Paula Scher (Project 5)

For our fifth project we were to pay homage to a famous graphic designer by designing a logo for their name and using it in a bio poster.  The designer I chose was Paula Scher and the first step was research.  I found a large amount of her work (above) and learned that she was a leader in the retro design movement with her different approach to typography.  I was attracted to her design because it had a very clean feel even though the way she places her type is all over the place.
So I started to sketch ideas before I went to the computer.  What I wanted to do was somehow contain her name.  Also there needed to be strange angles somewhere.  These are some of the initial sketches.  

I then went to the computer and put down some solid ideas. (below)  They were printed out and put on the “war wall” and I got feedback from the rest of the class on what was working and what was not.   

After some more ideas I finally chose a logo (last one in the one above).  It combined the container style used in her “Ballet Tech” poster and the angles that come up in a lot of her works.  Also, the font I used (Eurostile) is a san serif font because she used san serif fonts in a lot of her work.  

On to the bio poster!  First up was a lot more research.  Prof. Davis let me borrow a few of her books (Megg’s History of Graphic Design by Philip B. Meggs; Women of Design by Bryony Gomez-Palacio and Armin Vit; Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide by Johanna Drucher and Emily McVarish.) and I pulled out all the information about Scher and her influence on the Graphic design community.  Then I had to narrow that information down.  I ended up including her education, employment, clients and what she works with for the basic information as well as a paragraph about her design influence.  Finally I used a few of her own quotes from an interview that I thought really illustrated her character and her outlook on design. 

            Now it’s time to lay it out on the poster.  We had to use a picture of the designer, but in an interesting way, so that was the first thing I did.  I found a picture of her and cut her out and placed her in the corner of the poster.  I didn’t like how it looked though so I put it through live trace just to see what it would look like and it came out looking really interesting.  So I made her blue and the background yellow, a color scheme seen in some of her works.  Then I added the logo and put it in the center of the poster.  The rest of the information came after that and in keeping with the angles that she used I tried to align the information with the angles of the logo.  The final step was to bold the important things, add some more blue, and make sure that all the text was aligned correctly and I ended up with the final product below.