[1] A visit of the Museum of Modern Art during a family trip to the New York World's Fair in 1964 had made her aware that her interest was in the power of design.
It was at the interdisciplinary Unimark offices where McCoy was exposed to the strict Swiss typographic and design approaches which came to permeate much of American corporate communications through the late 1960s and 70s.
[citation needed] Katherine describes combining the "objective" typographic approach that she knew through reading and the Unimark experience with an interest in the social and cultural activism that was in the air in the late '60s when creating and reinventing the program.
[citation needed] The commercial vernacular collages of Edward Fella, the Basel experiments of Wolfgang Weingart and a Yale project by Dan Friedman were visual design influences.
Later sources included semiotics, post-structuralism, literary theory and deconstruction; both the students' and McCoy's work experimented with applications of these ideas to communications design.
Reinvented by the McCoys, the program was organized around experimentation in the studio, with minimal structure or assignments – a return to the Art Academy's original method.
There were no deadlines, papers, or finals, other than the expectation of new work in weekly critiques and semester-end self-evaluations and extended bibliographies.
[8] Although the McCoy's program was sometimes thought to be controversial,[9] their tenure at Cranbrook resulted in the graduation and success of many known designers, including Lorraine Wild, Edward Fella, Nancy Skolos and Tom Wedell, P. Scott Makela, Andrew Blauvelt, Lucille Tenazas, Meredith Davis and Patrick Whitney.
In 1991, Katherine and Michael McCoy, along with a team 2-D students, produced the book "Cranbrook Design: The New Discourse" (Rizzoli International Publications).