a lot of political posters. There were a Vietnam War protests. There were things that were from Haydashbury. There was Victor Muscozo, a incredible designer who actually was Yale graduated and studied with Alpers on color theory. And then was doing the wildest, most outrageous behavior that we all loved.

1:56And that was in the music business. It was the film Maurice type posters. And then there were a whole pile of devotees and followers. And this guy is still around, by the way, he's quite wonderful. Incredible. And then there is my husband and pushpin. And Milton Glazer, Seymour Quast, and Ed Surrell. And they were, they came at it from an illustration point of view, but Seymour drew an alphabet called, from an ink box design he had done, where he had made an A that looked like an ink drip. And it became like a 60s typeface. It was called our tone. And people didn't know it. It was really from a commercial job he had done.

2:35And it became this alphabet that I thought, because I didn't know him when I first saw it. I thought it was an allegus to bell bottom pants, because it was thin on the top and wide on the bottom. And I thought it was a hippie type. Because it went with the fashion. So cool. But that was the world. And tell me about like where the offices like we'd see in Mad Men. That was the advertising business, which was I think very different from graphic design and tone and tempo. Those guys wore suits to work. And they were much more clean scrubbed. And they were dealing with big corporate clients. And they would spend a lot of time in meetings.

3:16And you know, they had bottles of scotch on their wall. I remember going around to those offices. And even later when I worked with gray advertising, doing their corporate headquarters, I saw that still there. There was still the whiskey bottle sitting on the countertop for like a 5 p .m. snort or whatever that was. There's still that relationship though between graphic design and advertising. It feels like they're related modalities. No. Well, I think they're described as being in that realm of creation for business. But they're really function very differently. And what they supply is different.

3:55They become more confused lately because a lot of television advertising went away. So they're begun to sell identity. And they sell it very different than design firms do. Because they're really looking to get the identity as a means to get whatever the promotion and the advertising is. But identity is foundational. And theoretically, if you're designing an identity for a corporation, you want it to less 20 to 40 years. You don't want to turn it around like Instagram. So there are two fields coming at it, sort of with opposite directions. So graphic design is something that you want to have a timeless appeal.

4:40Whereas advertising is really more of a of the moment. It's to catch your attention now. And tomorrow, if tomorrow, if it feels old, it's okay because it's only for today. Would you say that's right? I think that's what happens. I don't think that that's the intent. I think it's the nature of the way they do their business. Because the thing is that if I think about companies I've worked with and I have logos that are around, you know, for 25 years going on 30 and some. And they are, they are foundational because they're designed not really to go out of style. Sometimes they have to be tweaked.

5:17Sometimes you, you design something and the weight is fashionable, say of typography in a given period. And then five or six years later, it changes and that you do need to tweak and adjust because you don't want it to look dated. It's like a like clothing, you know, Hems go up and down. But theoretically, there's got to be something in the logo that is inherently recognizable. And what happens is that with the advertising agencies, they want to define what the positioning statement is and the theme of the organization. When an organization is new or it has a new president, and that might last only five years.

5:56So then whatever they design and that capacity becomes irrelevant. Where if you're looking for a, I would say more of an abstraction of form and less about style, you can make something that's really lasting because people recognize it. And then if it has to be adjusted, it's very minor. And you know, the Coca -Cola has a module of how you're supposed to think about these things. Like in the Coca -Cola logo, essentially, was designed in the 1800s. Wow. I mean, there really is, there really is a script that was designed, that's evolved over the years to be the way you see Coca -Cola today. And that in their quadrant, they say that the logo's sacrosanct and it stays forever.

6:40And that's in the upper left hand part of the quadrant. And the upper right hand part of the quadrant is packaging. And packaging stays for a period of time enough to become recognizable, but has to evolve in style or form or various things. So it keeps it, it keeps it contemporary. Then below it is advertising and advertising can be seasonal or it can adjust to be very quick if you need to in certain instances if you're launching a new product with it. And there the logos in the corner are never changed. And on the package, the logos are never changed. And then, though they have Coke and Coca -Cola, they've added devices to it.

7:21And then in the following quadrant is promotion. And promotion is the quickest changing thing. And that's Instagram. So something like the Coca -Cola green, the green bottle of Coca -Cola that was what a Coke bottle looked like for a really long time. It was a design choice. They stuck with it for a period of time. And then somebody decides either we don't want to use glass bottles anymore and we're going to tin cans or what happens when there's a decision to make a big change in a brand that's ubiquitous. I would imagine it's cost. You know, I mean, I think usually when there's that kind of a shift you're dealing with, I don't also convenience.

8:02I mean, it may be that that the glass was breaking or the kids couldn't handle it. I mean, I'm not inside Coke. I happen to have known that thing because I worked on a product the Coca -Cola produced called Travea. And that's the first time I saw the chart. But I don't actually know the mechanisms of the corporation. But I would I would guess from other corporations when you make a decision like that to fundingly change something that's classic. Then you do it because of cost issues. And that I think the glass bottles still exist. But I think they become more promotional and they become this thing that they're putting out as specialty items, you know, like anniversary bottles.

8:38I mean, companies that have legacies do that. Now, I worked I worked for Tiffany and they have this very firm model. And what I did when I worked for them in the 90s was pick their blue color swatch that they already had. But it had to be universal because they distribute the product all over the world. And the the dilats would change, depending upon where you bought the box. So that was something that had to be controlled very tightly. And that they had very big typography initially when I worked for them on their boxes. And it made them look cheap. And I just made it really small on the box.

9:14And it sort of changed the whole look and looked like you could raise the price just by those sort of adjustments because there there were cues you learn in terms of how things fit in categories and what expectations are. I mean, that's part of working in commerce. It has it also has to do with aesthetics to a degree, you know, because it's sort of a statement of a certain kind of taste. But was there a time that the large Tiffany logo made sense? I'll tell you, I when I saw the packaging, I was really I was really shocked. They had at the time that they hired me. They had worked they worked mostly with manufacturers and the people who, you know, ran the jewelry stores were just sort of making the decisions.

10:00They had a blue. But the blue wasn't their big problem with it was it didn't look the same in all places. So that was one problem. But then they had made decisions that were sort of surprising on something that's essentially an upscale product. And they had a they had a ribbon, not a ribbon, it was some kind of cord they had that was really fat and look sort of clunky on their shopping bags. And then they had the very big type on things. And essentially if you look at a Tiffany ad, you don't even see the logo. They use the blue box and they have a white ribbon around it. And that's their classic.

10:33Never have to change that. Isn't that fantastic? Absolutely. You worked at Columbia. I guess you worked at CBS Records for a period of time. And was this in the 70s? Yes. Describe that environment. Well, it was very male. I was one of very few women on the floor. I worked I worked there twice. I worked in the advertising department first for about two years. And I was making ads for records. And that's where I learned everything I know about office politics. And then I had designed an ad campaign that the head art director at Atlantic records liked and he hired me. And I got to do ads and record covers because they were done in the same department.

11:17So that's when I started designing album covers. And I did them for a year and they won awards and gotten some design annuals and things like that. So I was hired back by an art director named John Berg to be East Coast art director. What were some of the covers you did when you were in Atlantic? Charles Mingus changes one and two, kind of classics, John Prime, Common Sense. Then there were artists like D .D. Bridgewater who were like lesser known. It's funny because I just went through them because I'm giving some work to a museum and Munich. And there were 25. I can't remember them all. There was a guy named, I think his name was Steve Wright.

12:03There were sort of odd, they weren't big and there were jazz musicians and quite good. And I did a lot of jazz work at CBS as well. So CBS I think the biggest people I did, I did a Dylan album, I did a Bruce Springsteen album and I did a bunch of Billie Joel albums that were probably the most famous artists. And then they were all, you know, there was Boston, which I hate. But it's, but it's, but it's an important, I mean, it's, it's lives on in the culture. There was, I had a friend named Marty Peacar who was a copyrighter at CBS and he says, you know, when you die, your, your tombstone is going to say design the Boston cover and I've lived in horror forever.

