Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design

and phrases to reassemble themselves through new juxtapositions that
jarred conventional meanings. It offended almost everyone, drawing rage
and ridicule from designers still committed to the modernist canon of
simplicity, legibility, and problem solving.
The investigation of formalist expression culminated in 1980 – 1981
with the high formalist phase. Here the emphasis shifted, in Shannon’s
model, from the message to the sender. The classic student exercise in
typography, to take a semantically neutral message like a weather report or
recipe and explore its presentation through typographic and compositional
variations, had evolved into what became known as the “label” exercise.
After some classic warm-ups, the projects started with a Yellow Pages ad or
a product label that was subjected to visual analysis, typographic variations,
and most controversially, subjective interpretations of the original object or
ad. The designer was no longer just a translator, but a commentator,
partner, and participant in the delivery of the message.
The third, poststructuralist phase ( 1983 – 1995 ) grew out of a
restlessness and dissatisfaction with mannered formalist manipulations.
Although the Visible Language project in the late 1970 s touched on
deconstructionism, it wasn’t until the mid- 1980 s, with the classes of 1985 / 87
and 1986 / 88 , that an active interest in linguistic theories really flourished.
Driven by student inquisitiveness, McCoy called this period the “theory-of-
the-week-club—structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction,
phenomenology, critical theory, reception theory, hermeneutics, letterism,
Venturi vernacularism, postmodern art theory.” McCoy resisted, asked
questions, and challenged both students and theories. As Jeffery Keedy, a
student at the time, recalled (Eye,No.16,Vol. 4 ) that McCoy kept saying,
“But what does it look like? How you do make it work as a design tool?”
She admitted to being skeptical at times, but always remained committed
to the mutual search, if not the mutual conclusions.
In the poststructuralist period at Cranbrook, the emphasis in
Shannon’s model of communication changed again, now from sender to
receiver. The traditional notion that text was to be read (a linear, encoded,
left-brained activity) and images were to be seen (a holistic, experiential,
right-brain activity) was questioned. Text became cross-functional and took
on an expanded capability to communicate beyond its functionality, moving
into the realm of the illustrative (type as image), atmospheric, or expressive.
Similarly, images could be “read,” sequenced, and combined to form more
complex information patterns.
Concepts like multiplicity, layers of embedded information,
viewer-controlled text and imagery, and nonlinear progression, which were
characteristics of Cranbrook’s experimental design in the late 1980 s, have