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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.
