Katherine McCoy
Encyclopedia
Katherine McCoy is an American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 graphic designer
Graphic designer
A graphic designer is a professional within the graphic design and graphic arts industry who assembles together images, typography or motion graphics to create a piece of design. A graphic designer creates the graphics primarily for published, printed or electronic media, such as brochures and...

 and educator, best known for her work as the co-chair of the graduate Design program for Cranbrook Academy of Art.

During her extensive career spanning education and professional practice, McCoy worked with groundbreaking design firm Unimark
Unimark International
Unimark International was an American design firm founded in Chicago, Illinois in 1964 by seven designers: Ralph Eckerstrom, Massimo Vignelli, James Fogelman, Wally Gutches, Larry Klein, Robert Moldafsky and Bob Noorda. Unimark filed for final Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1977, and no longer exists...

, Chrysler Corporation, and with Muriel Cooper
Muriel Cooper
Muriel Cooper was a digital designer, business woman, researcher, and educator.Cooper received her BA from Ohio State in 1944, and a BFA in Design and a BS in Education from Massachusetts College of Art. After her graduation, Cooper moved to New York City and attempted to find a position in...

 in the early days of MIT Press
MIT Press
The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts .-History:...

 while at the Boston design firm Omnigraphics. McCoy's career in education was similarly broad, teaching at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design
IIT Institute of Design
Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology , originally founded as the New Bauhaus, is a graduate school teaching systemic, human-centered design.- History :...

, and the Royal College of Art
Royal College of Art
The Royal College of Art is an art school located in London, United Kingdom. It is the world’s only wholly postgraduate university of art and design, offering the degrees of Master of Arts , Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy...

, London. She is also the co-founder of High Ground Designers, a workshop firm created for professional designers in their studios.

Early career

McCoy's discovery of the Bauhaus and industrial design was at the Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...

 while on a family trip to the New York World's Fair. As a student, McCoy studied Industrial Design
Industrial design
Industrial design is the use of a combination of applied art and applied science to improve the aesthetics, ergonomics, and usability of a product, but it may also be used to improve the product's marketability and production...

 at Michigan State University
Michigan State University
Michigan State University is a public research university in East Lansing, Michigan, USA. Founded in 1855, it was the pioneer land-grant institution and served as a model for future land-grant colleges in the United States under the 1862 Morrill Act.MSU pioneered the studies of packaging,...

, where she graduated in 1967.

Shortly after graduation, McCoy joined Unimark International
Unimark International
Unimark International was an American design firm founded in Chicago, Illinois in 1964 by seven designers: Ralph Eckerstrom, Massimo Vignelli, James Fogelman, Wally Gutches, Larry Klein, Robert Moldafsky and Bob Noorda. Unimark filed for final Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1977, and no longer exists...

, a design firm led by many key figures in American Modernist graphic design, including Massimo Vignelli
Massimo Vignelli
Massimo Vignelli is a designer who has done work in a number of areas ranging from package design to furniture design to public signage to showroom design through Vignelli Associates, which he co-founded with his wife, Lella...

, Ralph Eckerstrom of Container Corporation, Jay Doblin and Herbert Bayer
Herbert Bayer
Herbert Bayer was an Austrian American graphic designer, painter, photographer, sculptor, art director, environmental & interior designer, and architect, who was widely recognized as the last living member of the Bauhaus and was instrumental in the development of the Atlantic Richfield Company's...

. It was at the interdisciplinary Unimark offices where McCoy was exposed to the strict Swiss
International Typographic Style
The International Typographic Style, also known as the Swiss Style, is a graphic design style developed in Switzerland in the 1950s that emphasizes cleanliness, readability and objectivity. Hallmarks of the style are asymmetric layouts, use of a grid, sans-serif typefaces like Akzidenz Grotesk, and...

 typographic and design approaches which came to permeate much of American corporate communications through the late 1960s and 70s.

Following Unimark, McCoy worked for a year in the corporate identity offices of the Chrysler Corporation, then joined the Boston design firm Omnigraphics, where she worked on several projects for the MIT Press with Muriel Cooper
Muriel Cooper
Muriel Cooper was a digital designer, business woman, researcher, and educator.Cooper received her BA from Ohio State in 1944, and a BFA in Design and a BS in Education from Massachusetts College of Art. After her graduation, Cooper moved to New York City and attempted to find a position in...

. Next she joined Designers & Partners, the Detroit advertising design studio where she met the designer - illustrator - cartoonist Edward Fella. Designers and Partners focused solely on working with advertising agencies and had a staff that included s wide variety of graphic arts professionals, including illustrators, cartoonists, and “lettering men” as well as graphic designers. Although McCoy was not particularly fond of working with ad agencies, the opportunities she was given and connections she made allow partially for her success today. She also worked with other professional practices including Xerox Education Group, and major advertising agencies.

Career in design education

In 1971 McCoy began her career in design education when she was appointed co-chair of the Cranbrook Academy of Art graduate design program with her husband Michael McCoy
Michael McCoy
Michael McCoy is an American industrial designer and educator who has made significant contributions to American design and design education in the latter half of the 20th century...

