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Abstract: The Art of Design | Paula Scher: Graphic Design | FULL EPISODE | Netflix — Transcript

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0:13[Paula] I walk outside and I see typography everywhere.
0:20New York City is a city of signs.
0:24Sometimes things written by hand,
0:27mismatched,
0:28hung up in some peculiar way.
0:31You think, "Oh my God, can I get up there and please readjust that sign?
0:34That's just absolutely awful!"
0:37The way numbers are on doors. No two the same down the block.
0:42All messages are different, and they're everywhere.
0:47Typography is painting with words.
0:52That's my biggest high.
0:54It's my crack.
0:55[funky music playing]
1:05[Lupton] Paula Scher is the goddess of graphic design.
1:10Her stuff is everywhere!
1:17[Bierut] Paula's been able to come up with
1:19more ways to make type talk than anyone else,
1:23and to create a distinctive body of work just with letters.
2:20[Paula] When I go to work every day,
2:22I feel like I'm navigating myself through a maze.
2:27-Hey. -[colleague] How are you?
2:33Look at this! A real type book!
2:36-Can you bring this to Courtney? -[colleague] Yeah.
2:38[Paula] I sit nose to nose with my partners.
2:41My team is on the fourth floor.
2:42I have to run up and down steps to see them.
2:45I actually like this. I think you should move 'em lower.
2:48It's very quick paced.
2:49You're seeing something that looks like this.
2:52I'm solving things on scraps of paper.
2:55Starting something, getting interrupted...
2:57-[colleague] Paula? -Yeah?
2:58The interruption is great.
3:00I like the way the icons also interrelate with the thing.
3:04Pentagram is a design cooperative.
3:06There's the benefit of a large firm,
3:08but everybody gets to act like they're an individual.
3:11There's no boss. Just friends.
3:14[Bierut] Pentagram's a supergroup of the most famous designers in the world
3:18doing the best work in the world.
3:20It's like an all-star team, and Paula is the indispensable player on that team.
3:25That one's my favorite so far.
3:27[Bierut] We all have our own individual style,
3:30individual way of working.
3:33[Paula] I could never walk into an office and sit down at my desk to design,
3:37I would accomplish nothing.
3:39I can sit down at my desk to read my e-mail.
3:42You go through your junk mail...
3:43A lot of crap.
3:44You throw it all out, you make a little order on your desk,
3:47and then you go, "Oh, my God, how am I going to solve this problem?"
3:52Then, you walk up the stairs,
3:54go into the ladies' room, put on your lipstick and figure it out.
4:01[colleague] It's...
4:02I love it like that. It's very slurpy.
4:05-Slurpy, yeah. -Don't you think?
4:07Yeah, I like that.
4:09[Paula] Ideas can be triggered by working with my team.
4:12[Paula] ...optical illusion.
4:13I see more than I would see if I was just doing it all by myself.
4:16It's fantastic.
4:18I think that you have to make "Girls" and "Boys" the same weight,
4:22with the exception of the pointy things.
4:24And then figure out how the other type intersects.
4:27And then we gotta figure out color.
4:30We're working on the Summer Festival posters for the Public Theater.
4:34They put on free Shakespeare in Central Park every summer.
4:38So, like here it says, Taming of the Shrew inside the wrap.
4:43You don't have to do that work with the whole name.
4:45You're putting this in a kind of lozenge shape.
4:48-I think it'll be cool. -Yeah, it looks really fun.
4:50So, give it a shot!
4:57I've been designing for the Public Theater since 1994.
5:02My first project was creating an identity for the Theater.
5:06When they hired me, they had a name issue.
5:10[Wolfe] One of the things that was very challenging
5:12about the Public Theater, it had multiple identities:
5:14it was the Public Theater,
5:16and then some people called it the Joseph Papp Public Theater,
5:19and then there was Shakespeare in Central Park.
5:21I wanted everything to feel like it was of one.
5:25That it was breathing fully as an institution.
5:29[Paula] It had to be populous.
5:31I knew it had to be New Yorkish, meaning it had to be loud and proud.
5:41I was flipping through one of my books
5:45on American wood type.