12:45Might even be a picture on the tombstone the UFO. Oh God. At that time, CBS was huge corporate entity and Atlantic was still, it was big, but it was an independent label. Did they feel like different places working at the two? They were totally different. Atlantic was very much driven by Amit and Nestle Eard again. And Nestle Eard, I worked with directly because it was a very intimate place and he was, he was in charge of the taste making decisions that had to do with the corporation. So he, so he approved every album cover I worked on and he was lovely. He was a very elegant man and he really cared about craft and they were small and they could not, they could not afford to spend more on album covers or higher big photo sessions and they were, they were, they operated with a kind of economy even though they were a part of that time.

13:43They were a part of Warner Brothers. And CBS was big and corporate and there were a lot of hierarchy within the company, but I had already learned to manage it. And when I worked in the advertising department at CBS, I used to design trade ads. Those are the ads that went into cash box and billboard and then occasionally you'd get to do Rolling Stone and they would come out for every, every album. And the way the ad system worked is, I was assigned a copyrighter who was this person I mentioned before in a Marty P. Car and we'd be given sort of a, a, a, a, a, a, a recording artist and sort of a kind of a basis of the way they wanted to talk about the album which usually meant breaking out in three radio stations or what have you.

14:29And then you'd, you know, you'd have some sort of terrible shot and then you'd have something called a mini which was an album cover that was cut in half and made the title of the album really big on the top. And that was done in its own department and they were really ugly as hell. And you were supposed to put them on the bottoms of the albums and you wrote some kind of copy line on about them and you, they went into the trades. And the way they were approved was they were attached to a routing slip. And the routing slip was stapled to whatever the paper was that your ad layout was on. And in the first day on Monday, you do it in the morning and then the afternoon, it would go from the head art director to the copy chief to the guy who is the department head of creative services.

15:15And somewhere in there it would go back for changes. So the next day, you'd change it and it would go and it would go past those three people who already made a change and then we'd go upstairs and we go upstairs to product managers and producers and people like that. And then variable, he would have some more changes and then it would come back downstairs and by the time it came downstairs because they were out to lunch or in meetings, it would be the end of the day and you didn't do anymore. So then it would be Wednesday, the thing that the day it was due and you'd finish it at about seven o 'clock at night and get it out to the trade.

15:45And then I realized what was the point of doing anything at the beginning of the week? You might as well wait till Wednesday and do the whole thing because they'd be out of time. And that's when the work got good. I have to tell you. Great. It's good to know. Useful. I've been on those CCs on those art pieces that get sent around and it's a bizarre method in a big corporation. It had nothing to do with anything. It had nothing to do with the quality of anything or whether or not an audience would you know perceive it or understand what it was. It was just a method they had that they adhered to and it was like that when I started and it was like that when I left it just stayed the same.

16:24That speaks to what you said before about Tiffany probably at one point in time. When the record company started it was built with few people and based on taste. And then as it gets bigger it becomes this other thing and people who are more concerned with commerce than art take over. And then things like well let's put the logo big on it because we're selling it and the bigger the logo is the better it's going to look you know the better. More chance we'll sell it if it's big. That's right. It's like that mentality of people who don't understand what they're doing making these choices. That's exactly what happened at CBS.

17:02The founder was a guy named Goddard Liebersen who was an incredible tasteful man and you know essentially they were they were publishing classical music and then they had John Hammond who discovered Billy Holiday along with a myriad of other you know Dylan I mean the list is staggering. Yeah Bruce Springsteen Bob Dylan there was a very long list that I used to know by heart and he was a really lovely elegant man. Stevie Ray Belon. Yes. A wide range of long period of time. Even Benny Goodman. Yeah incredible. He said I wanted his first discoveries and then decided okay he's moving on. He was a guy who moved on and his taste was just impeccable and if you can take think about Goddard Liebersen and John Hammond what happens somewhere along the way is I think Mitch Miller became really powerful in the company and he had a television show and so the music taste became very mainstream and there was a period I think where they were very late into getting into rock and roll you know I mean they were I think that wasn't until the film or concert where Janice Joplin played and got signed in.

18:13I think my dad yeah that was it and it was it was amazing that the company had changed because it was a really middle of the road company after Goddard Liebersen had died and then it became then it became a bit of a rock and roll company not so much but they had foundational artists you know they had artists who were songwriters who were going to sustain periods of time like Bob Dylan like Bruce Springsteen like Billy Joel you know they've sort of which was smart and that was Columbia Records that was that label Epic Records was more like Boston it was sort of you know it hits and then they would fade and they get the next guy and that's how they operated that.

18:50Did you work in the Black Rock building? Yep. What a beautiful building. Eros Aaron Gorgeous. I love it. And you know and there was that's the first time I saw Ames furniture you know in that building and Lou Dorstman who was the design director of the whole company had designed the elevator buttons and there's a typeface called CBS Dito that's on all those buttons and they are gorgeous to this day. The CBS logo was incredible. There's a book of all the CBS the language of the CBS logo that's beautiful. Do all companies have that style guide of how to use what everything looks like associated with it so that you know it's coming from this brand?

19:35Well we make them all the time every time I design something we make them and I think I think most companies do. I mean most organizations when they when they buy design if they if they know what they're doing have to understand how they're going to execute it and if they're a large company though they may have a they already may have a built -in in -house art department that you train and work with to begin to get them to understand how to work with the identity and the typography and and we were just just finished an identity where they had a very practiced in -house art department and we worked with them you know when developing it so so it's a collaboration so they know they can execute it.

20:15I mean these things really do matter. What was interesting about the record business floor which was 10 through 12 those floors is they didn't conform to CBS graphics. We did crazy stuff because we were the record industry so we hung all kinds of stuff on the wall and the walls were metal. So you had to hang them up with magnets because that's the only way they they stayed on the wall and then sometimes somebody from Corp. Corporate would come down and write a little report that you had messed up the wall but the corporation on the whole was just very design conscious and very caring about it.

20:48There's something about design. In my case I was a kid I was going to NYU and I was lucky enough to go to the Black Rock building on a regular basis and when I from stepping down into the sunken area before you get to the lobby you could feel like you're in a special place and riding up in the elevator. You felt like you were in a special place. This wasn't an apartment building. This wasn't even an office building. My my artwork that estaylauder and I would be in the in that building all the time and it was nothing like Black Rock. Black Rock had a seriousness about it. An attention to detail that I'd never had never experienced before and I loved it and I felt like it was a spend almost like a cathedral in a way.

21:36Bill Paley who was the president of CBS. He had a second in command who was a design. He's the person that hired the architect. He was the person that decided to be Eames Furniture. He was the person who oversaw Lou Dorsman when Lou Dorsman was doing the the DDo CBS logo that's still on everything and it really amazing and that was the philosophy of the company and it was incredible to work there because it mattered and you knew it was different and those things you experienced were planned. So when you work in a place like that I imagine it has to have some impact on your work of like okay this is real like this is the big time I have to do my best look where I am.

22:21We were introduced like if a recording artist came and I actually had the position for a period of time is when Paul McCartney came and a few other recording artists were sort of checking us out to see if they they wanted to sign with CBS and they would they would come down and they would say well go to our award -winning art department and they were very the company promoted it as part of the CBS image that there was this this was going to be this very classy operation that we didn't do things on the cheap that the people were highly trained professionals and that the work was going to be at this very high level and that was that was implicit in the offer and some people joined the company because of that.

