Katherine McCoy

                                              Katherine McCoy

She began her work in design at Unimark International, and was a graphic designer for Chrysler Corporation's Corporate Identity Office, Omnigraphics of Boston, and Designers and Partners, an advertising design studio in Detroit. Other professional practice includes graphic design for MIT Press, Xerox Education Group, and major advertising agencies. As a partner of McCoy & McCoy Associates, projects include graphic and signage design, design marketing, exhibition design, the interior design of furniture showrooms and executive offices, and a television documentary, Future Wave: Japan Design. Recent clients include Formica Corporation, Unisys, Philips Electronics, Tobu Stores Tokyo, International Design Center Nagoya, Detroit Institute of Arts and Cranbrook Educational Community.

She is Past President and Fellow of the Industrial Designers Society of America, and an elected member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale. In recent years she served as President and Chairman of the Board of the American Center for Design, and Vice President of the American Institute of Graphic Arts. She has been a member of the Aldus Graphic Arts Advisory Board, the Design Issues Advisory Board, and a Contributing Editor of ID Magazine. She served on the Design Arts Policy Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts and chaired the Design Arts Fellowships Grant Panel for three years. She was a 1982 IBM Fellow of the International Design Conference at Aspen. In 1987 she received the Society of Typographic Arts Educator Award and the Joyce Hall Distinguished Professorship at Kansas City Art Institute jointly with husband and partner Michael McCoy. In 1994 they were jointly awarded a Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design.

Her work has been published internationally, including the book Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language History by the Walker Art Center and Women in Design, published by Rizzoli International. Her teaching methodology has been featured in the ABC Editions Zurich books Graphic Design International and Graphic Design Education, Eye Magazine, Novum Gebrauchsgraphik and Print Magazine. She recently coauthored and designed the book, Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse, published by Rizzoli International. She curated the exhibition New Dutch Graphic Design, which traveled to thirteen cities including Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, Seattle, Montreal and Vancouver from 1986 to 1990. In 1993 she chaired Living Surfaces, the first national conference in the U.S. on multimedia in graphic and industrial design.

A major exhibition, Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse, traveled to New York and Tokyo in 1991, featuring posters and books by Katherine McCoy, as well as those by her students and alumni. Other exhibitions include Mixing Messages at the Cooper Hewitt Museum of Design, New York; Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language History at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and L' image des Mots at the Centre Pompidou Centre de Creation Industrielle, Paris; the Design Museum, London, the Cooper Hewitt Museum of Design, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the International Design Conference at Aspen, the Cranbrook Academy of Art Museum, and the Pacific Design Center; the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the Isreal Museum, Jerusalem, and the Cultural Palace, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

International lectures include five ICOGRADA and four ICSID congresses, the Stanford Design and Aspen conferences, the Cooper Hewitt Museum of Design, the New York Architectural League, Harvard University, the Rietveld Academy of Amsterdam, and JIDA and JAGDA, Japan. Juries include the AIGA Communication Graphics, STA 100 Show, Interiors Magazine "I" Awards, and 1984, 1988 and 1991 United States Presidential Design Awards.

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.