Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design

As a result of working with Ed Fella, a self-taught commercial
artist with a highly personalized graphic style, McCoy’s modernist
tendencies expanded to include an understanding and sympathy for the
“low end” of commercial art and the vernacular. McCoy brought Fella
into the program at Cranbrook to participate formally in critiques and
informally in spontaneous interactions with students. This sparked
investigation into other commercial vernaculars and books like Robert
Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas.
In 1978 ,Visible Language, a scholarly journal devoted to exploring
the role and properties of written language, dedicated a volume to
contemporary French literary aesthetics and engaged Cranbrook in a
collaborative effort to design the volume, titled “French Currents of the
Letter.” Daniel Libeskind, head of Cranbrook’s architecture department,
worked with McCoy and select students, giving them a crash course in
French linguistic theory.
Deconstructionism, a term that would later become Cranbrook’s
albatross, is a part of poststructuralism, which, in turn, is a response to
structuralism, an earlier movement in French literary theory. Led by
Ferdinand de Saussure, structuralism posited that signs, rather than
being isolated elements with self-contained meanings, are culturally
interdependent parts of an overall network whose meaning is derived from
the relationships between the parts. Deconstructionism was introduced to
the United States through the writings of Jacques Derrida, which were
translated into English in the late 1970 s. Derrida suggested that a cultural
construction, such as an idea, a value, or a sentence can be disassembled, or
taken apart, and decoded—its parts examined for “meaning.” The parts can
be reassembled into another whole that may, then, take on a different
meaning. The rearrangement of the parts into various wholes opens a way
of exploring the complex nature of signs and moves communications into
the complicated landscape of multimeaning, layered contexts, thus marking
a shift from binary, yes–no signification to a more subjective,
multidimensional interpretation of meaning.
For the Visible Languageproject, McCoy and students Richard
Kerr, Alice Hecht, Jane Kosstrin, and Herbert Thompson created a
typographic analog to the text. The essays began with traditional layouts.
Progressively the space between the words and lines was expanded and
footnote material was repositioned to interact unconventionally with the
text. The final essays appeared to be pages of floating words visually
punctuated by black horizontal bands of marginalia that so dislodged
conventional reading order that the viewer was forced into alternative
reading patterns. Vertical and diagonal pathways opened up, causing words