• Muriel Cooper

Muriel Cooper

Regular price $60.00

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

By David Reinfurt and Robert Wiesenberger

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 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 large-format Polaroid camera, and had an early vision of e-books.

Cooper was the first design director of the MIT Press, the co-founder 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 vibrantly printed flyers for the Office of Publications; her final projects were digital.

A humanist among scientists, Cooper embraced dynamism, simultaneity, transparency, and expressiveness across all the media she worked in. More than two decades after her career came to a premature end, Muriel Cooper's legacy is still unfolding.

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.

With an afterword by Nicholas Negroponte, the founding chairman of the MIT Media Lab, Media Lab Europe, and the 2B1 Foundation; and a foreword by Lisa Strausfeld.

Designed by Yasuyo Iguchi

Hardcover in slipcase with belly band, 240 pages, 202 color and 137 b&w illustrations, 10 × 14 inches

Published by MIT Press, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-262-03650-4

Looking makes making better.