Paula Scher quotes:

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  • Helvetica is the font of the Vietnam War.

  • Great design is serious, not solemn

  • What you do is look at yourself and find your own way to address the fact that the times have changed and that you have to pay attention. You can't be a designer and say, "Oh, this is timeless".

  • I love the big scale and immediate impact of posters. They're my favourite things to design.

  • The best way to accomplish serious design ... is to be totally and completely unqualified for the job.

  • Art has no purpose. It exists for its own sake.

  • Beige is the color of indecision.

  • Design always has a purpose, art has no purpose. That's really the difference between them. Do I think one is better than the other? Absolutely not. I think they both fulfill functions.

  • Design really can be anything.

  • Having no purpose is the function of art, so somebody else can look at it and ask a question. Design is different - you're supposed to understand what's going on. You can be delighted by it, intrigued by it, but you're supposed to know it's a hot dog stand.

  • I don't want being a woman to be a factor, or being short to bea factor, or being Jewish to be a factor, or anything that makes you outside some design "norm"that I don't understand anyway. That makes me nervous.

  • I don't want people to think about my age. Notbecause I don't want them to know my age, I just don't want them to think about it, I don't want itto be a factor.

  • I know that in my own work I'm able to do all kinds of things I never thought I'd be able to do.

  • I like what I do. So why would I want to stop doing it?

  • All maps are distorted, they are not literal fact.

  • All the little risks I took were sort of like all the apartments I had moved into: I was finding the right spot.

  • Be culturally literate, because if you don't have any understanding of the world you live in and the culture you live in, you're not going to express anything to anybody else.

  • Creativity isn't about the advantage or disadvantage of a specific time or culture. Creativity is something that comes internally from a human being having a genuine mistrust of rules. And that may be the constant. It's almost like there's some rebellion in it.

  • Design always has a purpose.

  • Design exists to serve some purpose.

  • Design is the art of planning, and it is the art of making things possible.

  • Find out what the next thing is that you can push, that you can invent, that you can be ignorant about, that you can be arrogant about, that you can fail with, and that you can be a fool with. Because in the end, that's how you grow.

  • For people who make inventions, whether they make scientific inventions or artistic inventions, they're driven by pretty much the same thing. It's some mistrust from somebody saying it couldn't be a certain way, and overthrowing that. But that can happen at any point in history, at any time you come along. It doesn't get better or worse because you're born in this era or that era - I think it's more individualistic. It comes from within, you know, it's an internal thing.

  • I always drew. I was, you know, the school artist. I was the person who made the posters for the prom. That's who I was.

  • I do different things. I'm a designer. I'm a painter.

  • I don't think of design as a job. I think of it as - and I hate to use this term for it - more of a calling. If you're just doing it because it's a nice job and you want to go home and do something else, then don't do it, because nobody needs what you're going to make.

  • I find that I'm at my least creative point when I am doing something that I've done in repetition and I know all the rules - I never break the rules because I know them.

  • I get to work on things I've never done before and I get better at it, and I can do things that are innovative. Which I've done in my fifties, and want to continue to do through my sixties.

  • I love that the level of mediocrity rises.

  • I never thought I'd be able to design all the things I've been able to design. I thought that I'd be far more limited to a specific kind of work, and I've been able to establish an incredibly broad practice in all different ways, and it's because the expectations have gotten elevated.

  • I think Apple is a wonderful example of spectacular marketing and I love having my iPod. There are the naysayers who say that "nyah, nyah, it breaks" and I think "well, I don't like what Microsoft made..."

  • I think design, to a degree, is more generous and more humanistic than art, though great art can move us more.

  • I think that it's a great time to be a designer.

  • I think that the ability of people to accept new things is growing, and that's good for all of us.

  • I think that the notion of being creative is the notion that, inwardly, you assume that many things are possible. And that you can try these things and that something will happen.

  • I wasn't a very good illustrator so I became a designer.

  • Identities are the beginning of everything. They are how something is recognized and understood. What could be better than that?

  • Identity means "how do I get known? How do I expressmyself?" and that's generally what I'm helping somebody do. It may be three dimensional, it may be a public space, it may involve government,it may involve cultural institutions, it may involve corporations, it may involve editorial publications - it can be anything, really.

  • If I get up every day with the optimism that I have the capacity for growth, then that's success for me.

