Eye Magazine | Feature | Reputations: Paula Scher (2024)

Illustrating with type
JLW: Were you aware of other designers and the way studios worked?

PS: Peter Max was very popular. But he was too drippy, a bit children’s book-y to me … Then there was the counterculture: Zap Comics, Zig-Zag rolling papers. And Push Pin. And album covers – Zagorski did the silver Cream cover [Wheels of Fire].

JLW: You once said you can learn everything you need to know from just three Beatles covers: Revolver, Sgt Pepper’s and ‘The White Album’.

PS: Sure. In the Revolver cover there’s the grace and lusciousness of drawing against photography that’s simple black and white but incredibly involving. Sgt Pepper’s is a great editorial cover. It tells you about your times, you can keep finding things in it … you try to discern meaning, some of it seems cultural, some of it seems irrelevant – it’s an incredible narrative. ‘The White Album’ is the ultimate conceptual cover, the opposite of Revolver.

JLW: Interesting that the three covers you cite were not by conventional graphic designers …

PS: Well, I see Peter Blake as an artist who thinks like a designer. The 1960s were an inspiring time. There was the whole Fillmore scene in San Francisco, Victor Moscoso … It was counter-culture art – not what I was being taught at Tyler, which was Swiss Modernism.

JLW: Which you’ve pronounced against many times.

PS: Well I rather like it now, you know!

JLW: Were you taught those rules?

PS: First I had a design teacher who gave us Basel basics: move a black square around a white page, make a white on white piece – things that involved seeing and craft, but I was very sloppy, so for me that form of exercise was terrible. Y’know, the notion of lining things up and making things function, and then later designing a business card or putting typography on a grid was virtually impossible to achieve and depressing for me. I felt I was cleaning up my room in some kind of ordered system where the goal of life is to be neat.

I remember seeing Kathy McCoy talk about it from her perspective and she had said that the biggest compliment you could give to something was that it was ‘clean’. C’mon, there’s gotta be more than that… That can’t be it! What about expression, what about emotion, what about feeling? You had to be engaged with it in some way. If you could be neat, it seemed that you could achieve it. And that didn’t seem right to me about a form of expression and communication. If anybody can achieve it, why bother to do it, why don’t we all do it ourselves?

JLW: So putting type together – the way things were then – didn’t appeal to you …

PS: Yeah, the course split between design and illustration and I went into illustration. (I later moved to New York to try to be an illustrator.) What Zagorski did for me is this: I could never do the type on my projects, I could come up with an idea and I would illustrate the idea but he said to me: ‘Why don’t you illustrate with type?’ So I began drawing the type and discovering that typography could have form and then later when I began setting type at CBS Records, I found that you could be expressive simply by making choices.

JLW: Were you a type aficionado?

PS: That’s how I started, When I was at CBS most of the inspiration for the typographic album covers came from things like a Buckingham Pipe Tobacco tin. Or I’d buy a lot of old sheet music and copy the typography. I used Morgan wood types, which Jonathan Hoefler later digitised. When I started to give lectures, people started asking where I found my typography, because they couldn’t order the things from the traditional type houses, so I published Beautiful Faces through Champion Papers – all of my typefaces laid out on a grid so people could Xerox them. Now they’re all digitised. In fact I can tell when a type house picked up something from Beautiful Faces because they’ll use the name I gave it.

JLW: At CBS you commissioned a lot of illustrators … how did that begin?

PS: Well, first of all, I married Seymour Chwast! It was like I was living in an illustration landscape – and it was a golden age. Illustration was immensely popular. From around 1974 to 1980 I favoured this very lush illustration. I would commission it and then put typography on it. But I never felt that I owned the cover. It always became the work of the illustrator.

JLW: There’s a big return to illustration at the moment … would you like to revisit it?

PS: Well, you put your old clothes in the closet, and you think you’re going to wear ’em ten years later but they never fit you! Y’know I’ve been working now nearly 40 years – what I have to do is take what’s going on stylistically and let it inform me but I can’t go back to doing what I already did. I have to find my own little narrow thing that I can do and find something new to do it on. Which is how I change.

JLW: So when you started to do a lot of drawing again, was that to please yourself?

PS: I was always making things. In the 1970s I would put together rough-hewn comps and paint the type on acetate overlays. (I was horrified when people started making borders around things … you didn’t have to integrate the type into the illustration or photograph.)

In the 1980s the way I would work is that I’d find the typography. I would Xerox it and glue it down with wax and cut up the letterforms and move ’em around until I got that right and then I’d give it to somebody on my team to do the finished mechanical. Then I’d make the comp myself … like little collages – that was 
my art. By the 1990s the computer had come in and then it was pointless for me to make the comps… I never had computer skills so I always had to sit behind somebody and point. I felt I had my craft taken away from me, so I started painting because I needed to do something with my hands.

JLW: Yet over the years the hand-made work has become part of your practice hasn’t it – the maps and so on?

PS: That’s my fine art, I sell those in galleries …

JLW: But there’s the Public Theater posters, the environmental art and the op-ed illustrations … Your work is full of words. The projects are similar, even though the context is different.

PS: Yeah, that’s true. Like Zagorski said: it’s all illustrating with type.