5:47I like American wood type because it's powerful, and it has many forms.
5:54On this particular page were these Rs,
5:57and they go back to the skinniest form or to the widest form,
6:01and I realized I could make the word "Public" in the same kind of weights,
6:07and it would symbolize all of New York.
6:10Every type of weight was included.
6:14You can create an identity for a whole place
6:18based on a recognizability of type.
6:24[Wolfe] Paula's work pulled people in. You instantly knew, "The Public."
6:30It's a language that could be dissected, taken apart, put back together.
6:35That's one the things I think is thrilling about it.
6:40[Paula] Typography can create immense power.
6:43You're working with things that create character.
6:46You're working with weight.
6:48You're working with height.
6:50If you take an E,
6:53and the middle bar is the same length as the ends of the E's,
6:57it feels different than if the little bar is half the length of the E's.
7:02If you lift the little bar up higher,
7:05it will make the typeface look like it was drawn in the 1930s.
7:10The same thing as if you drop the middle bar lower,
7:12it will look moderne.
7:14If a font is heavy and bold, it may give you a feeling of immediacy.
7:19If a font is thin and has a serif form, it may feel classical.
7:25So that, before you even read it, you have sensibility and spirit.
7:30And that, if you combine that with a meaning,
7:34then that's spectacular.
7:40When I did the High Line logo,
7:42the goal was to make it look more like a railroad track than an H.
7:46If you take the kind of weight that might make the line for a railroad track,
7:50and you put two horizontal bars across it,
7:54it begins to look fairly industrial.
7:57It totally changes the spirit
7:59without having to create any kind of illustrative narrative.
8:20I used to paint my fonts by hand, when I was a young designer,
8:24and I really miss it.
8:28When we became fully computerized in the late '90s,
8:31I didn't touch anything and I didn't use my hands.
8:35In the past, I cut things up, I ripped things, I pasted things.
8:40I touched art supplies.
8:43That physical loss was huge for me, and that's why I started painting.
8:48Uh-oh. That's Utah.
8:50I deliberately began painting the maps
8:53because they would take me a long time to accomplish,
8:57in some very rote way,
9:00and that's actually everything that went away.
9:03These dotted lines are the distances between two given points
9:08and the background is the zip codes.
9:11It's not factual, it's emotional.
9:14Like Wyoming doesn't have very many people in it,
9:17but you feel it instead of know it.
9:23I'm not making something designed to answer questions,
9:27it's more a design to raise them.
9:30This painting is counties and zip codes.
9:35Why do some little states have a million counties,
9:38and some big states have very few?
9:43Now this one is a demographic map:
9:46average age of people, racial and ethnic breakdowns.
9:50To actually have any sense of it, you actually have to sit and read it.
9:53But, the information is equivalently complicated and ridiculous.
10:06I used to make complicated, nonsensical charts
10:10and diagrams that were satirical.
10:15Silly information. Fractured information.
10:17And I did it to make points.
10:21Then I started charting things that were not chartable.
10:26Mostly denigrating my own physical appearance.
10:30I find it funny.
10:32Sometimes they're pithy and more meaningful,
10:35like all my numbers on my credit cards,
10:38just to show how many numbers were attached to my name
10:41and they're in some computer somewhere.
10:44Later, they became political.
10:46Or nonsensical.
10:49Ultimately, it turned into my paintings.
10:53That one has a period, maybe they should have periods.
10:57[director] So Paula, these paintings,
10:58they seem to have a little obsessional quality to them.
11:02Yeah, I think they're quite obsessive.
11:05It's the act of weaving little bits of information to make a bigger thing.
11:10That's definitely stronger than that. This one needs to be stronger over here.
11:13It started when I was very young.
11:16I had this very high IQ score in something called quantitative reasoning.
11:21My family thought it was going to be Math,
11:23but it wasn't.
11:24It was the ability to synthesize a lot of information
11:27and come to a conclusion.
11:29A self-portrait.
11:31And I was happiest when I was making things.
11:341956, orthopedic shoes,
11:361959, developed a contempt for Girl Scouts,
11:401953, discovered I'm Jewish.
