Muriel Cooper

Muriel Ruth Cooper was born in 1925 in Brookline, an inner suburb of Boston, Massachusetts.

She was the oldest daughter of three children.

Cooper received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Ohio State in 1944, and a Bachelor of Fine Art in design in 1948 and a Bachelor of Science in education in 1951 from Massachusetts College of Art (MassArt).

After her graduation, Cooper moved to New York City and attempted to find a position in advertising.

She met Paul Rand, who was influential to her design "way of life".

In 1952, Cooper was recommended to and then recruited by John Mattill to join the newly formed Massachusetts Institute of Technology Office of Publications, which would eventually become MIT Press.

There, she collaborated with György Kepes, professor of visual design at MIT and former colleague of artist László Moholy-Nagy in Hungary.

She soon was appointed to head the Office, newly renamed to Design Services, which was one of the first university design programs in the country.

In 1955, Cooper recruited graphic designer and fellow MassArt alumna Jacqueline Casey to begin her own lengthy career at MIT, where her friend would design many posters and smaller publications in a modernist style.

At MassArt, they had worked together as cashiers and then as bookkeepers at the school store, and had also used the space as an informal studio after hours.

Cooper and Casey, along with Ralph Coburn and Dietmar Winkler, would be influential in bringing modern Swiss-style typography to MIT Press and to the related magazine that would become MIT Technology Review.

After working at MIT for six years, Cooper left in 1958 to take a Fulbright Scholarship in Milan, where she studied exhibition design.

When Cooper returned in 1963, she opened an independent graphic studio in Brookline, Massachusetts.

She also taught briefly as an associate professor at MassArt.

The MIT Press was among Cooper's various clients, leading to her design of its iconic trademark colophon or publisher's logo, an abstracted set of seven vertical bars (a visual play on the vertical strokes of the initial letters "mitp", as well as the spines of a row of shelved books).

The logo has been called a high-water mark in twentieth-century graphic design.

The commission to design the logo had first been offered to Cooper's old mentor Paul Rand, who demurred and recommended her for the job.

In 1967, Cooper returned to a full-time position as design director of the MIT Press, having been recommended by Paul Rand.

Cooper was influential in introducing computers to MIT Press design; in 1967, she had audited MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte's course on "Computers and Design", which increased her growing fascination with developing digital technology.

She admitted to being "bewildered" by the course, but nonetheless realized the growing importance of computers to publishing and design in general, and was unafraid to recruit others with expertise in computers to help develop their application to design.

Among many other publications, she designed the classic book Bauhaus (published by MIT Press in 1969, the 50th anniversary of the German design school's founding).

This project dominated her work for nearly two years, to enlarge, revise, and completely redesign an American version of an earlier German edition.

She set the book in the newly available Helvetica typeface and used a grid system page layout, giving the book a strong modernist appearance.

Cooper also made a film rendition of the book, which attempted to give an accelerated depiction of translating interactive experiences from a computer to paper.

This endeavor was her response to the challenge of turning time into space.

As the design director of MIT Press, Cooper promoted the Bauhaus-influenced, modernist look of a large quantity of publications, including 500 books.

She designed the first edition of Learning from Las Vegas (1972), the ground-breaking manifesto of Post-Modernist design, using radical variations on the Bauhaus style to produce the publication.

At 49 years old in 1973, Cooper was already well known in the design industry.

A third influential book design was a collection of essays by Herbert Muschamp, titled File Under Architecture (1974).

This was one of the first books to be typeset directly on a computer by the book designer.

At the time, the only typeface available was monospaced Courier, but she used the capabilities of computer typesetting to achieve a new level of control over the detailed layout of each page.

Cooper maintained her full-time position with the MIT Press until 1974, and oversaw the release of multiple series of titles in architecture, economics, biology, computer science, and sociology that formed a critical discourse around systems, feedback loops, and control.

She then continued to hold a part-time designation as “Special Projects Director” at MIT Press.

Starting around 1974, Cooper gradually phased out of her full-time position at MIT Press to found the MIT Visual Language Workshop with the designer, Ron MacNeil.

Cooper taught interactive media design as the founder and head of the Visible Language Workshop (VLW).

She was recognized as a pioneer in designing and changing the landscape of electronic communication.

Muriel Cooper (1925 – May 26, 1994) was a pioneering book designer, digital designer, researcher, and educator.

She was the first design director of the MIT Press, instilling a Bauhaus-influenced design style into its many publications.

She moved on to become founder of MIT's Visible Language Workshop, and later became a co-founder of the MIT Media Lab.

In 2007, a New York Times article called her "the design heroine you've probably never heard of".