Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design

part museum, and part design laboratory” become an experimental crucible
for American typography during the 1970 s and 1980 s without a plan, much
less a manifesto? In this unstructured environment the focus and impetus
for learning came directly from the students, who were highly motivated
self-starters. “We always encouraged students to read,” explained McCoy
(Eye,No. 16 , Vol. 4 ). McCoy kept an ever-expanding department
bibliography, but texts were not assigned; students were encouraged to
research, ruminate, and formulate with an eye to developing their own
conceptual strategies. Cross-fertilization was a way of life between
departments (art, photography, and architecture) and people. Students
worked cheek by jowl in studios with faculty and each other as dorm rooms
and cafeterias became laboratories for high-spirited discussions.
McCoy was reluctant to describe the evolution at Cranbrook as a
progression. It was more like spontaneous combustion, but there was an
overarching philosophy that confronted graphic design’s traditional
dilemma—form versus content—head on. “Form is not the enemy of
content, and form can become content as well as a container of content,”
she explained. For McCoy, her 1989 Cranbrook Designposter symbolizes
this reconciliation and pluralism. Visually, word pairs stretch the length of
the poster anchored to the center, their dialectic reinforced by color and
layout. Layered beneath the word pairs are collaged image-fragments of
student work, echoing the bilateral symmetry with two-dimensional
design projects on the left and three-dimensional projects on the right.
The deepest information layer is the See-Read-Text-Image diagram that
unites the poster formally, and semantically suggests multiple interactions
between the elements.
To structure the phases during her tenure at Cranbrook, McCoy
used a simplified communication model based on a 1949 linear-progression
schematic developed by Shannon & Weaver. Although Shannon’s model
was later replaced by more sophisticated ones, “the sender › message ›
receiver” chain identified the core elements of communication as a basic
linear interaction. McCoy, whose background is in industrial design, came
to Cranbrook as a problem-solver and modernist. In the early years,
1971 – 1980 , the program focused on the message part of Shannon’s equation,
expanding the modernist notion of the transparent designer
communicating a clear and precise message to an audience. The entire
lineage of Swiss work was examined, from Karl Gerstner and early Müller-
Brockmann, Hans Neuberg and Emil Ruder to the later “high Swiss” of
Ruedi Rüegg, Odermatt & Tissi, and Wolfgang Weingart’s “mannered
Swiss.” Despite this thoroughness, the Swiss vein was just one of many
being explored at the time.