MIT Press (1952-1974)

In 1952, Cooper became a freelance designer at the newly-formed Massachusetts Institute of Technology Office of Publications, which would eventually become MIT Press.[4]:2 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.[8] 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.[4]:3

Cooper and Casey, along with Ralph Coburn and Dietmar Winkler, would be influential in bringing modern Swiss-style typography to MIT Press[7] and to the related magazine that would become MIT Technology Review.[9]

After working at MIT for six years, Cooper left in 1958 to take a Fulbright Scholarship in Milan,[5] where she studied exhibition design.[7]

When Cooper returned in 1963, she opened an independent graphic studio in Brookline, Massachusetts.[10] The MIT Press was among Cooper's various clients, leading to her design of its iconic trademark colophon or 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 stack of books).[7] The logo has been called a high-water mark in twentieth-century graphic design.[8] 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.[10]

In 1967, Cooper returned to a full-time position as Design Director of the MIT Press, having been recommended by Paul Rand.[6][7] 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.[7][10][11] 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.[8][10]

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.[10] 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.[12]:368 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.[12]:368

Cooper was influential in introducing computers to MIT Press design; in 1967, she audited[13] MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte's course on "Computers and Design", which increased her growing fascination with developing digital technology.[7][10]

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.[14] She then continued to hold a part-time designation as “Special Projects Director” at MIT Press.[10]