Books and dinosaurs

This week I had the great pleasure to go to two exciting talks of outstanding designers from very different fields. At the Illustrators' Lunch, a fortnightly event organised by the Scientific Visualisation course here at the university, Martin Hoppe from bitrats talked us through their work. He is the person behind the Archaeopteryx application that has been on show in various natural science museums. Through beautiful 3D animation and Flash interactivity the programme allows the user to discover secrets and theories about the earliest bird known. Martin Hoppe explained how they carried out the project from their first approach through to the execution. It was an interesting talk and it made me realise once more that extensive final year projects like this one are probably getting very rare in our standardised 3-year BA reality where students are being rushed from project to project and have hardly any time to reflect, experiment or specialise. Martin studied 10 semesters (5 years) in the old diploma system in Münster (Germany), incidentally the university that I first applied for. I didn't manage to stand up to the 819 applicants and gain one of the 25 places though. And back then I didn't understand how bad the effects of the Bologna process on design education would be. An insightful talk in many ways.



The second talk was a lecture by Irma Boom. The Dutch book designer is famous for her international work which has been awarded many prizes (she´s also the youngest designer to be awarded the Gutenberg prize for her complete oeuvre). Her book 'Weaving as Metaphor' has been credited 'the most beautiful book in the world' at the Leipzig Book Fair. Irma Boom brought many of her books to the event and took us on a journey. For nearly two and a half hours she flicked back and forth through her books and told us all the anecdotes that came to her mind. Interesting was that despite the rather artistic and unconventional nature of her design, she doesn't like handmade books. Books have to be made industrially. She also thinks that books are made to be used. Interestingly, I've only seen her work behind glass. The design museum has only one copy that can be flicked through with gloves. Despite the quite arty approach, which I'm normally not a great fan of, I found her books incredibly interesting. They surprise and entertain with lots of fold-outs, hidden messages and stories. And another thing is interesting, Irma Boom always makes tiny mockups of her books that usually look more interesting than the final piece. Sounds familiar.