11:42Every hairdo I ever had:
11:44the Blunt Cut, the Sassoon, the Shag,
11:46the Summer Blonde, the Platinum Blonde, the Streaked Blonde, the Reddish Blonde,
11:49and No Blonde.
11:52I didn't really fit in very well in high school.
11:56I mean, I was a person who went to art classes
11:58instead of going to the football games.
12:00There's something wrong with you if you do that.
12:04Then I was at the Tyler School of Art studying Illustration,
12:09and I fell in love with typography in a way I didn't expect to.
12:14I was influenced by contemporary culture.
12:17Zig-Zag rolling papers,
12:19Zap comics,
12:20underground newspapers and magazines and record covers.
12:23Especially record covers.
12:25Those were the things that I really wanted to do.
12:28They spoke to me.
12:36I got a job designing record covers at CBS Records in the '70s.
12:43I'd combine the illustration
12:45with typography that related to the illustration or contrasted it.
12:50[Bierut] I first became aware of Paula's name in high school in the '70s.
12:55I'd spend three hours in a record store.
12:57I'd stand at those racks and look at the covers.
13:00I'd be like, "Wow, I really like the way that cover looks."
13:03I'd turn it over and see Paula Scher's name,
13:06over and over again.
13:08[Paula] I was a kid with the best job in New York City.
13:13I had recording artists and their managers,
13:15all these people coming in and out of my office.
13:17And always trying to keep these balls in the air
13:20to get them to agree to some design and get it to come to fruition.
13:25And I just became very good at it.
13:34Big recording artists were the things the company cared about the most.
13:39So I would do pretty much what the recording artists wanted me to do.
13:44Like for example, here on this Bruce Springsteen cover.
13:46It was shot by a friend of his who was a butcher,
13:49and I put this typewriter typography on it.
13:52Cheap Trick was a little bit different.
13:54They weren't as big as Bruce Springsteen, so I had a bit more control.
13:59With jazz artists, they got to be a little artier.
14:02Like, this is a series of covers I did for Bob James's label,
14:06Tappan Zee Records,
14:07and they were all single objects that were blown up out of scale.
14:12My favorite was always this matchbook.
14:16And then, of course, the monster illustration, Boston.
14:19Six million copies, I think, in the first month of sales.
14:23It was quite something.
14:26They wanted it to be something futuristic,
14:30so we came up with this half-baked idea that the Earth was blowing up
14:35and all these spaceships were escaping.
14:38Guitar-shaped spaceships.
14:40And they left the planet Earth and went up in the heavens.
14:43[Boston's "More Than A Feeling" playing]
14:46♪ When I hear that old song They used to play ♪
14:50[song stops abruptly]
14:51The Boston cover is dumb.
14:54I am still mystified by how something like that really resonates in culture.
15:00I mean, it predated Star Wars.
15:02So we must have hit a zeitgeist that was about to happen.
15:06But when I die, it will say, "Designed the Boston cover,"
15:10and I've lived with this horror ever since,
15:13and I think it may wind up being true.
15:16However, if nobody cared about the album, that's where I did typography.
15:21And that was what I liked doing most because I was the artist,
15:25I was the one that controlled what these things looked like.
15:29So, Charles Mingus, One and Two,
15:32and he didn't care what was on the cover.
15:34This was a reissue of a whole pile of Yardbird songs,
15:38and these things I really, really loved making.
15:44Over a period of four or five years,
15:47the typography came forward and the images moved to the background.
15:51I had made this radical shift
15:54and developed the way I would work for the next 30 years.
15:59I'd learned so much about typography, and became known for it.
16:11[Lupton] Paula was always part of popular culture,
16:16but bringing a unique graphic design voice to that,
16:21very much embodied in her use of typography.
16:28[Paula] Ideas come all kinds of ways.
16:32I get my best ideas in taxicabs, you know, like sitting in traffic, drooling.
16:40I'm allowing my subconscious to take over,
16:45so that I can free associate.
16:50You have to be in a state of play to design.
16:52If you're not in a state of play, you can't make anything.
17:07It should really start like almost with that bar,
17:10like if you drop it down about a sixteenth of an inch
17:13and then, when you put "Pier" on the end of it, it's really nice.
