10 Books Designed by Irma Boom

From the Publisher. Color diagrams are derived from 80 natural locations designated as UNESCO World Heritage sites. It is an exercise in describing without words, using instead colors to evoke and celebrate the essence of a place. Detailed information about the World Heritage properties, their selection criteria, how many are inscribed per nation, and in what regions such sites are most endangered makes this an important tribute to the reasons such places exist.

From the Publisher. An extensive and timely survey of innovative contemporary design in the Netherlands: always verging on the experimental and recognized universally as a melting-pot of cutting-edge twenty-first century creativity. This overview features work by Rem Koolhaas, MVRDV, Ben van Berkel & Caroline Bos, Marcel Wanders, Petra Blaisse, and Jop van Bennekom, among others. 1,000 images offer a visual sourcebook of Dutch design in all forms including architecture, urban planning, industrial design and graphic design.

Featured at the Designers & Books Online Book Fair

From the Publisher. Mid-20th-century California offered fertile ground for design innovations. The state’s reputation as a land of unlimited opportunity, its many institutions of higher learning, and its perpetually booming population created conditions that allowed designers and craftspeople to flourish. They found an eager market among educated and newly affluent Californians, and their products shaped the material culture of the entire nation. This book, a companion to the popular 2011 MIT Press/LACMA publication California Design, 1930-1965: "Living in a Modern Way," reveals the complex web of influences, collaborations, institutional affiliations, and social networks that fueled the California design economy. This book offers more than 140 illustrated biographical profiles of the most significant mid-century California designers, including such famous names as Saul Bass and Charles and Ray Eames as well as many lesser known but influential practitioners. These designers, craftspeople, and manufacturers worked in the full range of design media, creating furniture, fashion, textiles, jewelry, ceramics, and graphic and industrial design. Each entry includes a succinct biography, a portrait of the designer or image of an important design, cross-references to other entries, and a list of sources for further research. Significant examples of California design and craft objects are featured in more than 180 illustrations and rare photographs. Created by internationally renowned graphic designer Irma Boom, the book is a beautifully crafted object in its own right. It will become an indispensable resource for all those interested in modern design.

From the Publisher. The only up-to-date monograph on the work of Dutch product designer Hella Jongerius. Written by three experts on product design; Louise Shouwenberg, Paola Antonelli and Alice Rawsthorn. Includes over 300 photographs of Hella Jongerius' work, each selected by the designer. A specially commissioned Collector's Edition volume with a unique Jongerius vase is also available. 

From the Publisher. Design is one of the most powerful forces in our lives. When deployed wisely, it can bring us pleasure, choice, strength, decency and more. But if its power is abused, the outcome can be wasteful, confusing, humiliating, even dangerous. This title explores design's influence on our lives. None of us can avoid being affected by design, whether or not we wish to. It is so ubiquitous that it determines how we feel and what we do, often without our noticing.

Hello World explores design's influence on our lives. Written by the renowned design critic Alice Rawsthorn and designed by the award-winning book designer Irma Boom, it describes how warlords, scientists, farmers, hackers, activists, and designers have used design to different ends throughout history: from the macabre symbol invented by 18th-century pirates to terrorize their victims into surrender, to one woman’s quest for the best possible prosthetic legs and the evolution of the World Cup ball.

At a time when we face colossal changes, unprecedented in their speed, scale, and intensity—from the deepening environmental crisis, to giant leaps in science and technology—Hello World explains how design can help us to make sense of them and to turn them to our advantage.

— Brain Pickings founder and editor Maria Popova, called the mini edition of Irma Boom: The Architecture of the Book:

“A micro-manifesto for the printed book at its most alive.”

#1 Design Best Seller at Van Alen Books, New York (January 2014).

Irma Boom has become one of the most widely renowned and laureated book designers in the world today. Her often ingenious solutions to individual book productions have gained her international fame and her work is now collected by many leading museums such as the MoMa in New York. Besides book designs she also creates corporate identities, postage stamps and posters. The special collections of the University of Amsterdam library will honor Irma Boom with a major retrospective exhibition of her work. Her studio archive was donated to the library in 2003. To accompany this exhibition she produced an exceptional catalogue; this miniature book (1.5 X 2 inches) contains a complete overview of her work, with commentary and more than 450 full color illustrations in 704 pages with printed edges. Published in correlation with the exhibition at the Special Collections of the University of Amsterdam library.

Also see Irma Boom: The Architecture of the Book.

From the Publisher. In 1940, Hans Knoll founded a company in New York that soon earned a reputation for its progressive line of furniture. Florence Schust joined the firm and helped establish its interior design division, the Knoll Planning Unit. In 1947, the year after their marriage, Hans and Florence Knoll added a third division, Knoll Textiles, which brought textile production in line with a modern sensibility that used color and texture as primary design elements. In the early years, the company hired leading proponents of modern design as well as young, untried designers to create textile patterns. The division thrived in the late 1940s through 1960s and, in the following decade, adopted a more international outlook as design direction shifted to Europe. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Knoll tapped fashion designers and architects to bolster its brand. The pioneering use of new materials and a commitment to innovative design have remained Knoll's hallmarks to the present day.

With essays by experts, biographies of about eighty designers, and images of textiles, drawings, furniture, and ephemera, Knoll Textiles, 1945-2010 is the first comprehensive study devoted to a leading contributor to modern textile design. Highlighting the individuals and ideas that helped shape Knoll Textiles over the years, this book brings the Knoll brand and the role of textiles in the history of design to the forefront of public attention.

From the Publisher. Between 2005 and 2011, architect Rem Koolhaas and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed the surviving members of Metabolism—the first non-western avant-garde, launched in Tokyo in 1960, in the midst of Japan’s postwar miracle. Project Japan features hundreds of never-before-seen images—master plans from Manchuria to Tokyo, intimate snapshots of the Metabolists at work and play, architectural models, magazine excerpts, and astonishing sci-fi urban visions—telling the 20th century history of Japan through its architecture, from the tabula rasa of a colonized Manchuria in the 1930s to a devastated Japan after the war, the establishment of Metabolism at the 1960 World Design Conference in Tokyo, to the rise of Kisho Kurokawa as the first celebrity architect, to the apotheosis of Metabolism at Expo ’70 in Osaka and its expansion into the Middle East and Africa in the 1970s. The result is a vivid documentary of the last moment when architecture was a public rather than a private affair.

Designer Irma Boom won the Gold Medal for the "Most Beautiful Book in the World" Prize given at the Leipzig Book Fair

This intriguing book examines the small woven and wrought works artist Sheila Hicks has produced for the past fifty years. With their distinctive colors, thoughtful compositions, and narrative, these miniature creations reveal the emergence and continuity of the artist’s approach to her work. Internationally recognized for her mastery of a textile vocabulary of extremely different scales—sculpture, tapestry, site specific commissions for public spaces, environments of recuperated clothing and uniforms, and more—Hicks has thoughtfully crafted miniatures throughout her nomadic career. The palm-sized works present a record of her remarkable and personal journeys.

Focusing on some one hundred miniatures from public and private collections, the book demonstrates the breadth of Hicks's concerns: her persistent inquiry into the mysteries of color, her playful yet reverential subversions of weaving traditions, her surprising range of materials, and her exploration of new technology. From initial experiments based on pre-Columbian weaving structures to a 2005 sculptural project using ninety colors of synthetic filaments, these small works offer a unique opportunity to access and examine the artist's conceptual and technical forays. The volume includes informative essays by Arthur C. Danto, Joan Simon, and Nina Stritzler-Levine as well as illustrations of the artist’s working tools, related drawings, photographs, and chronology.