Paula Scher vs Jeffery Keedy

American Graphic Design.
Paula Scher was born 1948, Washington, D.C. In her career she has worked for broad range of clients such as Citibank, Bloomberg L.P., Bausch & Lomb, Coca-Cola, Time (magazine), Tif
fany & Co. and so on.
In the 70s Scher worked for CBS Records and Atlantic Records, designing album covers. Her favorit album cover is the one for Eric Gale, and the album Ginseng Woman. The illustration is by David Wilcox.
“His work would be nearly impossible to produce within a large corporate structure today. The approval process involves too many people, all of whom are too nervous to allow an illustration to be commissioned without seeing something similar already in existence.”

This is how Scher sees the world of graphic design for most of her professional career. Too many corporate people take away the interest and joy of design

. Much of Schers best work is when the clients are inside the world of graphic design or with entrepreneurs.

Jeffery Keedy
Keedy is a teacher at the California Institute of the Art since 1985. He has designed the type Keedy Sans in 1989.

“In the early days of digital design I was frustrated by how few good typefaces were available in digital form. Also I realized that most typefaces were extremely out-of-date an

d did not express the spirit of our time. I felt it had become impossible to do new typography with old typefaces that were exhausted of meaning.”

Keedy contributed to Emigre magazine in the twenty years of it publications. As a typographic designer he also writes a lot of essays fo

r different publications as Eye, I.D, Critique, Idea, Faces on the Edge: Type in the Digital Age and so on.

Keedy Sans was in the beginning (1989) considered illegible, weird, deconstructed, or confrontational design. Almost ten years later it's just another decorative type style, one among many. Its wilful contradictions are only what’s expected in design today.

So what is the difference between these two designers?
While Keedy jumped on to the digitalisation of type, Scher refused it for a long time, she had a distaste for the Swiss International Style. She said, “the act of organizing the Helvetica type-face on a grid reminded me of cleaning up my room”.

Keedy Sans has by The Museum of Modern Art in New York been collected as one of 23 milestones in the digitalisation of typography.

While Keedy embraced the new era, painting became Schers new media. Her book design for AIGAs (American Institute of Graphic Design) Garphic Design USA 11. A compendium of all the exhibits and competitions AIGA had held in 1989. This is what she says about the cover:

“The 1990 AIGA Cover was a spoof on graphic design in America, not dissimilar to the Print parody cover. I painted the information instead of typesetting it. It was writing as design. The cover simply took the words Graphic Design USA literally and then dished out some completely useless, nonsensical information. The front cover featured an eye whose eye lashed listed all the emotions and desires that might be attribut

ed to ambitious designers: fame, power, money, ego and

ennui. The eyeball carried an absurd dissertation about whether or not less is more. The background of the painting had a listing of every state in the United States, and the percentage of people in each state who used Helvetica. I made up the statistics, but I decided to base them loosely on the 1986 Reagan-Mondale presidential election. I reasoned that if Reagan carried a state the local designers were probably inclined to use a lot of Helvetica.”