Alphabet in Motion: a Talk by Kelli Anderson

Join us for a very special talk by Kelli Anderson on how letters get their shape.
aci-d club is built on the idea that engaging with design means paying attention to materiality, context, and intent. Consider typography. Every letterform is shaped not just by a designer's hand but also by the technologies, tools, and cultural conditions of their time — stone, metal, phototype, bitmap, vector. Typography is a record of these hidden histories. The wavy distortion of 60s psychedelic type is the optical signature of phototypesetting machines. The clean geometry of early digital fonts reflects the hard constraints of bitmap grids. The serifs on Roman capitals are formed by the act of chiseling into stone. In this sense, even a “neutral” typeface like Times New Roman can be traced back to a specific material problem: how to cut letters into stone.

Over five years, Kelli Anderson wrote, designed, and paper-engineered Alphabet in Motion: How Letters Get Their Shape, a pop-up book that traces the historical development of typographic form. These pop-ups function as "explorable explanations" enabling the reader turn the sometimes abstract relationship between design, technology, infrastructure, and culture into something they can tangibly experience.

Kelli joins aci-d club for a talk about the material history hiding inside everyday type and what it took to get Alphabet in Motion in motion. Talk is followed by a short Q&A and a book signing. Copies of Alphabet in Motion will be available for purchase.

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Kelli Anderson uses handheld revelations to reconnect people with the depth and possibility of their world. Her books force readers to touch g̶r̶a̶s̶s̶ paper. She created This Book is a Camera (MoMA)—which transforms into a working camera—and This Book is a Planetarium (Chronicle)—which houses paper devices (including a planetarium) and has sold more than 100,000 copies. Alphabet in Motion, an interactive book about typography and technology was published to wide acclaim in the Fall of 2025. Other projects include a viral paper record player and—with The Yes Men—a utopian counterfeited New York Times, which won the Ars Electronica Prix. Doctors without Borders have used the award-winning Tinybop Human Body app she illustrated to communicate illness and treatment nonverbally to their patients in remote areas. Clients include NPR, the New Yorker, the Guggenheim, MoMA, Apple, and the New York Times.  She has been nominated for the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Award twice and teaches at NYU, SVA, and Cooper Union.