  • If I know something well, it no longer makes me say "wow" even if it's really terrific, even if it's a great iteration of it, because I know it well.

  • If people that made products didn't market them and sell them we'd have no economy and nobody would be working.

  • I'm hoping that I continue to be innovative on things that are tremendously visible and are still important projects.

  • I'm most proud of the fact that I get to keep growing.

  • I'm not from a generation of kids that grew up on a Mac.

  • It could be that going to work is better than being home. But you should never think of days as the weekend. It should all be the same, it should all be stuff you want to do. And when it isn't then you have to change it, and you have to think about how you change it.

  • It took me a few seconds to draw it, but it took me 34 years to learn how to draw it in a few seconds.

  • It's through mistakes that you actually can grow. You have to get bad in order to get good.

  • I've become much more interested in architecture than I've ever been.

  • Marketing implies that you want a public to relate to your product - if it's a product - in a way that makes them want to use it. That is only good or evil in relationship to what the product actually does.

  • Marketing is a necessary part of the creative process.

  • Marketing is neither good nor evil.

  • Marketing is not inherently bad. That's just dumb. That's said by somebody that isn't doing enough work.

  • My expectation is that technology always changes.

  • My fear is that when you become an expert in anything then the expectation somehow makes you ordinary, in a way, because you become the firm that does that, or you become the person that does that. You really need to change the form to make the discovery.

  • New Zealand looks like the future to me

  • Planning involves considering how other people may use something.

  • Planning is design. As a designer what I tend to do, and what's different from being a painter, is that I interact with other people, and the people have things they need to have happen.

  • Really, everything is designed.

  • Some people are in stultifying environments where there are rigid rules and rituals and they need that to thrive, where other people are just asphyxiated by stuff like that.

  • Technology is something that grows and changes, and what I need to do is find out what it can do so it can do what I want it to do. And I want it to do whatever I want it to do really fast. And it's fantastic.

  • The goal of design is to raise the expectation of what design can be

  • The idea of retirement seems to imply that you stop doing what you always did. Why would you do that? I don't get that.

  • The job of the designer is to make things understandable, usable, accessible, enjoyable... important to a public, that involves the public.

  • The work needs to get out of your head and on to the table, and it needs to be done from the heart.

  • To me what really matters is that it shouldn't matter to you what day of the week it is.

  • We don't do everything the same way we always did it. We just don't.

  • What a designer does is he makes things possible that you didn't imagine could exist before, and it makes the world a better place. You know, it's a great thing to be doing. A fine artist does that, too, but they make the expression for themselves, not for others' use.

  • What happens is people - especially, I think, audiences in the United States - people confront new things a little bit afraid. It's like when you're a kid and your mother puts something on your plate you never ate before. I think that American audiences are very much like that, and when they can accept something new they can accept the next new thing, it's incredible. And what happens is that their expectation of what things should be is elevated, and that's really terrific for us.

  • What I hate is when something I've done is replaced by something better than what I've done. It's really embarrassing.

  • What makes me say "wow" continually changes. It changes based on what I know.

  • What makes me say "wow" is usually something I haven't encountered, in a new way... something I haven't encountered before or something I have encountered that I see in a new way.

  • Whatever you design[/make/build], use it to raise the expectations of what can be achieved

  • When I don't know all the rules I'm just wild.

  • When I paint I do a different thing than when I design. But both involve aesthetics, both involve thought, both involve planning.

  • Words have meaning, type has spirit.

  • You can build an ordinary hot dog stand or you can build a spectacular one, and you can do it sometimes without that much difference in money - if somebody thinks about it.

  • You can't say there shouldn't be marketing and (that) marketing is a bad thing.

  • You have to have a lot of kids.

  • You need to be able to ride past the technology by understanding what it can do, who you are, and where you want to take it. You don't want technology to lead you; you want to lead it, but it's very hard to do that when you're in the middle of it.

  • Your name is Windows. Why are you a flag?

  • Your work gets destroyed by dumb people and it gets enhanced by smart people and it really doesn't have anything to do with marketing.

  • Stefan Sagmeister says that nobody innovates past forty-five, but I think he's wrong. I want to keep doing it.

  • Creativity has to do with what came before you immediately, not what came before you a long time ago.

  • We become different people and we adapt to our environments, but that doesn't have anything to do with being creative.

  • As a painter I make up projects for myself to express myself. And there's no client, there's no direction.

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