Type Meets Prototype: Kelli Anderson

The term black box has become shorthand to describe the impenetrable nature of explaining the workings of AI and algorithms. Even computers are sealed—gone are the days when you could swap out parts or see how things work inside.

Kelli Anderson’s books not only explore the inner workings of technology, but also engage our senses, offering a sharp contrast to our era of screens and endless scrolling. She is a graphic designer and master paper engineer who creates pop-ups that explore the physical, acoustical, and functional properties of technologies, making them accessible, intuitive, and even a bit magical. In a time when cognitive offloading is the norm, Anderson encourages us to see design objects more deeply.

Angie Weller

Since we first met, I have always known you as someone who creates books that are feats of paper construction. Have you always made books?

Kelli Anderson

I started my career on more of a didactic foot, creating a ton of data visualizations and infographics. There is something really appealing about making the invisible visible, translating numerical or complex data into something you could immediately see and grasp, and being able to wrap your human senses around inhuman things.

However, I quickly became disillusioned with that because the information is so heavily curated. As a graphic designer, I could feel the sneaky little editorial levers I was being asked to pull. To varying degrees, I feel like all data visualizations rob the reader of agency in a subtle way. They pre-interpret their subjects.

AW

What’s the era in data visualization you are referring to?

KA

I was working on visualizations a while ago when people were talking about Edward Tufte, specifically in 2012 and 2013.

AW

Was there a project that provoked this feeling of pulling levers—being the puppet master of information?

KA

Probably when the Wall Street Journal asked me to do a holiday infographic with a Christmas tree. I don’t know, assignments like that just felt like bending over backwards to be “data.”

So once that initial thrill of seeing my work in print in large publications wore off, I found myself wondering: What would be a better way to use this conceptual/design toolkit?

I was reading Bret Victor‘s [the engineer who helped design the iPhone touch gestures] philosophy about working with the grain of human intuition—using our sensory systems to build more dimensional ways of explaining things. Using the full spectrum of sensory pathways to communicate the true richness of an idea through experience rather than through interpretation. He called these things “explorable explanations.”

The idea is that a very natural type of learning happens when we allow people to tinker with a system, observe the cause-and-effect relationship play out, and interpret it themselves. I shifted my design practice and started creating tangible, explorable explanations that people could carry out into the world and use. It’s funny, I came at this from a data background but ended up somewhere that most people, aside from you, apparently, wouldn’t even think has anything to do with data because it feels more like craft. But it does.

AW

Did you work with tangible forms while doing data visualization? Or was this more of a sharp pivot—from working on a screen to making physical things like books and printed matter?

KA

At the time, I was doing a lot of data visualization for magazines and newspapers. But one project that ended up provoking a LOT of questions, and ultimately ended up shifting things, was one I made for two of my friends, Mike and Karen—both music people—who were getting married.

We knew that their invitation had to be about music in some way, and I had this memory of watching a Mr. Wizard episode as a kid where he rolled a piece of paper into a cone, taped it shut, stuck a needle on it, and placed it on a record player. That was all you needed to amplify the encoded sound from the grooves of the record into something audible. I pitched a paper record player to my friends, and they loved the idea.

I filmed a video of it and posted it online—and it went viral in a way I wasn’t prepared for. I was like: Okay, sure, I’ll take your praise. But this is also confusing because the thing doesn’t even work well. You can tell in the video it’s janky. It just barely works.

But the big reaction made me stop and wonder—why? Why do we assume technology should always move forward toward perfection: crystal-clear audio, infinite playlists, algorithms that read your mind for perfect wish fulfillment? And what is it that people are responding to when they see this paper record player? What is it they’re craving or realizing is missing from our tech landscape and our relationship with the physical world of designed objects that surround us?

That’s the generative question that has driven years of projects.

AW

What I love is how it cuts against the grain of so much tech hype. We’re constantly being sold snake oil—something’s “interactive,” “playable,” or “intelligent”—but it’s all smoke and mirrors. I think that honesty is part of what people respond to. What you see is what you get, and you’re in complete control of the mechanism itself.

KA

And now that I think about it, there’s probably a kind of sport/gamification to it—like, “Wow, let’s try to spin a record at exactly 45 RPM,” which is a losing battle for a human. But maybe there’s something deeper in that, something about the human condition. We’re all striving for perfection, and we almost always miss, but something is endearing in the trying.

AW

I can see how this connects to your work you are more known for. Did the planetarium book and the camera book come right after this project?