23:03Beautiful. When you were working on album covers did you get to meet artist's sever or was it more just dealing with product managers? No the artist had contractual cover approval you met what you met with all of them or they or they did it you know by phone I mean I never met Bob Dylan in person but I talked to him a lot when I did hard rain he I rubbed down some press type in the corner of the photograph and it's sort of look not very straight and I told him it would be straight when we type said it and he said no I like it that way I like messy I'll never forget that it ran like that it's always been like that I mean there are things like that that happened that were wonderful but you you as they had contractual cover approval and they would come sometimes individually usually with the if they were coming individually usually there was a project manager with them then there would be wives then there might be the manager then there might be a whole band and the whole band's wives and everybody's you know favorite sidekick to come along and look at it you never knew you just never knew who was going to come and it always worked somewhere more frustrating than others you know it really depended upon what their expectation was I I found some of it kind of boring and repetitive because there were so many new artists that were continually signed and they were very concerned about their photos on their covers and they they wanted you know to be styled and make up and hair and lots of money spent on this thing and then they would be very stilted in the photo and it would be sort of hard to put together and I remember on the dream police album for cheap trick we had a lineup they were dressed as police on the front and the back covers and then they were in a lineup on the inside it was in one of those open up packages and I had I had to replace different heads on different bodies you know it was in those days there wasn't Photoshop so you had to take a die transfer and you had to have the re -toucher of sand it so we could cut it out and put it on the photo and re -touch it so you didn't see the cut lines but all the heads were transposed amazing a concept for a cover would it often come from an artist would it come from a designer how did covers come to be if it was a jazz album it was usually me you know I would come up with that I would come up with an idea because it would be based on the title jazz artists tend not to be vain they didn't especially want to be on the covers I bought a lot of illustration for jazz and that's where I really also became a type designer in a strong sense because I did it when we particularly when we ran out of money in the late 70s I began doing covers just purely in type and they were wonderful to work with the jazz artists because they they really liked the idea that I was going to be creative with their cover and sometimes they came in with wives sometimes they came in alone I used to work I think I did four or five covers for John McLaughlin and he was first Mahavishnu John McLaughlin when I met him he came in like a Harry Christian and the robes and the thing and I actually did not like fusion jazz and I hated listening to his music and he came in one day after I don't know three years of working with him where he was a Harry Christian and he came in and he was wearing a leather jacket he cut his hair and he's like one of the handsomeest guys I ever saw and I said oh my god and he said I'm into materialism then he locked my he locked my door and made me listen to a full two record set he was putting out it was very funny why stuff like that happened all the time wow this is the fun the fun of the record business that was great they were all over the map though I mean that that sometimes the artists were terrific to work with Bruce Springsteen came in I did darkness on the edge of town and Bruce Springsteen then you know had the appointment it came up and he pulled out these two polaroids that were taken by his butcher and he just so he gave they were great I mean they were really they were sort of beautiful and you know the album was a darker album and if you you take I think it followed born to run and if you consider the difference in the two covers one was sort of like okay this this pop wonderful guy who's on stage moving around and playing with his saxophoneist all the time and all of that and the second one was was a little deeper and it was sort of easy to design because it had to be rough you know that you knew you knew this was rougher and it's not pretty but it's beautiful and I always like that cover I thought and it was really him he came in with the shots how would you decide between a typographic cover an illustration or a photograph and do each of those things whether it be on an album cover or in an ad do they communicate different things that's really a good question I never quite had a handle on it you know they would say I couldn't use illustration on a pop cover because that was the signal it was a jazz cover except for the reason it was a signal it was a jazz cover as I used to buy illustration for jazz covers just because I didn't have to do the shot of the recording artist and I liked that I liked them and I thought they were they were terrific looking and memorable and the other ones looked more or less the same so then it became defined by the company as a jazz cover and then it became difficult to use but of course there was Boston and there was something there was called heat wave too hot to handle and I had used the same illustrator I used to see a look same illustrators on jazz covers I mean I really didn't see that that way but I do think the public actually the public had its own rhythm about what they liked you know and when I think of think about it there was no market research there was no testing in those days I just heard a story recently about Andy Warhol and he became a commercial artist because at the time it was unfashionable and advertising to use photographs so there was a lot of work for straight illustration of products and that's what he did but it wasn't at a choice it was more like well that's what the market needed and he was able to do that that's how that works you know it's it's funny because we're all I think at least the people I respect are really serious about the craft you know that the making of the thing and keeping it at a high standard pushing the industry forward is really our overall goal in doing it so when you can elevate the expectation of what something can be that's a breakthrough and you know I he was he was actually a terrific illustrator those drawings were great and that lifted up that part and then of course he became the way we know him but that is you know not an unworthy achievement when you decided to become a designer was it a popular thing to do at the time now most people didn't know what it was how did it work out that you did it I wasn't good at really anything else I my mother wanted me to get my teaching certification so I could teach public school like she did and she thought I remember when I told her I was going to move to New York and and be a designer she says oh Paula you can't do anything like that that takes talent you know I mean it was sort of so you were an abused child yeah I did have that when did branding become a big deal has it always been or is that a newer thing you can't really brand something that's that's sort of silly in terminology because a brand is not what you make it a brand is what you make it plus the way everybody else perceives it plus everything that happens along the way like if you take chipotle which is a you know it's a nice nice fast food place and it can have nice graphics and the the place the food is reasonably okay for the price etc but there was food poisoning so the brand owns food poisoning and you can't take that away so you know if you say you know I branded chipotle that's sort of like branding for the poisoning I mean you have to be you have to be I'm using an extreme example but the assertion that this thing that you work as part of is going to stick forever and be this thing is just not possible because you can't predict and I don't like to say that I do branding I like to say that I'm an identity designer a visual identity designer and that what that means is that you're going to see something and you're going to associate it with the product and that that is going to be what that thing looks like it doesn't mean that that's what the product is or becomes it's just that's what that looks like which is different that's what logos are and you very rarely now design just a logo you're usually designing a visual system that so you have the logo and the logo can animate and the logo can become large and small and exist in three dimensions and all of the things that needs to do to be recognized but it's really it's really a system while we're on fast food you designed the Shake Shack logo and it really looks different than everything else when you when you see a Shake Shack for a fast food place it has an air of sophistication just based on the signage how did you come to work work on Shake Shack well pentagrams office used to be on Madison Square Park we had bought a a small building there and Danny Myers was a you know a terrific restaurant tour and he had two restaurants across the park and he was on the board of Madison Square Park and I did the identity from Madison Square Park because they brought it to me and wanted me to do it for free and told me if I if I didn't want to do it it was okay and they'd bring it to the competing firm around the corner and I thought oh no I'm gonna have to get up and look at their logo every day so I had become involved with the park and then the park began having art shows in the park and really building up this incredible system of shows exhibits and events in that park and one of the events was Danny Meyer put a taxi in the park and made a hot dog stand there because he always was inspired by his childhood in the Midwest where he remembered all these kind of fast food places where he felt he got a good meal and he felt that was missing today so his goal if Danny Myers had a mission statement I mean he is a hospitality person but his goal was to make a better fast food place charge two dollars more for the hamburger and put brisket in it so it stayed soft you know that it didn't get hard like it like a burger does and he succeeded it was great but the building was a prefab building that was put together by a terrific architect he was a postmodern architect who did all the best stores in Virginia that had sort of buildings that came apart from each other and what he designed was the structure that was dropped in the park because it was prefab so they didn't have to build it and disrupt the park and they originally I think they were when it first opened they were bringing water over from the restaurants and then they then they had the plumbing put in and that was the first shake shake and the the structure of the building which had an awning that came out looked very what I would call mode earn which is sort of a style from the late 40s that looks like streamline it was sort of the design of trains and the kind of things rain and lowey would make it look like post deco right right it was little it was more modernist but you there there were there was a typeface that was introduced called Neutra which came out of that period and you could tell it was a streamlined typeface because the middle bar on the e drops lower and it creates the sense of periodness about it and I used that inside this band that was in the the dropped in architecture and we it said shakes and sodas and they actually called that the purple cow and I don't I don't know why they named it that maybe they were going to put something that was called the purple cow and they were never did and it runs around shake shake and then the the type on the top is big and at first we did it without the icons in the park and then Danny said he missed the neon and as childhood so we couldn't put neon in the signage because we didn't know what neighborhoods would allow it depending upon ordinances so we just made neon icons and then sometimes they were neon and sometimes they're not but that's part of their packaging and their system and we did it twice we did it for the building and then when he decided to make it a chain then we then we added the other you know the the menu boards and all the other stuff that went with it and it did it looked different from everything else and they didn't call it face food they called it face casual dining it's all category it's great yeah I always loved it it was fun doing it too because it's wonderful to work with somebody else who's inventing something yeah and that's what he was doing LMNT Element Electrolikes Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun You want to maximize your endurance and feel your best Add element electrolytes to your daily 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38:30What does it feel like Well right now I forget you know like I mean 20 million city banks all over the place I walk by him every day. I don't even think about him You know so that that it's it's strange and and the same with sometimes I what I really like are the shakeshacks in Europe Because they're all designed differently which was part of our our thinking in the place and there's a woman who Came out of the architecture firm Who built the original shakeshack and what she does is position the type on the building so it works with the architecture like the first one did So they're all different, but they're all the same because it's the same Thinking about it, but they're different sizes.

