Paula Scher has been named the 2019 SEGD Fellow “for promoting the highest values in environmental graphic design and significantly contributing to the direction and growth of the field.” SEGD Fellows are the laureates of environmental graphic design. For four decades Scher has been at the forefront of graphic design. Iconic, smart, and accessible, her images have entered into the American vernacular. She has been a partner in the New York office of Pentagram since 1991 after having begun 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 reimagined the urban landscape as dimensional graphic design. Her graphic identities for Citibank and Tiffany & Co. have become case studies for the contemporary regeneration of American brands, and she has also developed identity and branding systems, promotional materials, environmental graphics, packaging and publication designs for a broad range of clients that includes, among others, Bloomberg, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Bausch + Lomb, Perry Ellis, the Museum of Modern Art, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, the New York Philharmonic, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, the New 42nd Street, the New York Botanical Garden, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Robin Hood Foundation. Scher holds a BFA from the Tyler School of Art and honorary doctorates from the Corcoran, MICA and Moore College. She has served on the board of directors of The Public Theater, and in 2006 she was named to the Design Commission of the City of New York.
