This holiday greeting was designed by Paula Scher, winner of the 2013 National Design Award for Communication Design. Scher has been at the forefront of graphic design for four decades. Iconic, smart, and accessible, her images are part of the American vernacular. Known for her reimagining of typography as a communicative medium, she has said, “Words have meaning and type has feeling. When you put them together it’s spectacular.”
For Cooper-Hewitt’s holiday greeting, Scher used obsessive typography to treat the holiday clichés of jingle bells, ho-ho-ho and the sound of reindeer hooves. “The only thing to do is be relentless," she said. The greeting features hallmarks of Scher’s signature designs, including a lack of white space and dynamic motion.
Scher has been a principal in the New York office of the distinguished international design consultancy Pentagram since 1991. She has developed identity and branding systems, environmental graphics, packaging and publication designs for a broad range of clients that include Bloomberg, Citibank, Microsoft, the Museum of Modern Art, the Public Theater, the High Line, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, the Metropolitan Opera, the New York City Ballet, the New York Philharmonic, and Jazz at Lincoln Center.