Irma Boom: the book is a voyage

Many of the most beautiful books to have been designed in recent years are the work of Irma Boom. Born in Lochem, the Netherlands in 1960, Boom has won international acclaim for the iconoclastic beauty of her books. Reading one of her books is like embarking on a visual adventure yet, by beginning each design project with rigorous research into the book’s contents and detailed discussions with its subjects, editor and author, Boom ensures that the aesthetic impact of her work is entirely empathetic with the text. Since opening Irma Boom Office in Amsterdam in 1991 she has designed scores of books, as well as teaching at Yale in the US and the Van Eyck Academy at Maastricht. Her most ambitious project to date was a book celebrating the centenary of the Dutch conglomerate SHV in 1996 to which she devoted five years of work. The first three and a half years were spent researching the subject – from scouring the company’s archives to observing shareholders’ meetings – only then did she embark on the design. She described the project as: “dream and nightmare. Dream because of the conditions which were ideal – a very good client – but nightmare because of the very long, intense process.” Originally Boom envisaged producing a 4,000 page book. The end result ran to 2,136 pages and weighed several pounds but was devoid of page numbers or an index. “The book is a voyage,” she explained. “You find things you don’t want to find and discoveries happen by coincidence. The only clues are the dates. The book is made in anti- chronological order. It’s a book for the reader’s mind including doubts, mistakes and changes.” Since the publication of the SHV book, Boom has adopted a prolific pattern of working, generally designing several books at once. She admits that the freedom given to her by SHV has made it difficult to deal with less permissive clients and that, whenever possible, she avoids working to briefs. “I can’t even work for someone telling me what size of book to make.” In recent projects such as an art book for Aernout Mik and a monograph of her own work Gutenberg Galaxie, she has refined her signature style. The defining characteristic of Irma Boom’s work is a raw beauty with bold juxtapositions of type, die-cut holes and text teetering off the edge of the page. “If there is something in common about my books it is the roughness,” she says. “They are all unrefined.” From 4 April and until 19 July, the Zurich Design Museum is showing a selection of her works in the context of her designing the book "Every Thing Design" about the museum's collections.

Klimahouse 2025: twenty years of sustainability

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