Women Of Design - Bryony Gomez - Palacio & Armin Vit

Surging within the unsympathetic, male-inclined business and academic environments of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, these designers defined their own berths in a fledging graphic design profession and cultivated an instrumental body of work that would influence future generations. Now, with decades of experience, through sustained practice and career that have lent them firsthand accounts - even leading roles - of the numerous changes in the profession, their contributions are incisive, authoritative and salient as they continue to exemplify the creativity and business acumen that represents the best graphic designers today.

Katherine McCoy

More than forty years ago you held your first design position at Unimark International, a paragon of the then-new corporate modernism. How formative was this first experience?

I was very excited to join Unimark International as a junior designer after college graduation. It was an exceptional way to begin one's design career. Unimark was like graduate school for me. 

The Unimark designers were excellent, and I learned a great deal from them. I had the opportunity to work with two Swiss graphic designers, Harry Boiler and Peter Tuebner, who were my first sources of knowledge about the Swiss grid system. I watched their every move! Massimo Vignelli, a Unimark vice president who headed their New flew York office, flew in Periodically to discuss projects.

The Unimark clients and projects were high quality, well-funded and challenging, allowing us the opportunity to do our best work. 

The Unimark designers had books that I had never seen before—the Swiss "bibles" by Muller-Brockman, Karl Gerstner, Armin Hofmann and Emil Ruder. In 1967 these books were only available in one bookstore in the United States George Wittenborn in New York City. I photocopied each entire book after-hours on Unimark's photocopier! 

Unimark was very demanding. We all worked very long hours, often over sixty hours a week. But we were highly motivated by a missionary zeal to improve the design quality of the built environment in people's lives. The state of design in the U.S. was pretty awful in the 1950s and 1960s, and we wanted to clean it up. The highest compliment one could say about a design was, "That is really clean!" Clean meant minimalist, modernist form based on an objective and systematic problem-solving process. Sans serif typography (Helvetica and occasionally Univers) on a grid was always a key element. The Unimark office had a bank of flat files filled with Helvetica 

transfer lettering. 

After working at a few other design firms, you and your husband, Michael, and industrial designer, set up your own outpost, McCoy & McCoy. This collaboration has stood, to different extents, since the 1970s. How have you been able to maintain it? Do you separate business from pleasure? 

Michael and I met in our university's industrial design studio, so we shared a passion for design from the beginning. We married two weeks after my graduation, and it was natural to continue sharing our design enthusiasm. I brought things home from Unimark constantly and we poured over them. Mike began his own studio at that time, and it was natural that I worked on those projects with him after-hours. When we began at Cranbrook, we formalised our partner-ship as McCoy & McCoy. 

We've always lived and breathed design. We do take time off from design, although not in a formalised or structured way. Design is not just from 9 to 5 with personal life in the evenings. Our work lives and personal lives are more fluid and less formally structured than many people's. Our individual design interests and abilities seem complementary. Because we each know a lot about the other's work, we are able to support and assist each other, and celebrate each other's accomplishments. Over the years, we have found that it is healthy for each of us to have our own focus and build our own reputation in that. Then, when we collaborate, we both have the the maturity to be equal contributors. 

When we were first out of school, it was very important for me to build my own 1 career and establish myself as a designer independent of my husband. This was the late 1960s when there were few women in design. In fact, except for a six-month period, I was the only female designer in each place I worked. And at Cranbrook, I was the only woman on the faculty for almost twenty years. I worked for four different design firms and studios before Cranbrook, and I gained valuable experience from each. I've always enjoyed working in organisations, whereas Mike has always preferred to work independently. I have also devoted many fruitful years to work and leadership in professional design organisations—the Industrial Designers Society of America, the American Institute of Graphic Arts and the American Centre for Design.

Paula Scher

With an unparalleled typographic approach that can adapt and thrive in a perplexing number of applications - record covers, staircases, air-conditioning ducts - and for an enviable range of clients - Citibank, Tiffany&Co, and The Public Theatre, to name a few - the work of Paul Scher has surfaced the top of the profession for more than three decades. She started in the music industry at CBS Records and also briefly at Atlantic Records, then broadened her scope of work in the mid-1980s through her own studio, Koppel and Scher. She has been a partner at Pentagram since 1991, where her energetic deign has fully developed into a multidisciplinary portfolio.

Sheila de Bretteville

For the last three decades, de Bretteville has been cementing her legacy in design education: First in the 1970s as the founder of the Women's Design Program at the California Institute of the Arts; then in 1981 as the initiator of the communication design program at the Otis Art Institute of the Parsons School of Design; and since 1990 as professor and director of graduate studies in graphic design at Yale. During her academic career, de Bretteville has produced work that embraces user participation and the effect the work has on local communities - her celebrated work in the public art realm reflects this sensibility by weaving itself into the neighbourhoods it inhabits.