KA

I made the thing just blissfully unaware, like, “Oh, this is cool.” In design, we often talk about post-facto rationalization as a bad thing, where you do something and then later come up with a reason for it. I realize now that you tend to intuitively find your way to something, and then only later figure out why it excites you. And that process can point you in other directions.

I was working with Chronicle Books on an illustration and told them I had a book I wanted to make. They were interested, so I had to flesh out the idea for This Book Is a Planetarium very hastily.

It was initially called This Book Is a Blank; I came up with 20 different contraptions and filmed them as best I could. They were all things made from paper that interacted with the world, not through electricity or digital technology, but just through structure. So they’re little explorable explanations of physics, but also tools you can play with.

This Book Is a Camera also came from that process—it was one of the rejects. It’s an elaborately folded black sheet of paper that functions as a camera. When I made that prototype, I thought: Oh, I nailed this. It’s the best thing ever. They’re going to love that this book can take actual photos. But they were like: Eh, we don’t think anyone wants to do analog photography anymore. That’s over. Which—they were very wrong. And I knew it. So I immediately took that prototype and thought, okay, I’m going to find someone else to publish this.

AW

I admire your persistence and how you follow your vision!

You are currently at the final production stages of a new and very ambitious project, Alphabet in Motion, that you are publishing independently. This book includes your extensive research around letterform design and how cultural currents and technologies influence it. It also uses interactive pop-up techniques demonstrating technical terms like “interpolation” and “phototype.”

I first saw you present early research on the project at WordHack [a monthly series spotlighting artists working with text as data] during Covid lockdown. I also have the catalogue you made during your exhibition of a mid-stage of this project at The Center for Book Arts in Manhattan.

What stands out to me is how this project builds on your earlier tactile and technical experiments while also delving deeper into how design operates within systems of power and culture. You explore how type is shaped—not just by ideas, but by infrastructures, politics, rendering processes, and physical constraints, showing how design decisions get baked into tools and formats in ways that most people take for granted.

KA

I studied art history in grad school. Art history trains you to see—to see how values, power struggles, and ideas about what-is-beauty/what-is-truth get embedded in objects. But, usually, in art-school art history class, you’re talking about how those forces take shape in a painting. However, I realized that typography works similarly.

Letterforms encapsulate a whole vibe, a whole era. When you look at Roman letterforms, a part of your brain is transported back to the Roman Empire. You’re thinking about serifs chiseled into stone. You know where those associations come from—the history is embedded in those forms.  How do other typefaces transport you to eras you never lived through? You don’t know much about it, but you still feel something.

Anytime a foundry makes a typeface, they’ll produce a specimen. The designer has to wax poetic [in words] about this visual thing—what this typeface is about and where it comes from. And some of those specimens offered fascinating clues that I could then explore. For example, Pilat by General Type seems like ’60s mod, space-race era, or “Tomorrowland.”

And why do I feel that way? Where does that come from?

There is a whole history associated with a Danish recreational mathematician named Piet Hein who, emerging from World War II, strongly advocated for the shape of the superellipse. There was a roundabout in Stockholm that he proposed; he didn’t think the roundabout should be circular because it lacks a beginning and end, and it shouldn’t be square because the corners require you to go too far out of your way. He had this whole poetic way of saying the perfect shape is a superellipse.

Then he went on to design all these tables and plates with the superellipse shape. Even the television glass that you see in Nam June Paik’s artwork uses it—the shape was everywhere. And it was in part due to Hein’s advocacy, but also because, following World War II, there was significant industrialization. Before then, you couldn’t make consumer products in these particular shapes. A Lissajous curve has a particular curvature, and you need to be at some industrial apogee even to produce glass for those Jetsons-looking TVs.

The reason the typeface by General Type was transporting me to the Jetsons space-race era is that it was based on the footprint of a superellipse. All the Os are superellipses, inside and out. All the other characters conform to that shape.

I found that during the Vietnam War, at one of the negotiations in Paris, they acquired a superelliptical table for all the delegates because they believed it represented a compromise between the two different geometric tendencies of a square and a circle. It was a great symbolic thing for these negotiations.

It made me realize that I have these shorthand associations in my mind that I’m not entirely aware of, and no one has necessarily nailed down. There is a great deal of subtlety in how letterforms succeed in being recognizable as themselves and also in how they convey this deep sense of cultural vibe. That second part is what I was after. How do we reference history and transport people to all these different times and places, just by changing a Bezier curve just a little bit?

AW

So when we casually download a font to “look ’60s,” there’s a lot more embedded in that decision—historical, aesthetic, and even ideological layers we might not consciously register. I’m curious how you see that kind of dynamic playing out in tech right now. For instance, how these values are embedded in the design of AI interfaces and products.

