Paula Scher was born on October 6, 1948 in Washington D.C. and moved around in Virginia and settled in Silver Spring, Maryland, where she went to elementary and high school. Having had an unhappy childhood, Paula resorted to drawing as a form of therapy. Despite not being satisfied with her childhood, she later gained inspiration from her father’s device that ensure the distortion-free aerial photography as he was actually a photogrammetric engineer for the US Geological Survey to create hand-printed maps. When she went into high school, she even took some weekend art classes at Corcoran College of Art + Design to pursue her passion. Once she graduated high school, she got her BFA in illustration at the Tyler School of Art in Elkins Park, PA where she embarked on a place where she belonged.

While in college, Paula began taking classes that were outside of her comfortable medium, which was painting at that time, and thought she just was not good at anything until she discovered graphic design. In a class that combined illustration and design, she met a professor named Stanislaw Zagorski, who later on became an important mentor in her life. Stanislaw told Paula to “illustrate with type.” Due to her lack of drawing skills, Paula’s ability to communicate feeling through typography became really important.

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