39:09They're different Sometimes they're in neon sometimes they're built out of something else sometimes they have light bulbs in them I mean they they're all over the place depending upon where they are And so that when I'm in Europe they even get more distinguished like there was one in common gardens where it was barely branded But it was all in the right places or you'll go to another another place in London and in a suburb They have this enormous sign on a very little building, you know, and that's sort of charming And I'm I'm always I always love seeing that you know because you don't know what it's going to be But I don't I don't have the same thrill about it that I did when I was much younger What I do like is that I have a former assistance particularly who go to old record stores and buy up my album covers And then they sometimes I have to buy them back from them great.

39:55It's great. Have there always been logos and marks Well a trademark is is a is a mark that Stands by itself or can be combined with type like the swoosh for example Well, the swoosh is is Nike's mark and but you know it's not Nike originally it was with not Nike now You can now you can understand it without words and it you know only takes 30 years to do that You know that they it's built up with a you know sort of brilliant advertising campaign by widened Kennedy So you associate with movement. It's all about sport you look at the thing you know what it means so you don't need words But corporate marks do because they may have you know initials and then you don't know what it is and you need it you need it labeled I mean, I think that marks that completely worked on their own or the Westinghouse logo with the dots On the W and but but there was a whole type family for Westinghouse that existed with it that Paul ran designed when he did the Westinghouse logo And these these things become iconic and you know what they are When you introduce a logo if it's a mark you generally need type to express it But a logo and a mark also you don't need to have a mark you can just have a logo Which is just the name and the name is designed in some font And that can be as Understandable usually sought a lot of times their initials and you look at it You know exactly what it is and you know what the company is and then you don't need the secondary type You need the secondary type if you need to register it and there are other things that look like that slightly So there's the apple apple and then there's the type that says apple and it says it the same way all the time And sometimes we're together but often separately and either one works depending on the use yes At this point in time you would recognize that I don't almost anything You know, I mean you could take that you could take the apple logo and buy a white box that looks like it's for lunch And stick the logo on the metal oven you would think that apple started to went into the food business I mean you could you could in fact do that very easily.

42:00I mean things have They become iconic and use and fame and promotion and it's it's really that's what you want them to do That's the goal of it Was there every time in the record business where the person who designed the album cover also designed all the advertising and everything that went around Everything around it or was it always separate Well cbs of the separate because that's the way the company was set up Sometimes I would do a poster for an album. I worked on I did I did some of that with Billy Joel for a while But usually the departments were very specific and they didn't like that because it would take away It would take away the power of one of the departments because the cover department was always more powerful than the advertising department So they wanted to make themselves felt as the only people who understood advertising And and that was all political and I don't know if it mattered one way or the other'd be quite honest with it I think if anything the opposite it sounds like Whoever came up with the Creative feeling for a piece The more involvement they had in the whole campaign would probably be a good thing seems like no Well, it's hard to say because it really depends upon what kind of money was budgeted for it If you had a major artist very often they went to outside firms to do that sort of stuff Because there was a lot of pushback on the on the advertising department now I used to make a lot of promotions for record stores which were posters not ads And I there was a a series I did called the best of jazz that was all Constructivist design on craft paper and there were I think 20 albums in the series and that all the albums were packaged like this The posters were in the store and you saw that that's what you were talking about But that was really really rare largely because you couldn't even know what kind of space you were going to get in the record store for it and a place like tower records used to The owner of the store actually used to select how much space something would get based on whether or not He wanted to hang it up in a store So you just didn't know and that there would be promotional Men from the field who would be going out and trying to get positioning in placements But they were never seemed very successful to me and my memory of it Who would set up by the photo sessions for artists?

44:11Well, the art directors did I did that You did that I mean a lot of a lot of the job I think was Really really management You were setting up photo sessions you were getting makeup and hair done You were hiring sometimes a stylist for the clothing We went through series of genre photographers like there was this wonderful photographer named Bill King Who is a fashion photographer and he would get he would always shoot the performing artists in in motion And you can tell his shots right away from the 70s who is very hot for a period of time and Norman Seath and a pile of others who had huge styles that were popular and then sort of You transferred out of them.

44:53I actually had some of my best cover shot. They Richard Avedon. He was he was amazing he took muddy waters and muddy had come up Into his studio and we were gonna photograph him and muddy was wearing a hat and a coat And he wouldn't let muddy take it off. He pushed him against a white wall took six pictures and said I have it and he did It was gorgeous. That was hard again. I mean Amazing beautiful beautiful photography The difference in type that's hand drawn versus Type set or machine set tell me about the difference in what they look like what they feel like The perception of them Well, you won't see that anymore There won't you there won't be the difference in it In the old days you could because it looked like it was handcrafted and it and you could see you could see error Now and this is actually very exciting almost Everything we design as a bespoke font and it is because the computer software really has grown to the point that it perfects as you're as you're doing it and There's a core courses called type Cooper Cooper Union and The art students go and they they take the courses and they not only can Draw complete alpha bets.

46:12They can program them. So We compete with the type businesses because the type businesses sell licensing and what they do is This is really I think it was a mistake, but they Instead of being partners of the designer they became competitors of the designer in that They want you to purchase the font for some use for a corporation And they sell the corporation a license and they have to rebuy the license every three years So they're buying the same thing that they were using over and over again where a type designer Is more likely never to do that an individual type designer, but to create a font and create one fee for the use of it and let the company have it So the graphic designers who have who've become type designers, which are really young people starting out and they do great work And then there are the the older type designers who made foundries and started selling them and they're selling licensing fees How do you find young design talent to work in the company?

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47:13Well, I teach So through students Absolutely a students and referrals from other teachers who have good students That's generally how I found most of my staff my my Associate as a woman in kristin uber And kristin was my student and then she worked as an intern at panogram for me and then I centered down to the public theater To be their in -house art director and she had worked on the public theater for me internally So she knew the public theater and if you ever saw the film abstract she's the woman on the computer doing And then she went to the wing when it was open and which was designed by another panogram partner Emily Obran And then came back to me during covid because my my uh senior designer who was also a student Had gone to apple by stole I couldn't compete.

48:10I was it was covid. I had no one To know who to even know who to hire, you know because we're all sitting in rooms by ourselves And then I realized that the wing had folded and that kristin was available. So I grabbed her back great That was great Tell me the story of pentagram from the beginning Well pentagram is a really unusual design firm. It was founded by three men in London And it was originally called a Fletcher Forbes Gill Colin Forbes Ellen Fletcher and Bob Gill and they had an idea that designers should share profit and come together and not worry about who got the job that paid the most But that the combination of talent would make everything elevate And actually it didn't work in the first year and Bob Gill left And then an architect named Theo Crosby joined and so they decided to make it Crosby Fletcher Forbes always an alphabetical order And architecture is on a different time frame because the projects take much longer So that thea would have very big projects, but they might might go on between two or three years And the graphic designers are turning around things more quickly, but the fees are lower And that worked all right and then they decided to make an associate who worked for Ellen Fletcher a partner and his name was Mervyn Krlansky But they didn't put his name on the firm because he had a big long Jewish name and they didn't want to put it on the firm And he was sort of annoyed by it and then Kenneth Grange joined and he was a product designer and he's actually Sir Kenneth now he designed all of the Kenwood appliances in Great Britain the washers and dryers and things that everybody had in their kitchen that they grew up with and he did that at pentagram And he became the fifth partner and Mervyn got annoyed because his name wasn't on the firm It was going to be Crosby Fletcher Fletcher Forbes Grange and no Krlansky So they went off I think to a little partners meeting and they had a fight about it and Alan was reading a book on black magic and he said let's admit let's name it pentagram.

