McCoy, Katherine, with David Frej, 'Typography as Discourse', ID Magazine, New York, March/April 1988, pp. 34-37.
In 1971, McCoy became co-chair, with her husband Mike McCoy, of the design department at Cranbrook Academy of Art. This indicates a predominantly postmodern paradigm of her teachings and design practice. Being in Cranbrook for 24 years makes McCoy a reliable source to understand the rationales behind New Wave and postmodern design. Her reliability in graphic design is further evidenced by her presidential role at the Industrial Designers Society of America and an elected member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale. She is president of the American Center for Design and recently completed a term as vice-president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts.
McCoy suggests that New Wave was started in the early 70's through a combination of external influences on American design students from Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Wolfgang Weingart's syntactical experimentation in Basel's school of design. This results in a style that incorporates the layered images and textures that were pioneered by Cubism, Constructivism and Dada which is evident in Weingart's work and the vernacular imagery and colours that reflected the postmodernist architecture that was brought into popular culture. New Wave represents a style that is made up of complex syntactical compositions that abstract type and images.
McCoy also gives a definition of New Wave. "New Wave extends the classical Swiss interest in structure to dissections and recombinations of graphic design's grammar."
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