Paula Scher influenced the American 70s music scene with her album cover designs for CBS Records, including Boston’s “Boston” which featured jellyfish-like UFO-Guitar ships that hover above what looks like the earth on fire. (Boston was very popular.) She later applied her commercial sensibility and Art deco/Russian constructivism typography touch to book jacket covers, corporate logos (Citi), print ads (Swatch), and poster campaigns (The Public Theatre, New York Shakespeare Festival) when she joined the creme-creme design firm Pentagram, where she became the first female partner.
Daughter of a cartographer (or, to be more specific, a photogrammetric engineer who worked on aerial photography for the mapping division of the U.S. Geological Survey), Scher likes to paint maps. Not accurately, but rather to represent regions according to political divisions, economic growth, success and failure, stereotypes and status. She sold every piece at her first solo exhibition as a fine artist at Maya Stendhal gallery in 2006.