JULIA HOFFMANN
German-born Julia lives
with her husband and
three children in London.
Currently she’s the
executive creative director
at the Creative Lab at
Google EMEA. There, she
helps invent and advance
Google’s future – bringing
ideas to life with creativity,
the arts and technology.
creativelab5.com“There are many designs that have influenced
me throughout my career, but none like the
Noise Da Funk poster that Paula Scher
made for The Public Theater in 1995. I clearly
remember the first time I saw it. I was sitting
on the floor of the library, during the early
part of my sophomore year at the School of
Visual Arts in New York. My love affair with
graphic design was just beginning and one of
my new pastimes was to flip through design
annuals (this was before blogs and Pinterest).
I was still in the discovery phase of the
“artform” because – prior to enrolling – I
never considered graphic design as a field for
me. But when I came across Paula’s poster,
something clicked. My mind felt it and my
body, too. It was like a burst of energy flowing
through, similar to that jolt you get when you
see a painting or listen to a great piece of
music or a great film scene. It was art. It made
me feel. It expressed an energy that I had
never associated with graphic design before.
It gave me reassurance that graphic design
wasn’t meant to obey rules, and the
confidence to want to fuse the energy and
feelings of fine art with the reliability of
the grid system of design.
The poster works on so many levels. It’s
loud. It screams at you. But mainly it calls on
you to cross a busy street to see it up close.
And when you do, it radiates.
One of the highlights, or genius moves on
Paula’s part, was to take something as
mundane as the reviews of the show and
make them an integral part of the design. As
a designer it’s usually a chore to slapmarketing copy on a poster, and as a
consumer I always think it’s a cheap trick to
use journalists’ quotes to convince you
that this show is great. Paula uses these
quotes and integrates them into the design
to her advantage. Everything is considered,
everything on this poster has a function.
Nothing is arbitrary, yet it feels so natural.
This poster marked a time for me, and an
area in design.
A couple of years after seeing this poster
in the design annual I was lucky enough to
gain an internship with Paula at Pentagram.
Two years later I joined her team and had the
privilege of working with her for the next
four years. Perhaps the biggest highlight is
that we’ve developed a close friendship that
lasts to this day. A kind of fairy tale that
started on those grubby library floors. When
I left for my next job, I obviously had to ask
for a copy of this poster and had it signed by
her. It’s been in our household ever since,
reminding me every day why I’ve chosen
graphic design as my career.”DESIGN CRUSH
JULIA HOFFMANN ON PAULA SCHER’S NOISE DA FUNK POSTER
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