Muriel Cooper (The MIT Press)

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Description

The career of the pioneering designer Muriel Cooper, whose work spanned media from printed book to software interface; generously illustrated in color.

Muriel Cooper (1925–1994) used to be 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 encyclopedic 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 big-format Polaroid camera, and had an early vision of e-books. Cooper used to be 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 started her four-decade career at MIT by designing vibrant printed flyers for the Place of job 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.

A humanist among scientists, Cooper embraced dynamism, simultaneity, transparency, and expressiveness across all of the media she worked in. More than twenty years after her career came to a premature end, Muriel Cooper’s legacy continues to be unfolding. This gorgeous slip-cased volume, designed by Yasuyo Iguchi, looks back at a body of work that may be as up to date now as it used to be when Cooper used to be experimenting with IBM Selectric typewriters. She designed design’s future.

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