building books

Irma Boom founded an independent office in Amsterdam in 1991 and continued to work on projects in cultural and commercial sectors. A thorough reflection on a book's content leads Boom to her design decisions. It is her aim to enhance the reader's understanding while at the same time creating an object of beauty, with quality and permanence. One of Boom’s trademarks (Weaving as Metaphor) is the use of oversized type which successively shrinks from the opening to the end of a book as a way to lure people into reading the introductory pages. This book has a blank cover and alarmed publishers at the time but their unease presumably disappeared after the book's release, as it elevated Boom to international design stardom.

 

SHV think book

Boom was commissioned to create a jubilee for the Coal Trade Company, SHV. The book turned out to be a landmark in her career. The 2,136-page book took five years to complete, and was finally published in 1996. The project began in 1991 with Boom’s only prompt being to “look for the unusual“. The book utilizes the nonlinear structure of the internet, which was then quite new. The book contains no index or page numbers and is in reverse chronological order. The book is a voyage in time. Tulip fields and a Dutch poem are printed on the edges of the book, seen in different ways depending on the direction the pages are flipped. The book has a white cover and a text reveals itself when the book becomes used and dirty.

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