The Female Pentagram Partners

Pentagram Partners

PAULA SCHER

NATASHA JEN

GIORJA LUPA

Paula Scher is an American Graphic designer, who is one of the most influential female designers in the world. Paula began working in the 1970s as an art director, she has now been working in art for the last 50 years and is still continuing to create and design. She started her career designing record albums for major record labels like Atlantic Records, designing albums for artists such as Bruce Springsteen and Bob James. Scher earned four Grammy nominations for her designs.

In 1991 she became the first woman partner to join Pentagram, this was where her most iconic work was made and her career started to take off. Her work lays somewhere between fine art, street typography, graffiti and pop culture (Paula Scher | Biography, Designs and Facts , 2014).

Scher used a mix of sans serif typefaces to construct a visual vocabulary which created controversial opinions, however this is how she made such an impact in the industry. Collections of her work are presented in New York MoMA, Museums fur Gestaltung and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. She also has designed for International brands such as Coca Cola, Microsoft, Tiffany & Co, Shake Shack and more.

During the Pentagram, Scher created one of her most ground-breaking series’ of designs for “The Public Theatre”. Her spin on graphic design for this poster set a new standard in the 1990s. Using unconventional spacing, a combination of font colours and weights, and the application of uncommon typefaces, Scher's text-heavy poster creatively presents a substantial amount of information in a visually engaging and expressive manner. The strong aesthetic and layered typography with bold colours was rare (Pentagram, n.d.).

In a podcast Paula has talked about her struggles being the only woman in a room full of men. She explained that her first couple of years were difficult, and was regretting joining, however by the third year she was taken more seriously and started to get better projects, which meant the opportunity to display her potential. She states that her reputation in and out of the Pentagram changed her sense of self (Gamolina, J, 2021). However, that didn't take away her success of being apart of Pentagram.

Paula Scher’s contribution of The New Wave of Graphic Design was heavily influential, this typographic style that she used started to appear in magazine layouts to advertising, the blocky wood type used in all caps was extremly poular after this.

Paula Scher

Pentagram is the worlds largest independent design consultancy it is a multi disciplinary design studio that covers topics such as graphics and identity, products, packaging, exhibitions and more! It is a world famous design house that is ran currently by 24 individual designers that work collaboratively or independently where they share the profit, loss and decision-making. Each designer with a different point of view, the group is less of a partnership and more of a consortium of creative minds that come together to explore creative ideas. (The Pentagram Papers , n.d.). The non hierarchical organisation will inevitable cause clashes between the determined individuals, but the Pentagram works by all the designers having a belief that “content must drive design, that good design must be informed by the world around it, that creative excellence is as important as financial performance, that good design elevates quality of life for society as a whole and that teaching the value of design is the responsibility of every practioner”.

It is the only successful design studio where the creators of the work are also the owners. The name got given as a description of the business, “A star of five equal points, with alternating points connected by a continuous line; symbolic of alchemy”(The Pentagram Papers, n.d.). The decision to open the studio was based on a reading by a fortune teller, they relied on the practise that “the best design is rooted in a good idea, rather than style, a principle Pentagram still follows today” throughout their workings in the studio.

The studio continued on, the firm then started to introduce more partners such as architect Theo Crosby, Kenneth Grange and Mervyn Kurlanksy where they established the new business operative and founded Pentagram in 1972( Pentagram, n.d.). From then the studio grew large and lost many. The company has opened multiple different offices across the world, in some of the biggest cities which are London, New York, San Francisco, Berlin and Texas. In the 1990s the first female to be offered a principle position in the Pentagram was Paula Scher.

Introduction

In conclusion, these three female Pentagram Partners are a few of the most influential female n designers of the decade all having produced unique and iconic pieces of work that have influenced the design industry massively.

Paula Scher has been a revolutionary part of the industry, her typographic influence and cultural and modern inspiration can be seen in so many different pieces of work and is a prime example of the modernism movement. With Paula being the first independent female partner of pentagram, this broke down a few barriers for women in design. She often spoke about the difficulties she had in her career being a female, by doing this she has been a huge contribution of normalising gender quality within the industry.

Natasha Jen has made an incredible staple on the design industry with her strong and unshy opinions, also her use of graphic, digital and spartial designs. She has such a variety of different work which has boosted her career massively. She has won multiple awards for her outstanding work and continues to inspire those in the industry.

Giroja Lupi is one of the most unique designers of the decade, her workings come from nothing but data, her ideas have been massively admired by those in the data and design industry. She has inspired those to take their own to spin to things and experiment, express yourself and break the “rules”.

Conclusion

Natasha Jen

Some of her most famous work has included her branding. Natasha has always been interested in technology and culture and how they affect the way we behave, how we interact and the way we consume, Natasha has created branding for the most successful technology brands such as AR/VR, gaming, AI, crypto innovations etc. She also has collaborated with huge brands such as Google, Pfizer, Reddit, Galaxy Digital, Metropolitan Mueseum, OMA New York and so much more. Jen has designed the signage for OMA’s landmark CCTV building in Beijing, Animations for Times Square and also built the modular identity for MIT’s architecture school.

Jen was actually an intern for Pentagram before she landed the job 10 years later, she worked under the wing of Paula Scher. Jen stated in an interview that she was scared of Scher and sometimes still is, however the work that Jen produced left a massive impression on Scher. She often asked mutual freinds for updates on Jen. Then, 10 years later is when Jen was invited for an interveiw for Pentagram that landed her the job.

Natasha is very controversional when it comes to opions, she is very truthful and open about her opinions and feelings towards design. One of most famous talks in 2018, “Design is Bullsh*t”, was a very truthful and opinionated speech which opened her up to a lot of criticism and caused quite a stir (99U, 2018).

Natasha Jen is an award winning designer and educator, and first landed a place in Pentagram in 2012. Jen’s work is extremely recogniseable as her unique use of graphic, digital, spartial designs that didn't follow the conventional guidelines of media and cultural contexts. Her work ranges from packaging, exhibition design, architecture, print, digital interfaces etc. She also teaches at the School of Visual Arts in Graphic Design. She has also been elected for countless awards such as AGI(the Alliance Graphique Internationale) which is the prestigous association of the worlds leading graphic desingers (Pentagram, no date) .

ITS THROUGH MISTAKES THAT YOU CAN GROW. YOU HAVE TO BE BAD IN ORDER TO BE GOOD

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(Long, M, 2019)

EVERYTHING WE SEE IS DEFINED BY GRAPHIC DESIGN IN SOME WAY

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(PrintMag ,2012)