As a communication designer, Kelli Anderson began her career in information design. “The act of data visualization is all about bringing facts from the abstract and numerical realm into the sphere of perception, so you can see them,” she says in a video on Kickstarter. “And I thought, why stop there? What if you could also feel and experience those facts?”
Last year, Anderson launched a remarkable, five-years-in-the-making project called Alphabet in Motion: How Letters Get Their Shape, an ABC pop-up book about typography. She spent thousands of hours researching design archives and meticulously engineering kinetic and three-dimensional letters to show how type styles have evolved through the ages.
“If you look carefully at letters, you can see a secret history of the world—from the Bronze Age to the Information Age,” Anderson says. “But because many of these methods, tools, and machines are now obsolete, this history is challenging to follow. Alphabet in Motion leverages tactile, interactive features to help clarify how letters have transformed alongside technological upheavals and shifting aesthetic moods.”
The project is composed of two conjoined, detachable books. The pop-up section includes an interactive, seven-segment display cover that changes from A to Z, 17 moveable paper elements, and hands-on activities. The accompanying 128-page section contains an essay diving into the history and concept of each pop-up, plus 300 color images from the history of type design.
Anderson’s book originally funded on Kickstarter and is now being released more widely. Secure your copy in the Colossal Shop. Follow along with her work on Instagram, and you might also enjoy another of her projects, This Book Is a Camera.
