Author: Giovanna Qu

Paula Scher is a worldwide known designer and artist. She has years and years of experience and that is what lets her confidently design by instinct. At the same time, because she is so famous and well regarded I think clients are less inclined to go through infinite rounds of revisions and are more likely to trust her design proposals. I feel that if I were to propose designs that are out of the ordinary and that break rules, it won’t be as easy for it to be accepted because I don’t have years of experience and the client might not trust me. I’ve also had experiences with some older professors who I felt did not respond well to certain design proposals because they deemed them not normal and rule-following enough. Being at the beginning of my career I also can’t just do whatever I want and hope they like it, and if not onto the next one.

One thing I found to be contradicting from Paula Scher was how in one video she despises computers and can’t use them and can only send emails, and in the other, she talks about how she used Photoshop to render the designs for the underpass in Pittsburg. I don’t know if one video was older than the other and she eventually learned to use a computer or if one of her staff did the rendering, or if she just wanted to sound important and wise. I felt that it was stupidly arrogant. She can be arrogant all she wants because of her success, but you are going to be left behind if you don’t learn to use the computer. It is true that designers of today might miss the experience that comes from working manually, but computers are powerful tools that get jobs done much faster and easier. There is no point in dueling over the past when the present is digital and the world is going forward.