Paula Scher Quotes

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

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.

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

Words have meaning, type has spirit.

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.

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

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.

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

Your name is Windows. Why are you a flag?

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

Great design is serious, not solemn

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

Beige is the color of indecision.

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

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

Helvetica is the font of the Vietnam War.

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

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

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

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.

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

All maps are distorted, they are not literal fact.

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Zealand looks like the future to me

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.

Design exists to serve some purpose.

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.

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.

Design really can be anything.

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

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

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.

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.

Marketing is a necessary part of the creative process.

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

Design always has a purpose.

I love that the level of mediocrity rises.

Really, everything is designed.

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.

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.

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.