50:19They're five of us So that's how the name came to be and then that was stupid because the next year John McConnell joined and then there were six But they didn't want to go through the name change So I think part of the reason for pentagram's longevity is this sort of moving ownership of it through different people Who decide not to change anything and to use the formula for it and we've never changed the logo since the logo was designed I mean have all these designers you think no we don't want to touch it. It never no one will ever agree. It's pointless Right now they're 21 partners We have offices in New York in London and then Individual offices one in Berlin and one in Austin, Texas and that had to do with just sort of happen stance of people who were in a bigger office or Something moved around and they wound up on their own, but they shit they still are in part of the system what's unique?

51:17is that The partners are essentially running their own business and sharing and that the sharing is very important because it understands that Design business is not predictable certain industries go up and down for example somebody was working for cryptocurrency company Uh -oh, you know things like that do happen so but but collectively You're you're much stronger and the likelihood we're all going to go out of the business at the same time Is not real so that that means that there's a certain security in the numbers and that also we own the business and We've developed stock in the business so that you don't Get old and just be left with your drawing tables like so many designers were But the the significance of it is that if you're responsible and you run your business and you take on Enough work where you're profitable and you also can control the work you do you can do pro bono work or do things for free Because you want to and you can grow your your your visual vocabulary and really do things that can elevate the profession Which I think is the goal what year did you join?

52:31uh 1991 It's been a good run 32 years incredible. Yeah, and How do new partners Join do they get invited? Is that how it works? Yeah, yeah, you you are you generally we know you know like you're Watching other people's work and then you might meet them socially because you read a design conference and you sit down You see gee, this is a terrific person Their work is great. They'd be a good asset to the organization Sometimes that somebody you've just worked with on a project and you've collaborated for some reason or another They bring a special talent like a product designer would or they were The star of the New York Times being the the art director of the magazine like our newest partner Matt willy was You know and you you know them a little bit socially and you know who they are and if you like them And they want to join that's how that happens nice And is the partnership mainly financial or is there any crossover creatively?

53:33Can you ask one of the partners that you think is particularly good at one style of something that's different than your taste and To be involved in something that you're working on or to give you an opinion do you ever do that is their crossover? Yeah, there's a lot of it. I mean there's some My partner Lou Cayman and Emily Oberman serving I guess as our director and designer I've been doing Netflix for magazine for for months and months and then they collaborate on an ongoing project I've collaborated usually across disciplines like somebody who doesn't do what I do You know like I'll I'll Collaborate with a product designer or I collaborated with my partner Abbott Miller on some exhibition designs where where we Our talents really complemented each other, but I'll tell you graphic design like picking typefaces and that's also that stuff's very personal That's really hard.

54:27You know that there there there are sort of areas where you do it very I think easily in other areas where you don't You Welcome to the house of macadamias macadamias are a delicious superfood sustainably sourced directly from farmers macadamias a rare source of omega -7 linked to collagen regeneration enhanced weight management and better fat metabolism macadamias art healthy and bring boosting fats macadamias failure friendly keto and plant -based macadamias no wheat no dairy no gluten no ghee mOs no preservatives no palm oil no added sugar the house of macadamias I roasted with Namibian sea salt crack black pepper and chocolate dipped snack bars come in chocolate Coconut white chocolate and blueberry white chocolate Visit house of macadamias .com slash tetra back to Record design from you designed album covers and then we've gone by the time the CD came in or you still doing CDs My left when the CD came in I thought I'd better do book jack as they were bigger I'm serious really Yeah, I don't want to design these little things.

56:17It was like somebody shrunk the work Cassilly it's funny. We went from 12 -inch album covers to five -inch CD squares to now a thumbnail and It seems like there's an opportunity that no one has yet done. I'm still waiting for it where We went from this physical Object that had to be a certain size so that was the limitation and that limitation got smaller But now in the digital world we have endless space But it seems like we're just still doing a thumbnail. It's it's odd that no one has decided to create the world That's the visual image or the moving visual images whatever it is for the collection Well, I think that's not that difficult to do if you think about it I mean it may be that you download You know a movie with it or you download some kind of film or something that you you can either project or that you can You know that you can look out on your on your TV.

57:17I mean What I've noticed is there are a lot of there's a lot of record covers that are back And it's because people seem to love vinyl and I think part of the experience of vinyl was when you got the new album You held it and you looked at it and you read the liner notes and you had this other point of relationship So you could really absorb it but you know I have my Record collection on my iPhone and I drive my car One of my albums come up and I see my little cover and I'm still happy Send a little cover on the screen of the car When you work for a legacy brand like New York Times or Coca -Cola or Saxo Fifth Avenue one of those big companies and you're Refreshing what they do how much obligation is there to stick with what's familiar and How far can you go in terms of making it new?

58:11But there's a lot of tweaking going on The reason most people change a brand totally is something really bad happened You know if they got like the either there was some kind of Corporate malfeans or they made a product that was a failure or they're trying to change their image And that's when that's when you may be hired To do something like that which is really rare In the magazine industry all magazines will change the wrote logos right before they folded You know that was sort of they were last ditch effort to save the thing and then it would go down A company that's evolving Will sometimes tweak their logo to make it look more contemporary like if you look at Michael Beiruts work for sax fifth avenue When he first did it He got rid of a lot of the very florid stuff But stayed with the script because that was inherent in what the the company looked like and they've changed his identity Since he did it I think probably about 15 years ago or 10 years ago I can't remember how long and and they went to something even simpler So that there was this evolution down and it still looks very contemporary The thing is that you want it to be recognizable.

59:21I don't think the ordinary I don't think the public recognizes on a regular basis these kinds of tweaks Sometimes if it's radical it's not a tweak But they Accept them and they recognize the company because you don't want to lose that Recognizability if you change something drastically it usually means the products changed the ownership change the management change And you know things can really elevate their identity by doing that you know tweaking something to a way that it you think It's the same thing, but it's not but it looks more expensive I mean that's that's actually the thing that usually is happening or more fashionable or more hip or what more Whatever it needs to be to work in its milieu.

1:00:03I believe it was part of Michael Bayrood's Work with sacks that with the thing that blew my mind was he took the new logo and he cut it into squares Mm -hmm, and then rearranged the squares so that he couldn't actually read it But the curves of the letters were so familiar That just by seeing a postage stamp center you knew what it was And it was it was I thought it was brilliant beautiful The the new management came and they got rid of it wow because they actually found it. I think challenging You know that it has to do with the sensibility of the president of the company and what they're willing to accept Don't he get all the packaging with it.

1:00:48It was astounding really really wonderful system because you could recognize it And yet it was modular and you could you could move it you could put it you could make it large You could make a small you could make ad campaigns with it it totally worked And then somebody just changed it When you start a new project how much research do you do in advance? Sometimes I do You know a lot of research online to see what they are see other competitors are and and there's also a We have a woman a new business who also gives me some foundation about that But it's not really It's not really that's not really when I Pitching for the project when I get the project of what where the real research comes from is really interviewing And finding out everybody who's working on it and who who had a hand in it and what the history is and most importantly what the politics are The politics of the organization and how decisions are made is going to going to affect The way you handle and do the job.

1:01:48There's no way around it Because he would not you have to know who the key decision maker is and and how To begin to organize how you're going to show and and explain work to them and if you're working bottom up It's a disaster You know that you want to get to the the ultimate decision maker first and work the other way around Otherwise you're going to be doing the thing two three four five times and not necessarily making it better So that's that to me is What do they do? What do they want to do? Where do they want it to go and who is the ultimate decision maker? Those are the things I have to know the most of and then then things like manufacturing and other stuff that are more technical and Executional which you're never political really Have you ever pitched just one idea or is it always multiples?