17:16Mm-hmm.
17:17This is an identity for Pier 55,
17:20which is the park they're building in the Hudson River.
17:24It is going to have three theaters on it,
17:27and the theaters are going to be outdoor festival spaces.
17:31We started working with these fives
17:33and some of the fives are just made up of geometric shapes
17:36that come from the park itself.
17:39For example, the forms come from the amphitheater
17:43and then they create the 55s.
17:46This notion actually came from the fact that the park sits up on these pillars.
17:51So these are the original sketches.
17:52Somewhere I knew
17:53that I wanted this thing to feel like it was on water or underwater.
17:57Built these platforms that this island's sitting on.
18:00This is actually a more literal translation of them here.
18:02And then it started to abstract and become open.
18:07These are really good sketches.
18:08[director chuckling]
18:12Mostly what I design are identity systems.
18:18They have to exist in lots, and lots, and lots of ways.
18:26I generally try to want to push something as far as it can be pushed.
18:31For me, that's the fun.
18:41I've started trying to create a process in the identities that I make,
18:45where I go back and revisit them in five or ten years,
18:47'cause sometimes they need tweaking.
18:51It's hard to make that a guess,
18:53and so you want to design something that can be adapted to its time.
18:58I've redesigned the Public Theater logo three times, and nobody even knows it.
19:02I've tightened it up, moved it apart, changed the font.
19:07I've had, like, a love affair with the Public Theater.
19:12When Paula did Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk,
19:15it really signaled a paradigm shift, a new moment for the Public Theater.
19:22[tapping]
19:27And I think what Paula did
19:28was she figured out a way, how to take what she saw on the stage
19:32and turn it into ink on paper.
19:34[tapping becomes faster]
19:37The type in those posters, from top to bottom, filled with words.
19:41It's crazy, it's in your face, it's just like New York!
19:51[Wolfe] Noise Funk was everywhere.
19:54It was aggressive, it was urban,
19:57it was elegant, it was evocative.
19:59And the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical goes to....
20:03Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk!
20:05[cheering, applause]
20:07Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk really, really put her on the map.
20:12It was everywhere, and it was, like, "Holy Shit! This is really good."
20:20[Paula] It was awful because everybody began imitating it.
20:23It was like New York City ate the Public Theater's identity.
20:26Literally, in a matter of three to five years, it became the standard.
20:30It just made her crazy.
20:31She would be ranting around the office, saying, "Can you believe they did this?"
20:36[laughs]
20:37I had to change the theater to... not make it only that kind of typography.
20:44I remember I made these very dark posters that had serif typography,
20:49just to do something opposite to what I had done before.
20:52And I showed them to George Wolfe, and I was turning 50 at the time,
20:55and he said, "Okay, Paula is turning 50.
20:58Let's have a year of depressing posters." [laughs]
21:00[laughs]
21:02I'm not sure... Did I say that?
21:04She said I said that, that's just framed bad.
21:11Okay, we're having soup.
21:14Soup with avocado.
21:15[dog whines]
21:16[both] Go away, Mimi!
21:17-Watch it. -[Paula] This is not for you.
21:22It's bean soup.
21:23[Seymour] Oh, a different design this time.
21:25Yeah, I put an extra country in.
21:27Things aren't going so well in Spain.
21:29-What, the economy? -You can tell, look!
21:32Oh! [laughs]
21:33I thought you were telling me actual real news.
21:36Good doggy! She's been amazingly well behaved.
21:40Yeah, except for me who she attacks.
21:43[both laughing]
21:43The dog loves Paula and hates me.
21:47That's not true. Mimi really likes Seymour, but she jumps at him.
21:51-She hugs me. -Hugs you and she jumps on me.
21:53And she jumps and bites him.
21:56I learned how to pronounce Seymour's last name in school.
21:59I thought it was funny. I thought it was a funny-sounding name.
22:02Was it "Schwost," is it "Kwost"? All of that.
22:05But I thought "Seymour" was worse than "Kwost."
22:09[Lupton] The whole love story between Paula and Seymour,
22:12that's our Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton tale.
