Palestinian Graphic Designer Rajie Cook Gave the World Universal Signs
via Al Bustan Seeds
At afikra’s 10-year-anniversary event at the Lincoln Center in September, Wael Morcos (a former afikra podcast guest) gave a compelling talk about Palestinian-American graphic designer, artist, and activist Rajie Cook. Unknown to many, Cook is the visual genius behind the “universal” symbol signs that we instinctively know and navigate our lives with every single day. His legacy is ubiquitous, often unnoticed, and yet – as Morcos put it – gave us a gift of universalism and humanity through pictoral communication.
Rajie Cook’s Universal Public Symbols via Arabia Inc
Cook was born in 1930 in Newark, New Jersey to a Palestinian family. After a school teacher found his name “Rajie” too difficult to pronounce, Cook became “Roger” for many years. It was only later when he chose to reclaim his name in honour of his Palestinian heritage.
In 1967, he founded graphic design firm Cook and Shanosky Associates, which in 1974 won a contract to “develop a set of symbols that could be universally understood, and that would efficiently convey the kinds of information people in a public place might need.” They designed a total of 34 pictographs, all of which are still in common use today. In 1984, Cook received the Presidential Award for Design Excellence.
Keys to Peace, Rajie Cook (2006)
Living Stones, Rajie Cook (2006)
Beyond his functional graphic design, Cook began creating assemblage sculptures, many of which grapple with “social and political issues in the Middle East and were displayed in galleries around the world.”
Cook’s 2017 memoir, “A Vision for My Father”, is an homage to his parents Najeeb and Jaleela Cook. In writing his treatise on Palestinian exile, visual and artist expression, and humanity, Rajie “gives sight back to his father who was blinded in the early 1930s by the ravages of cataract.” This book brings together reflections on exile, diaspora, and the intimate and personal relationship between Rajie and his father, seated within the context of Palestinian national identity and experience.
A review of the book on the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs describes it as a “deeply personal tribute to America and the immigrants, who, like his father… leave all that they know and love to come here.”