1:02:35I And sometimes I have to be just absolutely sure that's going to work what I do is I I have a a philosophy. I always show three And I want to show I have to Determine when I show them I do more than three, but I have to determine that I'd be happy with Any one of these that they take because I don't want to be designing something. I don't respect so I will generally show Uh one that is pushing a boundary and could be a little scary one that is More classic to the areas in maybe more expected but done better and one that's somewhere between the two and I find That Inevitably nobody picks the middle one.

1:03:28They pick one end or the other Very rare that they pick the middle one Interesting I'm taking that as a good I think that's a good sign some reason that feels like a good That sounds like good news I have I have different strings of luck right right now. I there are a bunch of identities that I really am incredibly pleased with you know after doing this all these years It's hard for me to think oh this is better than other work. I've done But it they are and I think some of it is that the level either the level of client is better The level of taste of the execution is going up When a client comes in is it ever here's a new product We don't even know what the company is called give us a name and make a design or is it always this is what we're called and You make the visual for it I think I've been involved in naming processes and it's usually in doing the logo So there might be you know sometimes we we hire consultants who are purely naming consultants because you got to do a lot of research with that So well, we'll come in with a list of names I've never had a lot of success with that to be honest with you And most people make up their own name and they do they do a better job with the Shake Shack list any Myers idea He had that he had that ideas He'd been wanting to do it for years and that was his idea.

1:04:44It was a great name. Absolutely great name The naming thing is Is good because it protects you from a lot of competition and I would say Probably the name is a consideration on 50 % of the startups How have clients changed since you started till now Tell me about the the people who were the clients expectations I'll tell you what has changed time When I when I go back to the record industry We were working with very limited technology You know that I would I would produce a record with the recording artist and to figure out what the cover would be Would be a period of maybe two weeks not more than that really because you what you wanted to get The album to the printer so it could be released on the schedule So it meant that you would sort of decide in one or two meetings And then you would set up a Photoshop or make up for hair You get an illustrator to do the project and it would or you would design the typography or whatever you would do And they would come in and they generally made some comments and you might do some iterations to it And then you would type set it and then when you type set it it would go out to a typouse And it would come back and it would be these pieces of paper That you had to rubber cement down on a board that was called a mechanical and the mechanical was it was the blueprint for making the album cover And sometimes you had a you always had a proofreader read the copy And then the proofreader would find errors in the copy and there wouldn't be enough time to reset the type So you would cut in things like exclamation points or or commas or things that were left out by hand And they would be put into the thing and then they would be photographed and color separated And that would come out and that would be the album cover now I would say a process of that would take Maybe close to a month with the sort of trial and error the cover and then setting the type and getting the thing out All of that time except for the meetings with the client who is the usually the recording artist Was production time Now we have all this equipment we have all these fantastic computers and things we can show things and demonstrate things We can do retouching you got Photoshop on the thing we can set the type And centaneously if the type is is all the wrong copy you can replace it in five seconds But the things take even more time than they did Back in the record days and what do you think is taking up all that time Clients making changes people's opinion people come in they don't they don't read the they don't give you the right copy They're lazy they didn't do the thing they had seven people look at it and they sent you the wrong thing or You had a whole meeting and you had gone through every single piece of Whatever it is you're designing on the identity and you show them and then they decide oh no No, we don't want to do that color.

1:07:47We're gonna change it to this We got to see it this way and you do the whole thing over again And they never seem to run out of time and because you have the equipment and they know you can make the change Why not I went up to Sony records of I think Maybe it was 15 years ago about something or other and Sony which used to be CBS records now right CBS records is now Sony records your Yes, my old company. I went up there as a matter of fact They call me all the time because they get call still for permissions to use some record recording artist art And they don't I think they've assigned me the copyright because they don't they don't know where you know They bought the company, but they didn't actually buy the art and they don't want to deal with it So that's going on, but I went up there about something else and And there were a hundred people working in the department and when I was in the department We made record covers.

1:08:43We made eight track tapes. We made cassettes sometimes they were operas with the libretto's and The department that I worked in what I personally was responsible for was about 150 covers a year And some of them came in from Nashville. I didn't design them all but I designed a lot of them and There were 35 people in our department in total with a lot of them were in the mechanical room And they're the people that cut out the little commas and stuck them on that you know, etc So I asked the art director with Sony I saw this big department and I said I said How many covers do you guys produce a year and he says about 150 and I said we have a hundred people working here I said what do you do with the extra time?

1:09:27I need to know what I was talking about and then I realized They're making changes. Yeah, amazing Tell me about your relationship with typography. I Think We moved from a verbal language to a visual language and I think that people Recognized type without reading it That they can recognize they can recognize a brand without reading the name of the brand And that it it signifies something that they attach to it I think that's so much what Nike helped us do in that Absolutely brilliant 30 -year campaign widened Kennedy did and it was progressive But the computer did it as well because they started to have to recognize typefaces like before People didn't know what a typeface was they thought it was the lettering.

1:10:19Oh, they didn't even say lettering I was oh, that's like the the the the alphabet or the you know, they didn't know it had a name or that there was a a Serif one and a sans serif one and all of those things now they know all of that and that It means that you can shorthand communication In a way you couldn't do before and you can also abstract it like most of the work I do now Has a lot of animation Their digital signboards outside, you know, I do the public theater in New York City every year and now It's all digital in the subways even though they still the posters is digital on the street These things move people recognize it.

1:10:58It's type and motion and um I'm amazed at what people see and how they know it what they can understand Tell me the difference between something still and something moving When you when something is still It's easier for you to recognize the form of it But once you recognize the recognize the form of it you can stretch it and you can turn it at different angles If you if you go to our website and you look at landmark theaters you'll see that we did The logo for it as this L That's dimensional the strong and line and then when we begin to use it with movie Graphics inside, you know like the the person who's in the movie the stories in the movie or some image from the movie We're changing the angle and distorting it and you begin to read it both as an L and as as this other moving object But you understand the object in motion.

1:11:56I don't think people were capable of doing that Maybe 30 years ago because it wasn't common enough I mean, there are always motion met graphics in in movie titles, but they weren't as as um Daily and as predominant as the kind of motion graphics that exist say on Instagram the people are looking on their at their iPhone every minute and seeing that stuff So I think that that's a huge change in visual understanding That's why I think people recognize type and they don't really need to read it Unless of course you're reading an article. I'm not talking about text type I'm talking about things that are that are communicating a place or a service or something you need or want You know that that kind of Telegraphing of information you you know, you can you can recognize color and form on a on a sign that might be a gas station without actually reading it You don't do that anymore you recognize I Tell me about how you came to work with the public theater This was really right around the time I joined pentagram.

1:12:59I had I had there was a book that came out called New York design and before pentagram. I had my own business called co -pell and share and I had bought pages to promote co -pell and share and this book called graphic design new york And I had done it before I was asked to join pentagram. So the pages were stood and my my work was in this book and I had posters in it and there was a trust Elvis poster which is sort of a classic now and then there was a poster for a printing company called ambassador arts, which is The big A was this thing I did that was a cut up A that was put together with Xeroxes And they were side by side in the book and George Wolf who was the director of the theater sought and but He wanted to change the graphics of the public because they had been these classic Paul Davis posters for years highly recognizable But he wanted to cleanse the palette so he changed the identity Public theater didn't have an identity then did not have a graphic design identity didn't have a logo for the place It was known as the new york Shakespeare festival or the Joseph Pat public theater But it was it was never called the public and that's what we actually did with it and changed sort of the spirit of the theater and And it became very new york very loud and proud and I've been doing it for uh 29 years amazing when I lived in New York It was always loud and proud.

1:14:28I lived down not far and uh you really felt the feeling of this is something special Just based on I've never been it. I never went in But just based on your work. It was ubiquitous in my life and felt substantial That's branding That's what that that's what that part is it's graphic design branding the thing is that that the product matched it You know, I mean they they have been the inventor of so many terrific plays and writers and and things that've gone to Broadway I mean there's Hamilton or bringing the noise bringing the funk or or you know hair back in the day I mean that's the basis of the theater and they they should be They should be loud and proud.

