Irma Boom - Design books

Why a Graphic Designer should be able to design a book.
The Dutch Graphic Designer Irma Boom is showing how boring catalogues can become a book object, a collectable piece.
What I like about this video it's all the tips and comments that Irma tells about her work. These are just few...

• If you design something for a client (or commissioner as she says) who you know too well, it can be restrictive in terms of inspiration.

• She hates...doesn't like handmade books, she likes machine-made books. She sees the book as a democratic object. However, she knows how to make them because she makes a lot of models to understand and see if her ideas work. This also helps her to communicate with the people who are going to work for her; bookbinders, printers, paper suppliers...She often has to defends her ideas. Like when a publisher told her that white books do not sell and she wanted the book white. The book, in the end, sold really really well. As she says "book people" are conservative and often they restrict your creative ideas. It seems that a good way to design a good book is to go against the "current" and experiment a lot.

• The choice of paper is very important. Paper has such an important role that should be considered one of the key elements of any project. 

• An ordinary book catalogue about rugs can, in the end, be interesting not just for people who are into that business, but also for those who like the book as design object.

• Internet is for her another key point in her work. Books like hers, are available all over the world and people can access them easily. Selling only through the bookshop wouldn't be so successful.

•  She designed the layout of a catalogue after printing all the images in stamp size. She could then play with the sequence of the images according to colours, shapes. The book in the end, turned up different than the one imagined.

• When she was commissioned to do a special work that had to last 500 years, she excluded the electronic format because anything electronic will be out of date but a book, will be never out of date if it is made with good quality material.

• The attention to details in her work it's incredible. The work itself becomes an object to discover every time it is examined; the spine of a big book made of steel to make it open well; bookmarks that reveal the title of the book; a white cover revealing its own text when it gets dirty;