The Power of Ideas. – Paula Scher

Visual Interventions
At the moment Scher is deeply involved with the design of a new urban center in the Mt. Vernon Square neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The final project will include a convention center, a museum, hotels and a retail shopping center. In order to inspire the architects and developers to build the district in the way the planners envision, Scher and her team have been creating what she calls “visual interventions.”

“It’s been an interesting project, to imagine a city,” she says. “We have to marry programs with architects and show renderings of two-dimensional work that look three dimensional. And the Macintosh has saved our lives. I’ve been able to realize things that I could only imagine, and they look so real.” And when they’re built, the power to bring imagination to life becomes nothing short of “phenomenal.”

Growing Up on Macintosh
Pentagram has always been a Mac house, Scher notes. “We didn’t invest in anything else. We started that way, we bought better Macs, we bought faster Macs, we bought more Macs, we still buy Macs.”

Why go with the Macintosh? Again, the answer is simple. “The Macintosh was designed for designers,” Scher says. “It’s the most versatile computer available for design. At Pentagram we’re doing typography, illustration, working with Photoshop, manipulating images. The Mac is the state of the art form if you’re a graphic designer.”

Scher, a self-described “technophobe”, is quick to point out that her entire design team has been born and bred on the Mac. “They are techno-babies,” she says, fondly. “They grew up on Macs, they draw on the Mac, it’s the way they think. They understand all the software, all the programs, and are completely facile with them.”

“I never ask a young designer, ‘Do you know how to work on a Mac?’ It’s a given. It would be like asking if a person knew how to read.”

Mentoring Designers
Scher has been mentoring young designers for years now, both in her role at Pentagram and for more than 20 years at the School of Visual Arts MFA program. “I tell my students to learn as much as they can about the culture in which they live, to be politically aware, and that it’s important to have ideas and think about things because design styles, like technologies, change all the time.”

Scher tells these aspiring designers, “You have to have a strong vision.” The computer is capable of generating endless revisions, instantaneously transforming one style to another, swapping one color for another in the blink of an eye. For a young designer, Scher says, that’s probably the most confusing thing. “I tell them you don’t need all the colors. Just the right ones.”

Staying Alive
In any field, to keep working in fresh ways after 30 years requires the ability to continually solve problems in creative ways. For Scher that means “the power of ideas have to drive the work.” Styles come and go; technologies are constantly changing, but “there’s no other way to stay alive in this profession without being able to think.”

Three decades after designing her first record covers at CBS, Scher still gets excited about the future. “My favorite job is the one I’m going to do tomorrow,” she says.