1:15:13They are What sector of business do you think has the best design? Where do you see the best design in the world? Oh, that's a great question. I think there are there are fashion brands that have done incredible things and it really set standards and I really admire what Burberry did recently by taking their classic brand that was tired and sort of fussy and then flipping it around so it looks as cool as can be I mean, I just love that. I thought that Louis Vuitton their stores and like the sort of the embrace of the pattern that they already had fantastic And I think that there has been a trend in fashion branding where Good old fashion graphic design has pushed pushed these brands forward in a way that I never saw before like the the Spanish brand.

1:16:09I think they're Spanish or French. I'm not sure. Louis They do you know this this brand? I mean they they their stuff is so beautiful. It's so well branded and It's graphic design. It's in the purist form So I think that I think that's very terrific and I think I wish it was in more mainstream Brands that are sold in target. I wish I wish that that would happen as well and I don't see that I first I thought target was terrific because it was a it was a cheap brand that made itself fun But it seems to have fallen into a kind of a You know, just a discount store category and it really should come back up the tech industry is very erratic.

1:16:51I think that Apple Is sensational and that that was you know, it began With Steve Jobs and seems to have have been channeled into the company in their attitude about their packaging their advertising and and their product. I mean, I just think that they're they're stupendous that way Microsoft less so when they were my client and some of that is It's the difference between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates that that Steve Jobs thought he was a a Titan and he was an autocrat and he ruled and it was top down and it works top down does work if you've got sort of obedient forces But there's a downside to it if you if you leave or if the the company rebels Gates believed that his business ran better if the engineers who designed the products ran the individual areas So that I when I work for them doing windows 8 they were just there seemed to be like kind of anarchy in that And so when I work for them I started trying to create a system That would make things be collective which worked a bit like the Microsoft logo itself comes from the center of this diagram I did that how to do with The relationships of products so that windows 8 was uh They had this curvy logo with four boxes and what it did is it put it into perspective because it was off this perspective chart and all the other icons were drawn off of that with the Microsoft logo and the window being flat and that actually took force But they didn't do the other logos that I drew it just because they don't you know they don't talk to each other no It's amazing how that Accidentally Becomes because it sounds like it wasn't you didn't set out to design that part of the design you you that's right It you found it within the design Well, it was funny when I when I went there they had this That a logo that was in in The colors of the Microsoft logo and it kind of was curvy if you remember if you look at the wind what the windows logo Looked like it had evolved originally if I have somewhere I had this chart of all the Microsoft logos And the windows logo the first windows logo was uh an eccentric window It was linear and it had pains that were uneven Then somebody said wait a minute It's got to be in motion.

1:19:19This looks like it's too static So they sort of made it an angle but the angle curved then they bit mapped it So they had like bit mats in it then they had This thing that looked like a flag it had four four logos. It was sort of an angle But it was a curvy angle like it was a waving flag and when I when I met with him the first time I said well your name is windows. Why are you a flag? You know like I mean do I didn't understand the thing So that's when I thought I thought that they didn't mean to make a flag. I thought what they were really drawing Badly was a window in perspective Because what windows is as a piece of software is an ability for you to see you know You see through the window and that that's an appropriate name for that product and that the difference between Apple and Microsoft as companies is apple is top down and windows as your own perspective So that it made sense to put the window in perspective and that's why I did the chart and that was the that was the whole invention of that of that thing they Changed for windows 12 and they sort of brought back and this very dimensional thing that moves that has light coming through it and as much as very strange It was like fine.

1:20:34I think I think it was fine. I think they should have just left it alone But they they didn't but it's still around in its own way and the center is the logo I don't know who did I don't know who actually made that the logo Because I was long out of there. I think I designed that in I got 2014 2012 something like that I'm asking you this question as a partner in pentagram. How do different designers Approach the same project you can use examples if you want but think about how would the different people Come to find a way in to to solve a problem and how different would the results be We all have our own style and that there is the part of the process That is Getting the client to learn how to see That you have to before you can even work you sort of have to set the stage For what's plausible when they explain what they think they need and sometimes they think they need something and they actually need something else So you have that analytical part of dialogue Michael Beirut Can talk anybody into anything He's also he's just a great salesman in in in the nicest sort of way and um he makes Sports analogies and he he he sort of brings things into a language that his clients understand I could never do Explain things the way he explains things So I would act more like a school teacher and I sort of I sort of would show them things and explain why one thing works and one thing doesn't Which is not is compelling I think as what he does but I do it in the most compelling way that I can And then I think they're two Very distinct ways of doing it and everybody else is somewhere in the middle and they're They're all connected to their own personality and The way they want to explain things to clients like for example my partner Natasha Jen Is very analytical and very organized and she always makes like these very succinct diagrams That explain things to people very clearly where I would be uncomfortable doing that because my mind doesn't work that way And you have to find your individual basis of doing that Then you sometimes sometimes if you partner with somebody you may be doing it collectively also I do another form of work, which is environmental graphics, which is over you know They're projects that take a long period of time and don't require the same kind of explaining and selling because they're in an industry that is more about building in fact They're more about craft in many ways they're more like right the way we did record covers You know that if you persuade somebody to looking it's looking at something and they think they want to make it And they and you cost it out and they find out they can make it it make to take four years to build But it looks exactly like the Photoshop rendering you showed them Whereas when you do a piece of graphic design you might start out with somebody and it comes out totally different at the end because of the client relationship Give me an example of environmental design Okay, you've seen the public theater.

1:23:57Yeah, there's that you've seen the building There's the outside of the building and the inside of the building They're a graphics all over the place and they're they're built into the into the walls And they're the logos of the the place And there are objects there and there's an awning that comes out and there's a big word public on the top of the awning and it signs it signs and spaces And uh in New York City I've done symphony space which has sort of Complicated graphics new 40 second street studio. There are a lot of them in different places And they they exist in the inside of lobbies of buildings There's a terrarco floor that I designed that's in a hotel in Fort Lottardale that's 8 ,000 Feet and it's a map of Fort Lottardale and you walk over it and stuff like that That's you know this part of the the genre what is the relationship between design and architecture in general Well, architects tend to be my clients that it really depends upon How you're brought into the project?

1:24:57I met uh Jim Polshek who own who owned a design firm that was Polshek partners that has changed His name to any add later when he became old and was retiring and they They're an architecture firm that do a lot of wonderful things like museums He did the you know they did the Museum of Natural uh the uh earth center for earth and space at the Museum of Natural History in New York City That was probably the first big building I signed and I met Jim on and the lobby at the public theater many years ago And and uh this was before we did the The the major renovation of the lobby But he had to put up something quickly because George Wolfe had hired him at the same time where he was there at the same time I was doing the new graphics and he saw them and he liked them because they were sort of constructivist And he likes that period and he says I know let's just cover the place with this stuff And we said a hung things on the wall and made banners and that was the first time I was an environmental graphic designer So that's you know, it happens in connection to a place because it's part of the personality of it and uh It's very exciting work.

1:25:59It just takes really long Tell me about the maps For a long time I did these kind of sarcastic and fractured paintings of information that were small that I did uh for New York Times pieces like I made a a diagram of a blog thread or um, I did a some kind of information about Bill Clinton's uh I don't know whatever was going on with him at the time you know the Monica Winsky stuff and his america and who supported him Who didn't and they were political and I got used to do it in newspapers and somewhere I think around 1998 I think it was when I started working for city bank and I was really just doing straight corporate work for like a period of about six years with some other work that was more interesting and I thought You know, maybe that stuff that I paint the little things that I paint for the newspapers would be good if it was really big So I did a painting of the world.

1:27:02I went up to we have a house in Salisbury, Connecticut and their space and I enrolled Some canvas and I painted the world and I put all this information and it looked you know, then it was I I painted the world inaccurately and left things out and didn't care and wrote my version of everything and that was my pain And then I began to do them even bigger and as I was doing them I thought well Maybe this is really a thing then I had a friend who had a gallery and he Told me to bring my paintings in and show it to the gallery which I did and they gave me a show and it was a success so I've been doing it ever since we make prints of the paintings and We sell the prints as well as the paintings and recently I was commissioned to Paint a whole Porsche in 1977 Porsche and It's covered is a United States map.

