Last night James attended the Irma Boom talk for one of the D&AD President’s Lectures. Irma told of her early creative years, and how, when designing a commemorative Dutch stamp book, life wasn’t made particularly easy for her by her colleagues, as her working methods were a little different. Despite this, she wasn’t deterred by the industry. Irma’s determination eventually paid off, after she set up her own practice. Her design for Sheila Hicks’ book ‘Weaving as Metaphor’ was awarded the title of ‘The Most Beautiful Book in the World’ at the Leipzig Book Fair (shown below).

Irma’s style of presentation was refreshingly different too, choosing to have a projector focused on her hands as she flicked through her books, rather than just showing slides of them. One other interesting point she made was how she would sometimes determine type sizes by the amount of copy she had to work with for each spread. If there was lots of copy, type would be small to fit it all in, and if there was little copy, the type would be bigger. This allowed the pages of the book to ‘breath’.

While we’re on the subject of book design, Hugh (our current placement) picked us up this copy of Alice in Wonderland. It’s part of a series of Penguin books with the line ‘Books by the greats, covers by you’.