Muriel Cooper

Hardcover in slipcase | 26.82 x 3.23 x 37.31 cm | 240 pp

MIT Press | 2017 | 9780262036504

Muriel Cooper (1925–1994) was the pioneering designer who created the iconic MIT Press colophon (or logo) - seven bars that represent the lowercase letters “mitp” as abstracted books on a shelf. She designed a modernist monument, the encyclopaedic volume The Bauhaus (1969), and the graphically dazzling and controversial first edition of Learning from Las Vegas (1972). She used an offset press as an artistic tool, worked with a large-format Polaroid camera, and had an early vision of e-books.

Cooper was the first design director of the MIT Press, the cofounder of the Visible Language Workshop at MIT, and the first woman to be granted tenure at MIT's Media Lab, where she developed software interfaces and taught a new generation of designers. She began her four-decade career at MIT by designing vibrant printed flyers for the Office of Publications; her final projects were digital.

This lavishly illustrated volume documents Cooper's career in abundant detail, with prints, sketches, book covers, posters, mechanicals, student projects, and photographs, from her work in design, teaching, and research at MIT.

"Muriel Cooper is one of the most influential and inspiring yet little known figures in
20th-century design. Until now. What a pleasure to finally read a book that describes
Cooper and her work so eloquently." Alice Rawsthorn, author of Hello World: Where Design Meets Life

"Muriel Cooper was a theorist, a humanist, a futurist, anda deeply principled designer
whose work was as driven by thoughtful inquiry as by function and strategy. In a
chaotic world overrun by data and digits, her inventive contributions remain as elegant, her observations as trenchant as ever. This book is long overdue." Jessica Helfand, Yale School of Art