Theory at Work | 95KatherIne Mccoy Cranbrook
Graduate Design “See Read”
Poster, 1989. A photographic
collage of recent graduate student
work is overlaid by a list of
possibly opposing design values
and a diagram of communication
theories. McCoy developed the
“See Read” framework circa 1988
to model how deconstruction and
structuralist/poststructuralist
literary theories might be applied
to graphic design’s visual and
verbal processes. The underlying
premise is that a viewer receives
stimuli in two modes: seeing—a
visual, simultaneous, intuitive,
experiential, perceptual, gestalt
process; and reading—a verbal,
sequential, learned, cerebral,
decoding process. Typically we
assume that viewers “see” images
and “read” words, but this model
also links “seeing” with text and
“reading” with imagery.