MAKE IT BIGGER
In this extensive monograph, Paula Scher expounds on her professional life, from her modest beginnings as designer at CBS Records to her well-deserved status as principal at Pentagram New York. Of her first design job at CBS, Scher explains the politics of being an underdog designer. “I held the lowest possible position,” she reports in “Corporate Politics 101,” the aptly named first chapter. “I reported to the assistant art director, who reported to the art director, who reported to the creative director, who reported to the vice president of merchandising, who reported to the vice president of sales, who reported to the president of CBS Records.” Accompanying her written constructions are straightforward yet somehow humorous illustrated diagrams of the pecking order at the different design positions she held with CBS (designer in the advertising department and art director in the cover department) and Atlantic Records (art director in the cover department).

Scher’s second chapter, “Style Wars,” discusses her transition from corporate design monkey to owning her own studio. After quitting her job at CBS, Scher did some freelance design for a couple of magazines. She explains that most magazines fall into two categories: coping and craving publications. The coping style, “otherwise known as ‘ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag’” is instructional, while the craving style, “otherwise known as ‘shining shit,’” is more splashy and dramatic in nature. “The mannerisms of these types of publication informed all other forms of graphic design in the ’80s and ’90s, and are now the visual language of annual reports, brochures, books, packaging, and fashion advertising,” Scher writes. “Coping devices leaped right off magazine pages and became the language of computer screens. Most websites today owe their styling and organization to the coping magazines of the ’80s and early ’90s.” Her discussion of these types of magazines expands to the amount of publications that look just like other publications in their same genre. “If I receive a call from the editor of, say, a travel magazine, he or she will ask to see all the other travel magazines I have designed,” she says. “So coping magazines look like coping magazines, and craving magazines look like craving magazines. And coping magazines about money look like other coping magazines about money, and craving magazines about home decorating look like other craving magazines about home decorating. Once every five years a brave editor and publisher break the paradigm, and if they prove successful, shortly thereafter other publications follow suit.” As many problems as Scher recounts from her dealings with designing for publications, she does admit that her least favorite clients during her freelance period were advertising agencies—and not magazine editors (thankfully!).

Her third chapter, “In the Company of Men,” Scher opens with a lesson she learned from a presentation given by Pentagram partner Michael Bierut. This presentation was meant to explain the typographic system for a corporate packaging project for a large technology firm, and Bierut had put a headline above the typeface explaining, “This is Times Roman. It is a serif typeface. It has little feet.” Scher reacted at first by laughing. “Then I realized it wasn’t funny,” she says. “In that instant I understood what I had been doing wrong in client situations for more than 20 years. I had assumed that clients had come to me having the background to make value judgements about what they were looking at. When they picked inferior design, I assumed they were philistines bent on keeping down the American taste level. From Bierut, I learned that clients were ‘just normal people,’ and that normal people have a reasonable understanding of things based on their cultural environment … I was the one who was not normal … I had to learn to explain design in lay terms. ‘Little feet’ demystifies serif type. It explains a visual difference.”

Scher ends with a witty, self-deprecating note: “A designer I respect warned me that the danger of doing a book on my own work, beyond the obvious egotism involved, is that after its publication I’d be ‘over.’ I’ve been ‘over’ at least three times, rather prominently. Being over is a little embarrassing the first time, but if one considers that the average period of being ‘not-over’ is perhaps five years, possibly now shortening to three, being over is inevitable and something a designer should plan for. The great thing about being over—after one finishes the self-flagellation part—is that one can start right up again. This book is over.”
$27.50, softcover, 272 pages, Princeton Architectural Press