1:28:05This is the sort of upside down going around the car because if I One side of the car is you know the Canadian border and the other side of the car goes down to the bottom of Texas so it's sort of wrapping it and It's in an exhibit. I'm having I actually In Munich in a museum called Pina Cotec Moderne and it's all my typography including the car incredible are you going Yep, beautiful. You talked about the size of the pieces getting bigger talk about the size of art and why size impacts our relationship to the pieces that we see That's a really interesting question. I'm not quite sure how it works.

1:28:48I mean the thing is that I know what happened with my own paintings is that people seem to marvel at the scale of the of the the painting and relationship to the density of the information And the thing is that the information is often You know, it's mostly inaccurate. I mean I saw somebody there was a giant painting I did at the United States. It was a Cooper Hewitt for about six months And there were two men I walked in one day and there were two men describing a road trip they took and they were sort of Navigating themselves across the country on a road that was in the wrong spot You know and and it was sort of you know, it wasn't deliberately in the wrong spot.

1:29:26I just messed up They're sort of right You know, the information is sort of right because it's a it's generally correct You know, it wasn't like I was drawing a road from Taiwan in the middle of the United States It was just that I had a wrong route number on it, you know, and yeah, that that was probably the road he took but not the route number They're poetic mess They're They're opinionated also they're very political mostly and I get my frustrations out that way I had done a map that was completely low I had the last the last total show I had where I was doing One thing throughout it was really repainting the United States a million times with all kinds of demographic information and you know I am very politically obsessed, you know, I mean I just uh, I am a news junkie and I am really interested in how Americans think and What their value structures are which I don't understand anymore and I keep trying to find some commonality But I find that just different parts of the nation are really really different when you do the research And it is how we're how we're one nation is is I guess that's why there's Europe and maybe that's how that happened Maybe they were the United States is where Europe was when it all became different city states.

1:30:41I don't know Could be How has your relationship to design changed over the course of your life? I you know, I started out not knowing what being a designer meant and um I learned it on the job and I began to find my own method of communicating and and building On a language that I see people respond to and use and I I love it all I have to say I love The things that I do that are personal, but I also love the things that I do that are really public I don't I never tire of Finding out somebody saw something or was influenced by something or that it was out there and that I could make that happen And I think we're all very lucky When we can do those things It's amazing that we get to make creative things and people like them and it ends up being our job It's it's wild.

1:31:45It's a wild that the world works the way it does Now I think the the notion To to be able to love what you do is so fantastic so many people don't and um I find that I appreciate it more as I as I get older and You know find myself not feeling like I'm repeating myself and not Feeling anything but kind of limber in it and that's great great How important is it to break new ground and create something new how important is newness? I think Nuneus is relative you know there there are no real I'm trying to think of like the last great originator you know like I think you know Vincent mango made something that nobody was making That's new.

1:32:41I don't think we I think it's very difficult to do that now because there's so much What I do think is that? You move things forward and you you make discoveries usually through mistakes That you're you're you're doing something and you've made a terrible mistake and you stop And then you realize there's a possibility and then you can then you can play with it and move it forward and sometimes You you stretch your form and that that's really what I'm always trying to do is stretch the form That's an interesting thing about mistakes and accepting mistakes Some people's egos wouldn't allow the mistake to be the good thing So we have to be really open -minded to accept the mistake As better than what we were trying to do Do you think that's hard for people really?

1:33:33Well, I think it's there's some people who if it doesn't feel like it's coming They have the idea it's for some people's more intellectual they have the idea and they want to execute the idea And anything that gets in the way of executing that idea is not good Well, that's that's a that's actually self -defeated for sure. I remember my year and the same boat years ago Michael Bayrood said to me he was working on something and he said I have this really idea But I can't get it to work and I sort of looked at it and I said maybe it's not a good idea I mean that's sometimes sometimes you think you do but that actually is not it's not going to work for you Because there's probably something fundamentally wrong with the thinking in it like right It's it's creating an impossibility that's either going to be too difficult.

1:34:20I mean in the end. I think All our best work actually should seem so easy Because that's that's the hard part is making it almost as if it happened itself Exactly It should have designed itself Tell me about timely work versus timeless work Everything is done in its own time. I mean you can't There are things that there are things that never change their principles that never change Usually if something isn't working, it's because the scale relationships aren't right You know, there's a kind of a dynamism that's existed as long as people have been pushing Paint on paper or making anything in in some form because it's the relationship if you make if you do Something that's very extreme or something that's very withheld and quiet.

1:35:14They're going to work It's the middle of this the bad place You were part of the design commission for New York for a period of time What's that like? It's amazing that it exists. I'm happy that it exists. What were the kind of things that you guys would do? Uh, it was uh actually this was Bloomberg changed the name of it used to be called the art commission He changed the design commission and it used to be a commission that was Not run by professionals. It was uh sort of contributors to political campaigns that got appointed to give somebody a nice position in New York City Theoretically the role of the committee And it's called a commission.

1:35:53I was commissioned or share for a period of six years So I like being commissioner You you were looking Why not? There's another side side bar if not you who James Paul Shek invited me to be on the commission. He was the head of the commission and It was there was a wonderful engineer named G Nordstrom Another wonderful fine artist named Brian Kin Signi Neilsson a landscape architect was on the commission and we were all design professionals and our job was to look at new buildings and renovations and things that were in on New York public land and on public property and to make sure that These things were designed well and would serve serve the city I mean it was and Bloomberg was it was a design mayor.

1:36:51I mean I when I designed the high line He had just become mayor and he was the one that made that thing go Which was great when we were when we were working on the high line back in the day And he we actually rock I was working with Robert Hammond and Joshua David who started a thing And I did their identity and then there was a book about it and the book needed somebody in politics to Sort of sign on it and he they had Martha Stewart and they had Mike Bloomberg, but they were both sort of business people and then 9 -11 happened and Bloomberg was elected mayor And then all of a sudden it was met we pulled the book off press and put it back and it was mayor Mike Bloomberg And he and Adorso the thing and then all of a sudden all city government began moving to to make this thing become a real thing So beautiful and he did so much incredible work with parks He in point at a point at a great parks commissioner and her name is Betsy Smith and she's now at the Central Park and servency and they they really were rebuilding parks all over the city and The design commission was there to look at things like that and also things like bus shelters and at that point in time the new bus shelters were developed and The goal was that New York was full of terrific designers and architects and they should be getting the jobs And they should be doing the work and the work should be enhancing and pulling up New York So that we would sit we would go down There would be about three hour sessions for morning once a week And the people who were working on the projects and the the city agencies that were supporting them would come and they would present To the design commission and it was our job to approve or to recommend and then approve or or to try to help these things get better And move through the city it wasn't about necessarily saving money It was really about about the design of these things and it was really really interesting And I think I was lucky because the commission was so terrific and we we I think we did a lot to to make things better Sounds beautiful.

1:38:57I'm happy you got to do that. It's great It was great. It was fun. We haven't spoke since the creative act was released And I just want to thank you for helping it be all that it is And people seem to like it and the design is working And I just want to thank you for being so helpful and making something that people seem to resonate with Well, you know, they were your choices Rick. You're really this you're the star of that book I was just the facilitator But you made great choices. I mean, it's interesting. It was interesting to me working with you on it because You made choices. I would not have made and you made him From a very different place than I would probably be coming from I mean the book is Is interesting because it's very classical but it does have a contemporary edge and that that that's sort of the terrific thing about it I probably would have gone more much more contemporary with it But it wouldn't it wouldn't have had the richness That was brought to it by the classicism in it Cool, but thank you and great seeing you as always Fantastic.

1:40:09Thank you. This was fun You

From the publisher

Paula Scher is one of the most influential designers of all time.
A partner at Pentagram since 1991, she began her career in 1972 at CBS Records, where she eventually became the art director for the cover department, designing more than 150 album covers a year.
Additionally, she has worked with a host of clients – Bloomberg, Coca-Cola, and the High Line – crafting identity and branding systems, promotional materials, environmental graphics, packaging and publication designs.
Her designs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, the Library of Congress, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other institutions.
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