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| ==See also== | ==See also== | ||
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| * Interview in Eye Magazine with Katherine McCoy | |||
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Revision as of 04:42, 8 December 2011
| Katherine McCoy | |
|---|---|
| Born | Katherine Jane Braden (1945-10-12)October 12, 1945 Decatur, Illinois, USA |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Michigan State University, Industrial design Graduated 1967 |
| Known for | Graphic designer |
Katherine McCoy (born Katherine Jane Braden in Decatur, Illinois, October 12, 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. 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 while on a family trip to the New York World's Fair. As a student, McCoy studied Industrial Design at Michigan State University, where she graduated in 1967.
- Shortly after graduation, McCoy joined Unimark International, a design firm led by many key figures in American Modernist graphic design, including Massimo Vignelli, Ralph Eckerstrom of Container Corporation, Jay Doblin 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 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. 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. While McCoy led the graphic design program, and Michael McCoy 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 book Learning from Las Vegas, Richard Saul Wurman'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 experiments of Wolfgang Weingart and a Yale project by Dan Friedman were visual design influences. Later sources included semiotics, post-structuralism, literary theory and deconstruction; 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 deadlines, papers, or finals. Only a final thesis was required in the end of the program. However, the McCoys did require students to read about the history and theory behind the area of design they were entering. This was done “in order to really understand the context in which each student was going to be entering”. Each student is encouraged to develop their own voice in design, within a mix of different radical and new experiments, sometimes done with the McCoys. Students also had the opportunity to work directly with Katherine McCoy, and this became the counterbalance for the experimental work in the Cranbrook Art School. This process that Katherine and Michael McCoy had brought to the program had began a revolution of change in many aspects. It exemplified the transformation of the design program itself and the studios, along with its critiques, centered around the possibility of breaking away from the normal everyday practice of design. Although the McCoy’s program was sometimes thought to be controversial, their tenure at Cranbrook resulted in the graduation and success of many known designers, including Lorraine Wild, Edward Fella, Nancy Skolos and Tom Wedell, P. Scott Makela, Andrew Blauvelt, Lucille Tenazas, Meredith Davis and Patrick Whitney. After McCoy left Cranbrook in 1995, she held several other teaching positions. Her most well-known position with the 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 the book was often voiced without knowledge of the actual discourse of the studio critique. Lead by the McCoys, it challenged the experimentation to be as real as possible.
- After 24 years of creative work, the McCoys left their positions in 1995. They moved to Chicago where they spent every fall semester at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design, giving senior lectures and seminars until 2004. 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 curriculum 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 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.
Quotations
- "The challenge is for the graphic designer to turn data into information and information into messages of meaning". - Katherine McCoy
- "The complexity I’m interested in is complexity of meaning. I’m not so much interested in the layers of form as the layers of meaning". -Katherine McCoy
Positions Held
- 1982 IBM Fellow of the International Design Conference in Aspen
- President of the Industrial Designers Society of America
- Elected Member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale
- AIGA National Vice President
- Member of the Aldus Graphic Arts Advisory Board
- Member of the Design Issues Advisory Board
- Contributing Editor of ID Magazine
- Served on the Design Arts Policy Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts
- Chairman of the Design Arts Fellowships Grant Panel
- Curator at the exhibition for the New Dutch Graphic Design
- Associate Producer of a public television documentary; Future Wave: Japan Design
- Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Art in London (1992-1996)
- Co-chaired Cranbrook Academy of Art’s Design Department (1971-1995)
- Senior Lecturer at Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design (1995-2004)
Awards
- Throughout her career, Katherine McCoy has been the recipient of many awards, titles, and recognized greatly for her work. “Design awards include the ID Magazine Annual Design Review, the AIGA Communication Graphics Show, the STA 100 Show, the Print Regional Design Annual, the Type Directors Club of New York TDC Show, the New York Art Directors Club One Show, the Society of Publication Designers, the Interiors Magazine ‘I’ Awards, and the Industrial Designers Society of America IDEA Awards”. .
- 1984- United States Presidential Design Awards
- 1987-Society of Typographic Arts Educator Award
- 1987- Joyce Hall Distinguished Professorship at Kansas City Art Institute
- 1988- United States Presidential Design Awards
- 1991- United States Presidential Design Awards
- 1994- Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design
- 1999- Medallist of the American Institute of Graphic Arts
- 2000- Industrial Designers Society of American Education
- 2004- Honorary Doctorate from Kansas City Art Institute
- 2005- Design Minds Award by the Smithsonain Museum’s National Design Awards
See also
- List of AIGA medalists
- Interview in Eye Magazine with Katherine McCoy
References
- ^ Wild, Lorraine. "Katherine McCoy: Expanding Boundaries". Retrieved 30 Jul 2009.
- Harper, Laurel (October 1, 1999). Radical graphics/graphic radicals. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books. pp. 62–63. ISBN 081181680X.
- http://www.aiga.org/medalist-katherinemccoy/
- http://www.highgrounddesign.com/mccoy/kmframe.htm
- http://www.aiga.org/medalist-katherinemccoy/
- http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/medalist-katherinemccoy
- http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature.php?id=47&fid=56
- http://www.aiga.org/medalist-katherinemccoy/
- http://www.aiga.org/medalist-katherinemccoy/
- http://www.a-g-i.org/2053/members/mccoy.html
- http://powerofdesign.aiga.org/content.cfm/mccoy_categ
- http://www.highgrounddesign.com/about/about.htm
- http://quotesondesign.com/katherine-mccoy/
- http://eyemagazine.com/feature.php?id=47&fid=56
- http://seedawards.consultsherra.com/judges/katherine-mccoy/
- http://idsa.org/katherine-j-mccoy
- http://seedawards.consultsherra.com/judges/katherine-mccoy/
- http://www.a-g-i.org/2053/members/mccoy.html
- http://seedawards.consultsherra.com/judges/katherine-mccoy/