Make It Bigger By Paula Scher

Veteran designer Paula Scher has been influencing the design community with her brilliance for nearly four decades. Her autobiography, Make It Bigger, is a first-hand account of her journey from budding beginner to practiced principal at the New York design firm Pentagram. While the graphic design profession has continually changed over the course of Scher’s career, Scher herself has continued to refine personal design techniques without feeling the need to cave to current design trends. As a designer, a historian, and a trailblazer much can be learned from Paula Scher’s long line of professional pursuits which are all a part of her book Make It Bigger.

Make It Bigger, Paula Scher

In the early days of her career Paula Scher designed album covers for CBS records. Being part of such a corporate environment led to a variety of power struggles between Scher and her executives. Like anything else that was seen as a moneymaker, executives at CBS records wanted to create albums that would sell music first and foremost and were less concerned with artistic or conceptual design. Fortunately, because of time constraints that were sometimes involved in the process, Scher was able to squeak through highly conceptual designs she later said would have never been approved for the marketplace today. Of course there were a few album covers she probably wishes she could forget, “A friend at CBS records in the seventies predicted that when I die, my epitaph will read, ‘Art director of the original Boston album.’ The thought has always horrified me” (Scher 26). It is this use of dry wit sprinkled throughout the book, which makes for a few good chuckles along the way.

A great deal is also shared in Make It Bigger about the client-designer relationship and the politics that many times accompany them. For example, Scher points out that, a good portion of the time, her first design proves to be the most successful, but clients believe more is better (instead of more just being more.) Scher explains that she often times presents design options that are simply fillers, because the client wanted to see as many examples as possible. This somehow made the clients feel that a satisfactory amount of time had been spent on the design problem, regardless of how easily the solution may have initially come to Scher (the Citi logo is a great example of this). It was these types of professional experiences, and how Scher reacted to them, that I related to and learned most from the book.

Scher’s love of New York City also shines through page after page. The city seems to inspire her work and, in turn, her work inspires countless others combing the streets of Manhattan. Her passionate work with typography takes center stage all over New York City. From giving The Public Theater it’s identity to her design of the exterior signage at 770 Broadway you can see that Scher has a great eye for laying out type. She likens New York City streets to magazine layouts saying, “A well designed city allows the user to navigate both terrains and encourages their peaceful coexistence” (Scher 236). When the final designed came to fruition for 770 Broadway she explained, “the building is the story, but the awning is the headline” (Scher 236).

Make It Bigger by Paula Scher is an excellent read for any designer who wants an inside look into the world of graphic design from someone who has been in the profession for 40 years. Scher’s exceptional amount of experience in a variety graphic design areas becomes inspirational. Her use of dry humor combined with lessons on tackling design and client related issues makes this book an enjoyable read with nuggets of knowledge tucked into every page. It also paints an accurate reality of what a designer will face throughout their career. Case in point, “being ‘over’ is inevitable and something a designer should plan for. The great thing about being over—after one finished the self flagellation—is that one can start right up again” (Scher 261).

Below you will find part one and two of a great interview with Paula Scher.