Paula Scher: MAPS

Book excerpt: In the early 1990s, celebrated graphic designer Paula Scher (Make It Bigger, 2002) began painting maps of the world as she sees it. The larger her canvases grew, the more expressionistic her geographical visions became. Displaying a powerful command of image and type, Scher brilliantly transformed the surface area of our world. Paintings as tall as twelve feet depict continents, countries, and cities swirling in torrents of information and undulating with colorful layers of hand-painted boundary lines, place-names, and provocative cultural commentary. Collected here for the first time, Paula Scher MAPS presents thirty-nine of Scher's obsessively detailed, highly personal creations.