22:16Graphic designers love that story.
22:20[Paula] Seymour was my design hero when I was in art school.
22:23He must have been 39, 40? I was 21.
22:27Seymour was an illustrator, but he's a sensational designer.
22:31I thought his work was very funny. Some of it was exceedingly political.
22:36In the late '50s, Seymour founded Push Pin Studios
22:40with Milton Glaser and Ed Sorel.
22:43They developed a style of design and illustration
22:47that combined pop colors, wit and intellectual thinking.
22:56It's where I really started to understand that type had spirit
23:00and did not have to be some clean, mechanical-like thing
23:04that was simply doing its job.
23:07It could be this marvelous thing to engage with.
23:15Seymour has the studio above me.
23:17It's a bigger studio, and he makes more paintings.
23:20He can wake up and always seem to be able to work.
23:23[director] You guys are kind of historic as a couple.
23:26Well, that may be, but we don't really work together.
23:29That was actually my first question.
23:31-Never. -Never. We can't collaborate.
23:38Washington looks a little pale.
23:40Well, it'll look more vibrant when it gets a WA on it.
23:46I don't think so.
23:48[Paula] We can't collaborate.
23:49He can't work on my stuff and I can't work on his stuff.
23:52I don't want to. [laughs]
23:54That's why we're not apart.
23:56[laughs] There you are.
23:59-[Seymour] Throw a good one this time. -[Paula] Okay.
24:03[sighs]
24:04I love leaving New York City.
24:06You jinxed it.
24:08Okay, here we go.
24:10But I couldn't stay out of town that long, I have to come back to town.
24:15[both] Yay!
24:16Otherwise, I won't have any ideas.
24:19[traffic]
24:26When I started designing environmental graphics,
24:29it let me design in the physical world
24:31and that was at a time when the most interesting design had become digital.
24:35I was making large-scale lettering on buildings to create a sense of place,
24:43as well as to get somebody to navigate their way through it.
24:49Design exists beyond screens. It has an impact in real life.
24:55[indistinct shouting]
25:01After Hurricane Sandy,
25:04the whole economy of Rockaway Beach was devastated.
25:09The boardwalk was destroyed and the beach was fenced off.
25:14So I was hired to create what I'd call an emotional sign system.
25:22Beaches like the Rockaways invoke a memory of a bygone era
25:25of wooden boardwalks and rollercoasters.
25:28It had to be brought into the 21st century.
25:32While the boardwalks were destroyed,
25:34what the neighborhood still had were the beaches.
25:37And that the beach looked unique from every place that you entered it.
25:42If you entered it at 96th Street, it looked different from 101st Street,
25:46because the view is different.
25:49We created these large standing posters with photographs
25:52that would help orient people once they reached the beach.
25:56They helped emotionally connect the community,
25:58while functioning as directional signage.
26:01There was so much pride from the signs
26:04that the city government made this series of postcards
26:07so every town could have their own picture of their own beach.
26:10You're getting your own icon, your own logo,
26:13and it would give them identity.
26:18There's an emotional aspect to it.
26:21Design needs to take human behavior into account.
26:26[people chanting] Re-vote! Re-vote! Re-vote!
26:30[Paula] An example of terrible design would be the Palm Beach Ballot of 2001.
26:39I actually did an article on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times
26:42where I made a little diagram that showed why the ballot design was wrong.
26:49[man on TV] For the woman who designed Palm Beach County, Florida's ballot,
26:52life has changed.
26:53I keep thinking it's a nightmare
26:55and I'm going to wake up one day, and it's gonna be gone.
26:59[Paula] It was a butterfly ballot.
27:02The list of the names broken into two columns.
27:06The designer could not make one long vertical list
27:09because the names would be too small,
27:12and in the area of Palm Beach County, there are a lot of elderly people,
27:15and they wouldn't be able to read small text.
27:18So she thought she was doing a service.
27:21In the first column, George Bush was first and Al Gore was second.
27:26And then on the other side was Pat Buchanan.
27:29She had the holes that you punched in the center,
27:33except for the holes weren't where you thought they were going to be.
27:36You assume that if the first hole belonged to George Bush,
27:42that the second hole, right below it, would belong to Al Gore.
