Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
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.
Irma Boom has a forthcoming retrospective due to open at The Design Museum, London in Autumn 2022.
Irma Boom is a bookmaker based in Amsterdam and has created over three hundred books.
Boom’s experimental approach often challenges the conventions of traditional books in both physical design and printed content. Since 1992, Boom has been senior critic at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, and she gives lectures and workshops worldwide.
She has received many awards for her book designs and, in 2001, was the youngest person ever to receive the Gutenberg Prize.
Irma Boom’s books are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Vatican Library; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, among other institutions. The Special Collections of the University of Amsterdam collect her complete oeuvre.
In 2014, Boom received the Johannes Vermeer Award, the Dutch state prize for the arts and in 2019 received an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art, London.
