Best of Jazz^253
Paula ScherWith the Best of Jazzposter, Paula Scher
(b. 1948 ) introduced young American designers
to forgotten design languages and inadvertently
unlocked the floodgates for unknowing
designers to pilfer historical artifacts as
decontextualized scrap. With the Reagan
presidency in 1980 national sentiment turned
toward nostalgic and old-fashioned feel-good
graphics that fed a longing for past innocence.
This provided, consciously or not, a fertile
environment for a new wave of historical
derivation in design, which ultimately became
known as “retro.” For a generation of designers
and consumers disconnected from their visual
past, the Best of Jazzposter appeared fresh and
unprecedented.
Early in her career, Scher was inspired
by Push Pin Studios’ reprise of passé styles such as Victoriana, art nouveau,
and art deco. She turned to type from illustration shortly after coming to
New York, citing a self-assessed inability to draw well. As an art director at
CBS Records from 1975 to 1982 , Scher commissioned conceptual illustrators
and combined their surrealist styles with eclectic and often historic
typography that echoed the illustration. The effect was a holistic
integration of type and image in the manner of nineteenth-century posters.
In the late 1970 s, the record industry hit the skids economically—
sales slumped, costs soared, and inflation took its usurious bite. “I could no
longer put all of our money into imagery,” Scher stated in an interview in
Mixing Messages (Princeton Architectural Press, 1996 ), “so the type came
forward.” About that same time Russian constructivism was being revisited
in books and exhibitions. Scher, who had long collected and admired old
graphic styles, quickly assimilated the revolutionary language.
Scher may have begun the Best of Jazzposter with an
anthropological dig through the Russian avant-gardists’ visual vocabulary,
but she ended up with a distinctive tapestry woven of personal affinities,
problem-solving pragmatism, and New York derring-do. The letterforms
are not Cyrillic, but, oddly enough, nineteenth-century sans-serif