Paula Scher (born October 6, 1948, Washington, DC) is an American graphic designer, painter, and art educator in design, and the first female principal at Pentagram, the world's largest independent design agency. For more than three decades she has been at the forefront of graphic design. Iconic, smart and unabashedly populist, her images have entered into the American vernacular.

Scher earned her BFA from the Tyler School of Art in Pennsylvania in 1970, then moved to New York to accept a job as a layout artist with Random House's children's book division. In 1972, she moved to CBS Records' advertising and promotions department, but left after only two years to pursue a more creative endeavor at a competing label, Atlantic Records, where she took a position as art director. A year later Scher returned to CBS as an art director for their cover department where she remained for eight years.

During her time at CBS Records, she is credited with designing as many as 150 album covers a year. Some of those iconic album cover designs are Boston (Boston), Eric Gale (Ginseng Woman), Leonard Bernstein (Poulenc Stranvinsky), Bob James (H), Bob James and Earl Klugh (One on One), Roger Dean and David Howells (The Ultimate Album Cover Album) and Jean-Pierre Rampal and Lily Laskin (Sakura: Japanese Melodies for Flute and Harp). In addition her designs were recognized with four Grammy nominations. She is also credited with reviving historical typefaces and design styles.

in 1982, Scher left CBS to focus on her own work, and developed a typographic solution based on Art deco and Russian constructivism, which incorporated outmoded typefaces into her work. The Russian constructivism had provided Scher inspiration for her typography, and instead of copying the early constructivist style, she used its vocabulary of form in her work. In 1984 she co-founded Koppel & Scher with editorial designer and fellow Tyler graduate, Terry Koppel. During the six years of their partnership, she produced many identities, packaging, book jackets, and advertising, including the famous Swatch poster based on previous work by Swiss designer Herbert Matter.

Scher has been a partner in the New York office of the distinguished international design consultancy Pentagram since 1991. Beginning her career as an art director in the 1970s and early '80s, when her eclectic approach to typography became highly influential. In the mid-1990s her landmark identity for The Public Theater fused high and low into a wholly new symbology for cultural institutions, and her recent architectural collaborations have re-imagined the urban landscape as a dynamic environment of dimensional graphic design. Her graphic identities for Citibank and Tiffany & Co. have become case studies for the contemporary regeneration of classic American brands.

Scher has developed identities, packaging for a broad range of clients that includes, among others, The New York Times Magazine, Perry Ellis, Bloomberg, Target, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, the New 42nd Street, the New York Botanical Garden, and The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. In 1996 Scher's widely imitated identity for the Public Theater won the coveted Beacon Award for integrated corporate design strategy. She serves on the board of The Public Theater, and is a frequent design contributor to The New York Times, GQ and other publications.

In 1998 Scher was named to the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, and in 2000 she received the prestigious Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design. She has served on the national board of AIGA and was president of its New York chapter from 1998 to 2000. In 2001 she received the profession's highest honor, the AIGA Medal, in recognition of her distinguished achievements and contributions to the field. She is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale. Her work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich; the Denver Art Museum; and the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Scher holds a BFA from the Tyler School of Art and a Doctor of Fine Arts Honoris Causa from the Corcoran College of Art and Design. She has lectured and exhibited all over the world, and her teaching career includes over two decades at the School of Visual Arts, along with positions at the Cooper Union, Yale University and the Tyler School of Art. She has authored numerous articles on design-related subjects for the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, PRINT, Graphis and other publications, and in 2002 Princeton Architectural Press published her career monograph Make It Bigger.

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