Scher moved to New York, after she graduated the Tyler School of Art in Pennsylvania, where she got a job as a layout artist for Random House Publishers. She then went on to work for the advertising department at CBS Records and two years later, became an art director for Atlantic Records. Paula got a taste for designing album covers at Atlantic but returned to CBS, where she spent the next few years of her life designing over 150 album covers, like Boston’s Boston.

Paula Scher left the record company to pursue her design career even further, she was influenced by Russian constructivism and applied the principles of the movement to her typographic design work. In the mid 1980s, Scher formed a partnership with editorial designer Tyler Koppel and together they worked designing book covers, brand identities and advertisements under their firm, Koppel & Scher. This firm perished in a recession, and Koppel & Scher went their separate ways, Koppel to be a creative director at Esquire and Scher at Pentagram. In the early 90s, Paula became the first female partner and worked her way up to principal and used her design experience to teach at the School of Visual Arts and other art schools spanning twenty years.

Her most famous work is the identity for The Public Theatre, which appeared all across New York City and gave the theatre recognition and pushed it towards the company’s goal of becoming ‘accessible and innovative’. Each poster has a cultural message and is easily recognised to create a sense of community in the city’s competitive theatre market. 
Her career has spanned several decades and she is a designer credited with many works we see daily, such as, a rebrand for Windows; she was quoted as saying “if you brand is called windows, why are you a flag?” 

She created identities for the New York Philharmonic, Tiffany’s, New Jersey Performing Arts Center and Shake Shack. Now, in her spare time, Scher combines a love of typography, painting and her father’s career. He was a photogrammetric engineer, the precise act of taking measurements from photographs, and Paula’s inspiration for creating their large-scale maps each unique both in style and meaning.