Julia Born

Awarded

Julia Born

Three publications
Graphic Design

Implementing ideas radically
The Swiss graphic de­signer Julia Born lives in Am­s­ter­dam. Since grad­u­at­ing from the Ger­rit Ri­etveld Acad­e­mie she has worked on her own pro­jects and for clients in Switzer­land and Hol­land. She sub­mit­ted six books for the Swiss Fed­eral De­sign Com­pe­ti­tion, pro­duced as com­mis­sions or on her own ini­tia­tive be­tween 2003 and 2006. The jury praises Julia Born's con­cep­tual de­sign ap­proach and ad­mired the fact that the straight lines con­vey a sense of per­sonal hand­writ­ing. One of the chief char­ac­ter­is­tics of her books is that they are rad­i­cal im­ple­men­ta­tions of an idea that re­flects the con­tents.
The pub­li­ca­tion 'Ofof­fjoff – One To One' with the Dutch fash­ion de­signer Joff for ex­am­ple is more than just a look book. Julia Born de­scribes her years of work with 'JOFF' as a joint search for un­con­ven­tional ways of pre­sent­ing fash­ion. Pro­por­tion and size are im­por­tant el­e­ments of the col­lec­tion and Julia Born adopts these for the de­sign of the book as well. She de­cided to show the ten out­fits life-size, di­vided among eight to twelve posters. So each fig­ure is shown in the book cut to pieces and bun­dled. New com­bi­na­tions and jux­ta­po­si­tions of clothes, parts of the body and fab­rics emerge on every dou­ble page. The posters also al­lude to the star cut-ups in the youth mag­a­zine 'Bravo' and to the way an out­fit comes into being. 'Ofof­fjoff – One To One' as a pub­li­ca­tion sees it­self as con­tin­u­a­tion of the fash­ion col­lec­tion, and not just a record of it.
For the ex­hi­bi­tion cat­a­logue 'Le Nou­veau Siècle', Julia Born (with Lorenz Brun­ner) builds the chief char­ac­ter­is­tic of the ex­hi­bi­tion venue – its sym­me­try – into the book de­sign. The Gracht House dat­ing from 1672 fol­lows the rules of sym­me­try com­pletely, even where it has no func­tion. For ex­am­ple, false doors are in­cluded, or pat­terns ex­tended merely for the sake of per­fec­tion. The two graphic de­sign­ers take over the idea of sym­me­try as fol­lows: they struc­ture the con­tent rig­or­ously, and cen­tre it in part. They have also de­vised a pic­to­r­ial sec­tion of their own show­ing items and places in the build­ing that con­ceal an el­e­ment of asym­me­try within them­selves de­spite sym­met­ri­cal com­po­si­tion. The title on the cover is folded in as a flap on its cen­tral axis at the back and the front. As the title is pre­sented twice, half of it each time, it re­mains in­tel­li­gi­ble as a whole on the cover. Both these books show clearly how Julia Born trans­forms con­tent into de­sign.
Ar­i­ana Pradal

Julia Born
Born in
1975
Education
Graphic Designer