How do letters get their shape?
Alphabet in Motion (Ships Sept. 2025)
This project comprises two conjoined, detatachable books.
The pop-up portion of the book contains:
- An interactive "7-segment display" cover that animates A to Z
- 17 interactive pop-ups and hands-on activities throughout
- Fluorescent inks
- One essay for each pop-up
- 300 color images from the history of type design
$85
This is a pop-up book of the alphabet, from A to Z, that I researched, wrote, designed, and paper-engineered. It explains how typography works.
Open any text editor, email client, or design app and you will immediately be bombarded with a buffet of typographic choices. Serif or sans serif? Display or text? Classical or contemporary? Formal or casual? Ever wonder how we ended up with so many different styles of letters? This book, developed with years of research culled from the stacks of the world's design archives, explains and demonstrates, visually and tactually, the technologies and worldviews that have shaped letterforms through the ages.
In partnership with D.A.P./ArtBook and Katherine Small Gallery.
This is one of those books we’ll use for studying and understanding type for the next decades by an incredibly talented graphic and book designer… and paper engineer.
—Pentagram partner, Andrea Trabucco Campos
Kelli is a genius.
—Debbie Millman
If you look carefully at letters, you can see a secret history of the world — from the Bronze Age to the Information Age. 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.
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The Book Contains…
This project comprises two conjoined, detatachable books.
The interactive pop-up book section features:
• An interactive "7-segment display" cover that animates A to Z
• 17 interactive pop-ups and hands-on activities throughout
• Fluorescent inks
A 128-page companion essay section contains:
• One essay for each pop-up
• 300 color images from the history of type design
Here is the introduction for the book, so you can get a sense for the content: kellianderson.com/intro.pdf
The Essays
This book is unique in that reading is optional. (I tried very hard to make the experience engaging and informative for readers and just-tinkerers alike.) The essays pick up where each pop-up leaves off, expanding each themes.
By following the progression of typographic technology and history, this book traces how design values imprint themselves on the future they usher in. Each of these questions in turn reveals a new perspective from which to consider the broader impact of design and tech on human societies.
With a surprising economy of expression, you’ll see how letterforms connect us to an aesthetic and emotional experience of history. On every sanitation building and post office, in every Microsoft Word or Google document, and in every discarded-electronics bin, you will find letters embedded with different ideas about what civilization should be.
The essays explore how typography carries us to the early print culture of the Late Middle Ages; the standardized forms of the Enlightenment; the bustling metropolises of industrial capitalism; the bright neon curves of the early twentieth century; the “neutral,” universalizing pretensions of the mid-century International Style; the warped, hallucinatory words of posters from the sixties; or the dashboard of a race car.
A single letter can conjure a debate over anything from aesthetics to philosophy to corporate power whitewashing itself as benign-blandness. There are two layers of meaning in any use of typography: what it says, and what it says beyond the text. This book is an exploration of the latter: the visual dimension of type.
