The mark is alleged to represent books sitting on an implied shelf. But if we were to take Cooper's word for the shelf's existence, the letterform-books would end up impossibly descending into the shelf's structure, breaking it entirely.

The criteria for judging the Cooper mark have been made very clear given the explanations provided by Cooper and her biographers. The first order element to make sense of is the letters 'M,' 'I,' 'T,' 'P.' The second order is the bookshelf metaphor. The truth is, the logo fails to communicate either.

You might expect designers therefore to judge the logo as falling flat on its own conceptual terms. But this cannot be accepted. Designers pride themselves on their visual discernment. So they experience an acute cognitive dissonance when happening upon a dubious, yet celebrated logo like Cooper's MIT Press mark.

So in my head I'm like, "the MIT Press logo is the best logo ev-ar." And then I read up and it was done by Muriel Cooper. Yup. — Dorian Taylor (@doriantaylor) December 7, 2014

The instinctual response is to justify the apparent consensus. The designer says, "so what if I'm unable to parse both the primary and secondary elements of the logo? It must be the height of excellence, after all, it's in the canon!"

In this way, the true genius of the MIT Press mark is in anything but its formal qualities. Instead, the logo is noteworthy precisely because it has achieved critical acclaim despite, or more accurately, because of its failure to communicate.

The relief one feels after learning of the half-baked conceptual origins of the logo does not come from a sense of discovery and awe, but instead the sense that one is now in on the joke. Few are self-aware about this, and even fewer would ever admit it.

Despite the incoherence of this mark, it nevertheless set the stage for MIT's future brand efforts.

Cooper's Influence

Pentagram's Michael Bierut and Aron Fay led the 2014 identity redesign for the MIT Media Lab. They set out to follow in Cooper's footsteps, using a similar geometric grid, which led to a comparably dense result.