27:46But in fact, it belonged to Pat Buchanan, because the holes were staggered.
27:51So in Palm Beach County,
27:53one of the biggest Jewish residences in the world,
27:55a big part of the population voted for an anti-Semite.
27:59I can't go back and say,
28:01"Well, you know, if I would have done something else differently,
28:04maybe the election would have been different,"
28:06because you don't know.
28:08Absolutely. Graphic Design threw an election.
28:20Right now, because I'm trying to make an exhibit opening,
28:24I'm working really intensely.
28:26Like, I'll typically start around nine in the morning,
28:31and I can work till midnight or one or two in the morning.
28:38I used to paint to jazz and I got sick of all my records.
28:41So then I started playing old movies on television.
28:45I can do the dialogue right along with it. It's sort of like singing while you work.
28:49[TV and Paula] "When a man's partner's killed,
28:51he's supposed to do something about it."
28:54All About Eve. Fantastic!
28:57[TV and Paula] "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night."
29:03The Women, that's really good, it's really good.
29:05Really good dialogue.
29:07When anything I wear doesn't please Steven...
29:09[TV and Paula] "... I take it off!"
29:14There were no artist models in my family.
29:17The family was very well educated.
29:20All the women were schoolteachers.
29:23And my father was actually a mapmaker.
29:29He invented a measuring device so that maps would be more accurate.
29:37When I was a little girl, he taught me that maps were distorted,
29:42that they never accurately depict a place.
29:48My father actually thought art was stupid and serious people became engineers.
30:02[upbeat piano music playing]
30:25[Lupton] Paula has created a typographic language
30:29that is popular, it's American, it's New York,
30:36that makes sense to people.
30:38And it's part of everyday life.
30:41It's not an art form that is in some other place.
30:47It's in the street, it's on the shelf at the supermarket.
30:51Paula is the most influential woman graphic designer on the planet.
30:59[Paula] I never thought about myself as a feminist.
31:03Yet, when I was working at CBS Records in the '70s,
31:06women in the design business at that time were agents, they were reps.
31:11You'd sit there and think, "Oh, my God, what are they going to do with me?
31:14What am I going to do with them?"
31:18It's quite wild when you see it firsthand.
31:20All of a sudden, you turn around and you go, "Oh, my God, that was sexism!"
31:24You know, there it is.
31:25And it's like any other -ism.
31:32If I'm sitting with a new client, I can see in the first glance
31:36that he's wondering why he's got this old lady.
31:41I mean, I just thought, "I'm a designer. Look at it."
31:47Hi! Nice to meet you on the phone.
31:52I got your materials that I've been looking at.
31:55What are you looking to do now?
31:59I have an overall plan about how I'd approach work.
32:04Some of it is strategic and some of it is intuitive.
32:07Are you promoting the institution or are you promoting the show?
32:11The strategic part is absorbing information from the client.
32:15How many plays do you put on in a season?
32:19And do you have other kinds of festivals, or smaller programs,
32:23or things like under the radar, or...?
32:26I want to understand why they look the way they look.
32:30What's interesting is you seem, from what I see here,
32:33to be a little bit all over the map.
32:36I think you should develop a visual language.
32:39That's what we did with The Public and Atlantic.
32:41You don't need to see the logo to know what it is.
32:45You should be as powerful, visible, understandable,
32:49recognizable as anything in town.
32:54You're not changing somebody.
32:56You're making them a more perfect vision of where they started.
33:00So the job is to traverse these different roads
33:04and try to get either an individual, a group of people,
33:06or a whole corporation to be able to see.
33:09[applause]
33:14[Paula] In 1998, Citibank was merging with Travelers Insurance Company.
33:21They wanted a logo that reflected the merger
33:25and they wanted to launch it in the newspaper
33:27three weeks after hiring us to do it.
33:30Travelers Insurance Company had a red umbrella.
33:33Citibank had type that was in italic form.
33:37It took only a moment of time to design the logo.
33:41There's a T.
33:42The bottom of a lowercase T has a little hook on the bottom.
33:45It's a straight line.
