‘Mistrust of rules’
A few blocks away from Glaser’s studio, Paula Scher works at the offices of the international design firm Pentagram, where she serves as a principal.
Scher first entered the public eye while working at CBS Records in the 1970s, designing album covers for acts like Boston and Elvis Costello. Since then she’s designed for many companies, including Swatch, the New York Public Theater, and, perhaps most memorably, Citibank, for whom she created the current logo.
Like Glaser, Scher has not limited herself to one particular discipline. She’s worked extensively in designing signage and other graphic elements for public spaces (such as museums), and is an accomplished painter.
“ Creativity,” she says, “is something that comes internally from a human being having a genuine mistrust of rules.”
Adapting creatively
As creative workers who have stayed engaged with their industry over the decades, Glaser and Scher set an example as instructive as it is inspiring. While lesser practitioners have come and gone, they have remained at the forefront in their field.
They’ve had to adapt to a myriad changes along the way, bending their craft to suit new cultural and technological realities. It’s no small feat, given how different the landscape looks now than it did when they began their professional lives— before the advent of the Internet and much of what we think of as popular culture.
“I love the computer,” Glaser says. “I just don’t think anyone under 40 should ever be allowed to use it.”
Scher takes a somewhat more diplomatic approach, pointing out that “technology is something that grows and changes, and what I need to do is find out what it can do so it can do what I want it to do. And I want it to do whatever I want it to do really fast.”
As designers, their work straddles the intersection of commerce and creativity. That’s a difficult balance to keep, particularly in an indust ry traditionally associated with youth. By continuing to produce at a high level up to and, in Glaser’s case, past the traditional retirement age, they are blazing trails.
And indeed, as Scher is quick to point out, the right mindset takes age almost entirely out of the equation: “I don’t want people to think about my age. Not because I don’t want them to know my age, I just don’t want them to think about it; I don’t want it to be a factor. Just the same way I don’t want being a woman to be a factor, or being short to be a factor, or being Jewish to be a factor.”
Retirement a foreign word
Ask Scher and Glaser about what comes next and two themes emerge: a sense of accomplishment with having come this far, and an excitement about finding out what comes next. For both of them, the very idea of “retirement” is foreign.
Glaser: “If you think about it for a moment, would you ask Mozart or Picasso or Michelangelo when they’re going to retire? Inconceivable question.”
Scher: “There may be a time… where I just do projects that I want to do, but I wouldn’t call that retiring. I would call it not making as much money—making a conscious decision not to. But the idea of retirement seems to imply that you stop doing what you always did. Why would you do that?”
Both constantly seek new ways to see the world, but that doesn’t mean they’re entirely immune to looking back. And when asked about what the highlight has been so far, their answers bear a telling similarity:
Scher: “I’m most proud of the fact that I get to keep growing. That I get to work on things I’ve never done before and I get better at it, and I can do things that are innovative. Which I’ve done in my 50s, and want to continue to do through my 60s.”
Glaser: “The highlight is I’ve been able to practice so long…and to still wake up in the morning looking forward to another day’s work is, I think, my greatest accomplishment.“
The same can and should be true for all of us, regardless of which creative passions we choose to pursue.
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