Irma Boom: No Screen

Irma Boom is a pioneer in book design and in this talk ‘No Screen’ she will be sharing her experiences and ideas around making a book, from the initial idea and commission through to the finished book.

Irma’s bold experimental approach to book design challenges the convention of what a book is considering all aspects of the architecture of the book. The cover, spine, pages, ink, colour, surface, texture and size, are all sites for reinvention for Irma and it is through this experimental approach that she challenges how we understand the printed page.

When she works on a project, she does her own typesetting and sits on the editorial board, choosing the authors, photographers and book layout. “I don’t work for people; I work with them. I collaborate.” 

“When I start I make a model of the book itself. Then I bind my own models. The clips are essential. When I make a book of loose pages, the clip is the most important thing. The book is then bound and I can start to think how the book might work. It is the binder, the first step towards permanence. The urge to join things together is essential. It freezes the information and it shows that you have made up your mind. You have decided.”

Her style was considered unconventional. She mixed typefaces. She experimented. She became something of a household name in the late 1980s after designing catalogs for special edition postage stamps in a convention-defying Japanese-style binding, with text that dripped across multiple pages, printed folds, and translucent paper. She ruffled a few feathers, but the criticism only served to solidify what would become the defining characteristic of her work.

Each project is yet another opportunity for Irma to get closer to the core questions that drive her: What is the book? What can it be? She loves to talk about what books are meant to do and examine the ways in which we have strayed far from the book’s original purpose.

“I am always experimenting a lot with papers, I am not creating PDFs but books. The interaction with the material is obvious. People who only work digitally create something different to what I do. There’s no mistaking what I do and they do. The printer allows me to work with the content on a variety of media. I test the content and media. The moment you have a print, it changes things. It is a crucial moment in the process.”

Books, she says, play an essential role in our lives, and she doesn’t expect that to change. In fact, Irma says the physical book is even more vital now, in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, as we become increasingly isolated and reliant on technology.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilYeoRS6BMA

https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/irma-boom-arjowiggins-tooled-up-200416

https://sixtysixmag.com/irma-boom-library/