33:46If you put an arc on the top, that's an umbrella.
33:50There are two Is in Citi.
33:51It means the edge of the arc can line up with the two Is.
33:55There were a million meetings trying to get by 'em.
33:58"What if you do it this way, or that way?
34:00Show it to me on stationery, show it to me on a card.
34:02It's got to be red on top and blue on the bottom.
34:05What do you do with the blue wave? Is it something you use in retail?
34:07What if you put that back on the credit card?"
34:09Those were all the things that were being worked out
34:12for nearly, I think, two years before the thing launched.
34:17The design of the logo is never really the hard part of the job.
34:22It's persuading a million people to use it.
34:33So this is a diagram of a meeting.
34:36You are giving a presentation.
34:39This line is the line of the reasonable level of expectation that everyone has
34:45when you walk into the room.
34:47I got to say that, to my surprise, I very much like the black and white.
34:52[Paula] You begin to present,
34:54and you come above the reasonable level of expectation.
34:57Everybody gets enthusiastic, people begin to start asking questions.
35:01...a whole extra outline, right? The others only have three.
35:07And about right here,
35:09you've reached the height of the appreciation
35:12that you're gonna get for this presentation.
35:15You will be putting them on top of images where they create labels.
35:19So it's like a label smacked over a photograph.
35:22That's the... And we have... The buses are behind you.
35:27And at this point,
35:29somebody's going to make a rebuttal to your presentation.
35:32The contrast between the two is more fun for me here than it is here,
35:39because it's just... I feel the separation more.
35:42This, I kind of don't notice the contrast.
35:46[Paula] You're going to sink a little bit below that line of expectation.
35:50You grab it back and you make some concessions.
35:53You know, I may have to pull this down a bit.
35:56Maybe it just has to touch it.
35:58The thing is that the horizontal read is always better.
36:02Yes, see these are great, the horizontal pops. I love that.
36:06[Paula] And you get up to about here.
36:08And at this point, this is as high as you're ever gonna get.
36:13It's not as high as here, but it's good.
36:16Will this actually play in this color?
36:19-[Paula] What, you don't think-- -I mean, I love it.
36:22But I'm worried you're going to change it
36:23when you actually do it.
36:25No, I wanted that.
36:26Just to say, that's the thing I'm most concerned about.
36:29I just think it needs to be larger.
36:32The meeting must end here,
36:33because what will happen is a counter-rebuttal to your offer,
36:36it will go down below the reasonable level of expectation,
36:40and then come back only nearly above it
36:43and will continue on, until you reach sudden death.
36:47They want proof that this is really, really gonna work.
36:51The problem is there isn't proof.
36:54It's how do people see and perceive and accept things.
36:58I feel like, as usual, once I sit with them for a while,
37:01they really start to shout in a very specific way
37:05and it just feels like, of course, this is The Public.
37:07Of course, it's grabbing the attention that Shakespeare in the Park always does.
37:10-I think they're awesome. -Fantastic.
37:12It's going to be a black summer.
37:14[laughter]
37:16-All right. Bye. -Good to see you.
37:18-Terrific. Good work. Thank you. -Thanks.
37:21-[Patrick] Perfect. -Thank you.
37:33[Paula] I notice it more and more as I get older.
37:36How important the act of making stuff is to me.
37:45My father saw two of the paintings I did before he died.
37:51I was sort of embarrassed to show him,
37:52because, of course, it's totally inaccurate.
37:56And I brought him in and showed him the map
37:58and I said, "I guess you think I'm crazy,"
38:00and he said, "No, I never did anything that creative."
38:08[funky music playing]
38:24There's a moment, and it's in every job.
38:27It's like this incredible elation and high.
38:35It's like we made magic for a moment.
38:55-How you doing, sweetheart? -I'm standing! My feet don't hurt yet.
39:01[Bierut] Paula's inexhaustible.
39:04Forty-plus years of continuous effort.
39:08There's a virtuosity to that.
39:22[Paula] I'm driven by the hope that I haven't made my best work yet.
39:29Making stuff is the heart of everything.
39:36That drive never goes away.
39:39What can I make next?
39:42[upbeat music playing]

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