. While McCoy led the graphic design program, and Michael McCoy
Michael McCoy
Michael McCoy is an American industrial designer and educator who has made significant contributions to American design and design education in the latter half of the 20th century...

 led the industrial design program, both 2D and 3D design students shared studios, and explored interdisciplinary approaches towards designing. Katherine claims she "combined the “objective” typographic approach that she knew through professional practice with an interest in the social and cultural activism that was in the air in the late '60s" when creating and reinventing the program. Early conceptual influences on the Cranbrook design approach were Robert Venturi's
Robert Venturi
Robert Charles Venturi, Jr. is an American architect, founding principal of the firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, and one of the major figures in the architecture of the twentieth century...

 book Learning from Las Vegas, Richard Saul Wurman
Richard Saul Wurman
Richard Saul Wurman is an architect and graphic designer who is considered to be a pioneer in the practice of making information easily understandable. Wurman has written and designed over 80 books, and created the TED conferences, but remains associated only with TEDMED.-Early life and...

's publishing on the man-made environment, and McCoy's own interest in social design and design vernacular. The commercial vernacular collages of Edward Fella, the Basel
Schule für Gestaltung Basel
Switzerland's Schule für Gestaltung Basel at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule and its students have influenced the international graphic design community since it opened in 1968. Its tradition was shaped by influential personalities such as Armin Hofmann, Emil Ruder, Kurt Hauert and Wolfgang Weingart...

 experiments of Wolfgang Weingart
Wolfgang Weingart
Wolfgang Weingart is an internationally known graphic designer and typographer. His work is categorized as Swiss typography and he is credited as "the father" of New Wave or Swiss Punk typography....

 and a Yale project by Dan Friedman were visual design influences. Later sources included semiotics
Semiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...

, post-structuralism
Post-structuralism
Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of French intellectuals who came to international prominence in the 1960s and '70s...

, literary theory
Literary theory
Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...

 and deconstruction
Deconstruction
Deconstruction is a term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading...

; both the students' and McCoy's work experimented with applications of these ideas to communications design. Katherine designed a lot of material for the Cranbrook educational community including quarterly magazines, catalogues, posters and other projects that she and Michael produced as McCoy & McCoy.

Reinvented by the McCoys, the program was organized around experimentation in the studio, with minimal structure or assignments; there were no courses and the final thesis show was the only official deadline. However, Katherine and Michael required the students to read about both historical and contemporary design and theory in order to really understand the context in which each student was going to be entering. Each student was encouraged to develop a personal voice in a broad mix of radical experiments and practical projects that applied experimental ideas and forms, sometimes in collaboration with McCoy. There were many opportunities for students to collaborate with Katherine on the design of works that were actually realized. This became the counterbalance to the experimental work of the Cranbrook students, which was often reproduced yet not understood to be part of a wider range of projects undertaken in the department. However this process and progress that the McCoys had brought to the program, transformed into an obsession with the possibilities of change. This also shined light onto the transformation of design practice itself. At the studios and the critiques at Cranbrook, discussions often centered on the possibility of breaking away from the norms of everyday practice. While McCoy's program was at times labeled controversial, the McCoys' 24-year tenure at Cranbrook graduated many notable figures in American graphic design professional practice and design education, including Lorraine Wild
Lorraine Wild
-Biography:Lorraine Wild was born in Ontario, Canada, but has lived in America for a greater part of her life. She is a world-famous graphic designer, published writer, art historian, and art instructor of design. In 1973, she entered the Cranbrook Academy of Art program which was, at the time,...

, Edward Fella
Ed Fella
Ed Fella is an artist, educator and graphic designer whose work has had an important influence on contemporary typography. Ed worked as a commerical artist designing...

, Nancy Skolos and Tom Wedell, P. Scott Makela
P. Scott Makela
P. Scott Makela was a graphic designer, multimedia designer and type designer.Among other work, he was especially noted for the design of Dead History, a postmodern typeface that combined features of a rounded sans serif typeface and a crisp neo-classical serif typeface...

, Andrew Blauvelt, Lucille Tenazas, Meredith Davis and Patrick Whitney. After McCoy left Cranbrook in 1995, she held several other teaching positions, most notably with Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design, from 1995–2003, and the Royal College of Art in London.

In the 1970's, Katherine McCoy took two major leaps to advance the program, in terms of student work. First, she began to change the introductory typography projects to allow students a new semiotic interpretation. This allowed students to begin to drive to the solutions and to depart from the strict Modernist vocabulary used in the program in previous years. Included are stylistic elements that had previously been underused by Modernist typographers, such as historical or vernacular type forms or images. The second leap was to allow the more advanced and able students to take lead on the exploration of theory.

In 1991, Katherine and Micheal McCoy, along with a large team of 2-D and 3-D students, produced the book Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse (Rizzoli International Publications). The book documented the visuals of the work that had been produced in the Cranbrook studios during the 1980s, and it probably sealed the reputation of the school as being a place where the visual quality of the work, sometimes generated by a highly creative interpretation of theory, took precedent without regard to the “needs” of the profession. The critiques of the work represented in that book was often voiced without knowledge of the actual discourse of the studio critique. Driven by the McCoys, it challenged the experimentation to be as real as possible.

After 24 years of insightful and creative work, the McCoys leave their positions in 1995. They moved to Chicago where they spend every fall semester at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design, giving senior lectures and seminars. Katherine moved away from studio teaching and instead been concentrating more on theoretical issues. Mostly issues having to do with both the teaching and practice of graphic design in the context of new media.

Later Career

McCoy now consults in communications design, design curricula planning at Kansas City Art Institute and post-professional design education as a partner of McCoy & McCoy, and High Ground Tools and Strategies for Design. High Ground Design is a series of workshops created by Katherine and her husband, Michael McCoy
Michael McCoy
Michael McCoy is an American industrial designer and educator who has made significant contributions to American design and design education in the latter half of the 20th century...

for other professional designers to work in their studio. High Ground is dedicated to expanding design skills and methods, as well as opening up to the vision of design, questioning assumptions and redefining the nature of design.
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