Michael Cooper Stationery London 1967
BJ’s stationery design for Michael Cooper is an example of unequivocal boldness. With both its typographic restraint and exaggerated scale, and more importantly, with its straightforward prose and sheer audacity, it remains a source of astonishment. As a letterhead, it says a great deal about this designer, the client and the peculiarities of the 1960’s London scene that buoyed them both.
Michael Cooper was a well-known photographer in London and had done some Rolling Stones projects as well as photographed Peter Blake’s designed set for the Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover.
In formal terms, the design, with its Futura Bold typeface, is strikingly severe. Set on the letterhead in six rows, it generates the look of ideologically driven graphic utilitarianism. This simplicity of form is matched with clarity of expression. It takes a lot of guts to convert a piece of typography intended as an advertisement for someone else into a promotion for yourself. Every communication Michael Cooper made on this paper could not help but be at least as much about BJ’s as it was about its subject.
Bob Gill has suggested that the letterhead was designed in reaction to being cajoled into doing the job as a favour:
‘This is the greatest free job ever done by a designer. What does he want to say? I did this for nothing, that’s what.’
Bobby Gill (Bob’s then wife) has a somewhat different take on it:
‘Michael Cooper was somebody who used to hang around, but he didn’t have much of a personality. BJ thought and thought of something to do for Cooper’s letterhead, but the only thing this guy has done that was in any way interesting was to ask BJ to design it.’
The truth is somewhere between the two but accounts of Cooper do hint at a paper-thin personality. Among the most damning is that from Robert Fraser’s artist Jim Dine:
‘Michael was pathetic, Fraser’s pawan…They were close, but Michael was not a great photographer. He was on the scene in the sixties and Fraser knew all these people. That’s all.’
The director Dick Fontaine has suggested that BJ had a very different sensibility from that of the ‘velvet-suited’ brigade of Cooper and Fraser. It was a case of conceptual art and jazz versus hippy philosophy and psychedelia. A design made by Cooper himself in 1967 hints at this gulf. The three-dimensional photography and overblown yet hesitant composition of Cooper’s Rolling Stones cover ‘Their Satanic Majesties Request’ is about as far from BJ’s cool intellectualism as it is possible to be.
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