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Katherine McCoy (born Katherine MAIDENNAME Decatur, Illinois, 1945) is an American graphic designer 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, Chrysler Corporation, and with Muriel Cooper in the early days of MIT Press 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, and the Royal College of Art, London.

Early career

McCoy's first recollection of appreciation of design was on a family trip, while visiting the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As a student, McCoy studied Industrial Design at Michigan State University, where she graduated in 1967.

Shortly after graduation in 1967, McCoy joined Unimark International; a design firm which employed many key figures in American Modernist graphic design, Massimo Vignelli, Ralph Eckerstrom of Container Corporation and Herbert Bayer. It was at the interdisciplinary Unimark offices, where McCoy was exposed to the strict Swiss 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 in-house 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.

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. While McCoy led the graphic design program, and Michael McCoy led the industrial design program, the studios were regularly convened, and explored interdisciplinary approaches towards designing. Particularly influential on the Cranbrook design approach was Robert Venturi's book Learning from Las Vegas, and McCoy's own interest in social design and design vernacular. Reinvented by the McCoy, the program had no requirements, deadlines or assignments other than a final thesis show, and the student's work was a broad mix of radical experiments and practical projects, sometimes in collaboration with McCoy. While McCoy's program was at times labeled contoversial, the graduates of the McCoy's 20 year tenure at the Cranbrook program have included several notable figures in American design and design education.

See also

• List of AIGA medalists

References

1. ^ Wild, Lorraine. "Katherine McCoy: Expanding Boundaries". Retrieved 30 Jul 2009.
2. Harper, Laurel (October 1, 1999). Radical graphics/graphic radicals. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books. pp. 62–63. ISBN 081181680X.
3. http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/medalist-katherinemccoy
4. http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature.php?id=47&fid=56

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from http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature.php?id=47&fid=56 She studied industrial design at Michigan State University before joining Unimark International in 1967. She went on to work at Chrysler Corporation and Omnigraphics Inc. In 1971, McCoy became co-chair, with her husband Michael McCoy, of the design department at Cranbrook Academy of Art, which they continued to direct until 1995. By the 1980s, their sometimes controversial program had established itself as one of the most innovative in American design education, producing a stream of graduates who have gone on to make their own mark in the profession. Their company, McCoy & McCoy, has worked on two- and three-dimensional projects for Formica, Xerox, Unisys, MIT Press, Philips, Tobu Stores Tokyo and other clients. McCoy is a past president and fellow of the Industrial Designer's Society of America and an elected member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale. She served on the Design Arts Policy Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts and chaired the Design Arts Fellowships Grant Panel. In 1994. the McCoys were jointly awarded a Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design. 'Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse', an exhibition of work by McCoy, her students and graduates, travelled to New York and Tokyo in 1991. She has written widely about design and education, and her teaching methodology has featured in many international publications;

from http://www.kcai.edu/newsevents/news/detail/?id=30 Katherine McCoy and her husband, Michael, also a designer, previously held the Joyce C. Hall Distinguished Professors of Design position together in 1987. In October, the McCoys will be honored with the inaugural Design Mind Award, to be presented at the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. The award recognizes "visionaries who have affected a paradigm shift in design thinking or practice through writing, research and scholarship."

For 23 years, Katherine and Michael McCoy co-chaired the graduate design program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Katherine McCoy also was a senior lecturer at Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design in Chicago from 1995 to 2004 and served as a distinguished visiting professor at the Royal College of Art in London from 1993 to 1996.

Lorraine Wild's anecdotal history of the Cranbrook program at: http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/medalist-katherinemccoy

Cranbrook Selected Bibliography http://www.cranbrookart.edu/library/research/mccoy.htm

• Living people
• LIVING deaths
• American graphic designers
• Graphic designers
• Logo designers