“Swiss in America” Revolution Discussed

Katherine McCoy

Another valuable addition to the series of lectures organized by the Department of Architecture and Design, Katherine McCoy’s “Swiss in America,” presented on Monday, February 16, in the Architecture Lecture Hall, focused on the sixties arrival of Swiss graphic design in North America, another revolution—besides the “flower power” counterculture—which led to the transformation of graphic design in the international arena.

McCoy traced in some detail the web of connections among Swiss designers that started in a small way in the 1950s, but developed into something more visible in the 1960s, with the arrival of pivotal Swiss and Swiss-school designers to influence a key group of North American designers and design teachers between 1965 and 1975.

As a young graphic designer just out of college in 1967, McCoy avidly sought examples of Swiss design, but there were not that many at the time. The Swiss “Bibles” were on a book-shelf at Unimark International, where McCoy had her first design job. “I photocopied every page of them, since they were not in any Detroit bookstores,” she reminisced.

McCoy elaborated on the role of Swiss graphic design in the definition and growth of the emerging graphic design profession. Swiss design methods and visual forms, typified by Helvetica and the grid, provided designers with useful tools that further distinguished American graphic design from advertising, art direction, and commercial art.

From the early Swiss connection to the movement’s swift evolution from a radically different design to the conventional corporate style, followed by post-modernist Swiss rebellions and more recent Swiss revivals, even nostalgia—the presentation included various slides of the dramatic early work.  The vibrant Swiss visual form, typography, and design methods in their early contexts—beyond Helvetica—can help us recognize the threads of Swiss design in today’s international graphic design practice.

Katherine McCoy cochaired the Cranbrook Academy of Art’s Design Department for 24 years. She was a senior lecturer at Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design and a distinguished visiting professor at the Royal College of Art.