Scott Boms

Scott Boms discovered graphic design in high school, and it didn‘t take long for him to get hooked. Even before he finished high school, he landed an internship at a boutique design shop in Toronto, which provided his first real look at “what designers really do and how they do it.”

Scott went on to get a Bachelor of Technology degree from Ryerson University and spent a several years moving back and forth between design and prepress. He says, “Looking back, what I ultimately learned, aside from a lot of core fundamental skills, was how easily I could adapt to technological change.”

That adaptability led him to web design and user experience, which has been his main focus for the last decade or so. Eventually, he “moved 3,000 miles to California to join the Communication Design team at Facebook, which, as it turned out, aligns very well with my personal and career interests. Despite many zigs and zags, the two threads that connect it all are my love of typography and making things.”

Scott designed a new cover –

and hand-coded the ePub and

Kindle versions – for the first digital

edition of Marshall McLuhan’s

Understanding Media.

Ligatures, loops & McLuhan

When asked about his favorite projects, Scott says the “projects that have been the most successful and fulfilling have ended up being the ones that either afforded me an opportunity to riff on ideas or collaborate with friends, to do something that’s potentially seen as risky, or that just connect with a personal interest.”

His collaborative project Ligature, Loop & Stem “has and continues to be all of the above. It‘s provided an avenue to focus entirely on typography — to soak in type specimens, experiment, and make something real that just wouldn‘t be possible otherwise.”

And, of course, Scott‘s work with the Estate of Marshall McLuhan makes the list too. He admits, “I definitely geek out over having access to his personal library, unpublished photos, articles, and even an original mechanical for the Medium is the Message, one of my all-time favorite books.

Of the work he‘s done for the estate so far, what he‘s most excited about is “the first-ever digital edition of McLuhan’s groundbreaking book Understanding Media. I painstakingly hand-coded the ePub and Kindle editions and designed a new cover.”

Logic and creativity

Scott works in different mediums and technologies, which, he says, “is a reaction to needing to balance the needs of the left and right sides of my brain. I generally consider myself a hybrid designer — I‘m equal parts logical and creative. I think in code as easily as I do in pencil, pen, or pixels.”

1. “For me, and probably for most creative people, creating is a lot like breathing. It‘s an unshakable, inescapable activity. It‘s just part of our DNA.”