Rajie Cook: The Palestinian story behind the world’s most recognizable symbols

Rajie Cook, the Palestinian-American designer whose pictograms guide millions of travelers through airports and train stations worldwide, lived a life that fused professional innovation with cultural memory. He died in 2021 at the age of 90, leaving behind both a universal design system and a deeply personal body of art rooted in Palestine.

Cook was born to a Palestinian family from Ramallah that had emigrated to the United States. His original surname, Suleiman, was altered over generations, first to “Küçük” under Ottoman rule, then anglicized to “Cook” in America. Even as teachers tried to Americanize his given name into “Roger,” he held fast to his Palestinian identity.

After studying art at New York’s Pratt Institute, he established a design firm in 1967. Within a few years, the US Department of Transportation asked him to create visual symbols that could transcend language barriers. His simple, pared-down icons, restroom signs, wheelchair access, and exit doors quickly became the international standard. In 1984, Cook was awarded the Presidential Award for Design by President Ronald Reagan in recognition of his contribution.

But professional accolades never eclipsed his deeper calling. In the late 1980s, Cook turned to more intimate, politically charged art, building wooden assemblages filled with old keys, photographs, and everyday objects that spoke to the Palestinian experience of exile and displacement. Exhibitions such as Made in Palestine introduced his homeland’s narrative into American art spaces.

In 1989, he traveled with the American Presbyterian Church to Gaza and the West Bank, where encounters with refugee camps reinforced his conviction that art could serve as a political record as much as an aesthetic expression.

Though he lived quietly in Pennsylvania with his wife Peggy and daughters Cyndi and Cathie, keeping bees, playing guitar, and enjoying tennis, his work never stopped circling back to Palestine.

Today, Cook’s legacy is twofold: the global system of pictograms that make modern travel legible, and the artworks that insist on remembering a homeland. As he demonstrated, design can shape the way we move through airports, while art can keep alive the memory of a place far beyond them.