BOOM TIME

Dutch graphic designer Irma Boom has been a pioneering force in the world of print. As she continues to push boundaries in the most unlikely realms, we visit her Amsterdam studio to discuss unsexy commissions, curious heroines and holy encounters

- MARK SMITH

It seems fitting that Irma Boom - a woman who has done more than perhaps any other living person to alert the world to the possibilities of the book as a desirable, cutting-edge medium for the transmission of knowledge, and whose very surname means 'tree' in her native Dutch - should seek to communicate via print, even in person.

'Every year, it grows by three per cent, whether it's produced or not,' she says, laying out three tiny volumes of varying dimensions, each no bigger than a matchbox, on the kitchen table of her premises in Amsterdam's Oud-Zuid district. These are successive editions of her signature 'little red book', cataloguing her life's work in reverse chronological order with the designer's 'comments here and there'. The covers are emblazoned with BOOM in Flintstonian capitals.

'It works super well in English, too,' she says of her surname. 'Because it's also an explosion.' Inside are the greatest hits of the Queen of Books, from her Viktor & Rolf tome, a sort of anti-coffee table volume consisting entirely of dust jackets printed with imagery in inverted colours (if you want straightforward representations of their clothes, she reasons, you can google them), to her Eileen Gray monograph published in conjunction with a Bard Graduate Center Gallery exhibition on the designer.

Its edges resemble Gray's geometric rugs; the texts and images inside are arranged 'like architecture'.