Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, September 9, 2025 : Katherine McCoy, an American graphic designer and educator (#2361)

Tuesday, September 9, 2025

Artist of the Day, September 9, 2025 : Katherine McCoy, an American graphic designer and educator (#2361)

Katherine McCoy (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, a yearly conference created for professional designers.

McCoy was born Katherine Jane Braden in Decatur, Illinois. As a student, she first studied interior design at Michigan State University but switched to industrial design, in which field she graduated in 1967. A visit of the Museum of Modern Art during a family trip to the New York World's Fair in 1964 had made her aware that her interest was in the power of design.

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 & Partners focused solely on working with advertising agencies and had a staff that included a wide variety of graphic arts professionals, including illustrators, cartoonists, and "lettering men" as well as graphic designers. Although McCoy found that ad agency work was not very compatible with design thinking and ethics, the opportunities she was given and connections she made are an important part of her design experience.

In 1971 she founded the practice McCoy & McCoy, Inc, with her husband, Michael McCoy.

In fall 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 describes combining the "objective" typographic approach that she knew through reading and the Unimark experience 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 (1972), Richard Saul Wurman's publishing on the man-made environment, and McCoy's own interest in social design and design vernacular.

Reinvented by the McCoys, the program was organized around experimentation in the studio, with minimal structure or assignments – a return to the Art Academy's original method. There were no deadlines, papers, or finals, other than the expectation of new work in weekly critiques and semester-end self-evaluations and extended bibliographies. A final degree project and thesis were required in the last semester. The McCoys required students to read deeply about the history and theory behind the design concerns on which they were focusing. The process that Katherine and Michael McCoy brought to the program initiated change in many aspects. It transformed the design program itself and the studios, along with its critiques, centered on the possibility of breaking from the norms of everyday design practice. Cranbrook graduated over 200 students under the direction of the McCoys, many of whom also went on to become design educators.

After 24 years of creative work, the McCoys left their positions in 1995. They moved to Buena Vista, Colorado, where they opened the design studio McCoy & McCoy Associates. Later, they moved to Chicago where they spent each fall semester at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design, giving senior lectures and seminars until 2004.

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.

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