26 January 2007

Saw, Boom, Irma, 3


Q: How many pages did it end up with? A: 2.136

Tonight was again Shapeshifters night, an opener by Geneviève Gauckler was nice.. but off course the real reason I was there was because of the great arrival of worlds greatest type-woman, Irma Boom. Not only is she been granted the Gutenberg Prize and blahblah, above all she's a wonderfull straight-to-the point energetic dutch typographer with lots of juice inside and a clear state of mind. Just love her... she was drinking Leffe's afterwards but here's what you should note...

- She made a book about best books - it flips both ways
- She loves big-print-runs, and hates handmade books although she does them regularly for models and mockups » pocket-mini size cute little things
- Irma's never on chronological order, so so is this list
- She wanted to get in at TotalDesign by Wim Crouwel, but they didn't allow her at that time
- To Irma content is prior
- It's all about books, and to be honest it is my favorite medium too (yes, write his down!)
- She puts staples in the spines whenever she's of the hook ;p
- Ange Leccia is worth while and so is Hicks
- She sometimes outputs text in order of it's importance
- She, always, overrules all editorial-overpower
- She puts text inside dustcovers and folds like a duck
- She once ruined a printer (and that's big industrial machinery, not home and desktop kitchenett-printers) printing out on coffee-filters...
- She' been working for 18 years, books only
- She caught my full attention for over two hours, that's really something (knowing i suffer severe ad(h)d)
- She says to take advantage of your problems and not try to solve them
- She works mostly on very time-consuming stuff
- She made the European-Flag_barcode before Koolhaas did it
- She has more power than Phaidon-editors, cfr. False Flat
- She made a great book on colors for promoting the quality of dutch printers - which none of them (at first) liked
- She likes Frits, sometimes

- I've never seen somebody mix type, color and imagery so well
- She thinks of clients as commissioners, and works with them not for them (this could be a very good lesson for all my advertising colleges and enemies !!)
- She tells students to ALWAYS DO THE THINGS YOU LIKE YOURSELF
- She teaches at Yale University

- I love her ! She loves 3 ! — guess we have a chance to get along someday

Irma Boom makes books that are nearly sculptural objects before they are repositories of information, ...
— by Daniel Nadel

1 comment:

  1. I totally agree with you!
    She has a mind of her own which makes her work too what it is...impressive and layered! She's a master in giving books layers and layers. For lot's of people the secrets of her books are still not revealed, even if you turned the book inside out! My favourite is the book about colour which translates famous paintings into the cmyk values. I think her ideas about visualising text are honest...putting text bigger because it's more interesting to read or smaller when it's a boring piece of text, is just being honest with the reader and it also works visually! No complicated structures, but concentrating on simple, reasonable thinking. Best lecture from this season Shapeshifters!

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