Paula Scher

     Paula Scher is, from what I've gathered, a very expressive designer who is influenced heavily by her surroundings and her disdain for helvetica and every conforming, conservative, war starting institution for which it stands... sigh.  While I do enjoy her designs aesthetically and formally I find I often disagree with her reasons for her formal choices.  Doing a project a certain way for a thousand dollars is fine, but I don't think you should then be able to trace every decision back to "and it allowed me to keep the thousand dollars".  A thousand dollars does not mean you can make Utah an Island to justify your geographical misnomer.  But I digress (busts a vein).


     One thing that Scher does have right is her observations about how geography can influence design.  The world is full of lines which in turn make one giant grid for us designers to fit into.  Letting this grid influence our design allows for cohesion between the environment and design.  Obviously we probably won't be making a building in New York that follows the grid of our design.  More commonly the infrastructure will already be there as there are certain rules to follow, and nobody wants a design that doesn't look like it belongs somewhere.  This also forces us to create solutions for spacial relations we do not naturally process, and take lessons from these solutions.  The infrastructure that we have made is an extension of us, and our design is an extension of the infrastructure.