Muriel Cooper

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 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…