The experimental outlook of Irma Boom, winner of the D&AD President’s Award

Every year, D&AD’s sitting President gives the D&AD President’s Award to a person who has had a seismic impact on the creative industry. This year, Lisa Smith, global chief design officer at Uncommon Creative Studio, nominated Irma Boom – the inimitable Amsterdam-based designer behind some of the most visually arresting books of the past four decades.

Many fine artists share the same origin story: cushioned by the apparent safety net of a design degree. For renowned Dutch book maker Irma Boom, the journey was the opposite. “I didn’t want to become a book designer. I wanted to become a painter. That was the idea for me going to art school, but after three and a half years, I understood it didn’t work for me. I had this romantic idea of the painter in the studio making art but I found out that that was not my thing. I simply was not good enough,” she says. A lecturer who regularly brought striking books into the school showed her a way out, or a way forward. The covers of two in particular, Jan Wolkers’s Horrible Tango and Turkish Delight, ignited a curiosity in designing and creating books that set her entire career in motion. “I thought, that is what I want to do, and I never painted again. I only made books.”

As a young practitioner nearly four decades ago, she quickly gained notoriety when she was invited to design the official annual Dutch postage stamp books in 1987. “I wanted to make a point about something, so I just made a book I wanted to do,” she says. Her interpretation was considered unconventional to the point of controversial in design circles, a response that perplexed her. “I really didn’t understand that people didn’t understand what I was doing. I really didn’t get why people were upset,” she recalls. “I got my first best book design award, but it was totally terrible.” Despite the criticism at the time, she looks back on the experience with what sounds like pride. “In retrospect, I think that I was a young girl and that I had the courage to do it, but that’s a little bit me. I’m so focused that I simply do what I want to do and forget everything around me. I’m totally obsessed with that one thing.”

Like the work she makes, the matter of how to classify Boom’s practice is slightly tricky. She has in the past clarified that what she does is not art, but the traditional design bracket doesn’t sit entirely right either. “I’m autonomous in my field, and I think that is very different than other designers,” she says. “I don’t like to read briefs, because if you read a brief, then you’re already going in a direction. I want to talk to a commissioner and have a conversation and work from there, not from an assumption of what the book should be, because then I cannot do it. For me, it has to be done in freedom. If there are too many people saying what you have to do, then it doesn’t work.” It’s why she prefers to work without middlemen and instead partner directly with those “commissioners” (a term she uses instead of “clients”, which include Rem Koolhaas and Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, among many others). “If there are people in between, that’s a disaster.”

The publication she completed for Chanel in 2013 is an example of how majestic an outcome can be when given the bandwidth to create freely. The book measures 5cm in depth – the number referring to the brand’s iconic perfume – and its entire contents are embossed rather than printed with ink. “I had the idea to make a white book, because perfume is invisible yet present, so I wanted to make a book which is almost invisible yet present,” she explains. “I always stay very close to the content. For me, that is the starting point.”

A simple reproduction of someone’s work on a page rarely feels to her like the richest expression of their practice. She considers that more of a catalogue, whereas “if you make a book, that’s something else, that’s a thing of its own, a world of its own, and not the portfolio or solely the representation.” The outlier, of course, is her own series of monographs, which she admits are essentially catalogues, though not everything is as straightforward as it seems. The book is scaled down to a dense toy-sized publication – nodding to the miniature book dummies she creates during every project to judge the composition and structure – and is arranged in reverse chronological order.

When it comes to working with collaborators, she often hunts for a deeper kind of transformation. “If you’re really interested in an artist, you see other possibilities in how to present their work, because if you talk about a book, it’s all about representation. Representation is not showing just the work as it is. For me, the thinking is more important than the designing.”

Her work on Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor in collaboration with the pioneering fibre artist encapsulates this meeting of minds, with raw edges and a textured cover that threaded the narrative of Hicks’s work into the design. “The Sheila Hicks book I worked on for a long time. I think one of the first designs I made, that’s how the [final] book looks. Although I made all these models and all these other things, I came back to the first idea.”

This way of working, where the designer’s role is so elevated, is not without its challenges. She has found it’s not suited to some artists “because they’re afraid that you’ll take their place,” she says. “And that’s, of course, what people sometimes feel: that it’s my book and not their book. It happens. But if an artist is really good, then you collaborate and then you do it more or less together, and then you get a fantastic book.”

Over time, she has evolved not only in the field of book making but also in the art of diplomacy. “In the beginning, I was always fighting, fighting, and I still do a lot of fighting, but I try to do it a little bit more elegantly,” she says with a laugh. She admits to being “a little bit of a stubborn person,” but she has found that stubbornness, when conveyed as “anger”, doesn’t help move a situation forward. “I learned that that’s not the way to do it. You have to be a bit more calm and explain and talk about it.”

A prolific figure in publication design, Boom has been in the field long enough to know how the game works. However, she still treats each piece of work with a sense of naivety. “I think every project is new, and every project I have to think about so much,” she explains. “If I don’t have any idea in my head when I start, the book will become nothing. So I have to have a very good idea.”