KA

One thing I discovered through this research is that we have an elevated sensitivity to type—that we can both read it and pick up on all these cultural cues and histories.

There’s an excellent article in the Walker Reader; it’s an interview with type designer Jungmyung Lee. She was talking about how type conveys a personality, you know, a sense of character. The reason we can pick up on all that in type is that we have this extraordinary human hardware, which has been refined over thousands of years of evolution.

The difference between two sans-serif grotesque typefaces might be incredibly subtle. And I think that’s a wonder and a marvel about our perceptual system, and our brains, and our ability to parse these subtleties.

There’s this quote I like from the designer Kenya Hara: “It’s not the delicacy of paper in and of itself but the finely tuned human senses it can awaken . . . both the immediate world and the distant universe can be found there.” He was the design director at Muji for a while. He’s in Japan, where there are a variety of types of paper, including varying weights and slightly different textures. You might have a book with 15 different kinds of paper in it—some that are slightly translucent, white paper, thicker paper, and cover stock.

What I like about it is that he is shifting the conversation we have about the design off the thing. It’s not: What does the thing do? It’s: What does the thing do to us? He said the thing he loves about paper and designing with paper isn’t about the paper itself: it’s about the human sensitivities that paper awakens.

That sounds like connoisseurship, and when you’re talking about typography and type design, it also gets into that. You know, like when you go to a coffee house and they’re like, “This one tastes like chocolate, this coffee tastes like cherries,” and you’re like, “I don’t taste any of it.” But the thing is, you need design—you need that external, physical reality to awaken that range of sensory capabilities within yourself.

My experience with AI and AI design is that it flattens things. It doesn’t bring me places because there is this very human, perceptual, fleshy history in all type design.

If you’re a designer and want to create a monolinear T, where both the horizontal and vertical lines are the same thickness, you might think you could make those lines the same thickness. However, due to the evolution of our perceptual system, we tend to assign more weight to horizontal lines than to vertical lines.

You can go into Futura or any typeface that professes to be completely monolinear and start turning things sideways—you’ll see that things are not what they seem. AI can’t design type because, to some extent, we don’t even understand why we see what we see. All the different distortions, all the things type designers can intuitively compensate for—because they’re human, and they can see it and say, “That’s weird, I’m going to fix that.” We don’t even know why that is. Like the horizontal/vertical weight thing—that’s called anisotropic contrast. Evolutionary psychologists think it’s because we were scanning the horizon for predators. So we’re very attuned to horizontal lines.

But no one knows. There’s no rhyme or reason to this stuff. So it operates in this delicious space of intuition, where you’re like, “I’m getting messages, I’m getting visuals, I’m getting all of this information, and I don’t know where it’s coming from.” But I can understand it because I’m human. And I can make it for other humans because I’m human.

Maybe one day AI will have all the type in the world fed into it, and it’ll know what a letterform is. But, yeah, it’s poor at drawing type. I’m sure whatever it makes would just be an artifact of its training.

AW

We began by discussing data visualization. What I love is the idea that no one is sitting behind decisions around type, pretending it was some algorithmic optimization. It was a human—a designer using intuition and their understanding of how we perceive things—making something that feels right. And that’s so different from an AI way of thinking.

KA

We continue to use data to try to understand what’s “real,” but intuition itself is real. It originates from our bodies and nervous systems, from far more complex inputs than we could ever fully explain. It’s operating at a level that exceeds our ability to describe.

That’s probably why I find the aesthetics of type, design, and art to be endlessly fascinating.

I once heard an interview on CBC Radio, part of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s podcast series, featuring an author named Constance Classen, who had written a history of art from the perspective of the senses. It was something formative for me because she was talking about how we live in the age of information. This idea of data is really important, but it’s not everything.

Every different period in human history has had its own dominant sense. In the medieval period, touch was of great importance. And we get this expression “He is sharp” from that period.

However, as soon as the Enlightenment came, bringing light to various aspects of life and optics, and people began wearing glasses, the sense of vision became a higher priority. And all of a sudden, it became “He is bright.”

And it’s interesting because I think that I’m always trying to, at once, understand that now we have more information and data than at any other point in human history, and that’s useful in all these ways. But also, it’s such a small part of the story in terms of our three-dimensional, living, breathing lives as humans.

Classen talks about paintings in the Middle Ages and how people would look at them by rubbing them—that figures would get rubbed off in paintings because that’s how people wanted to engage with them. And I think that future anthropologists will look at us and be like: They thought everything was data.

As a designer and artist, I am fascinated by the relationship between things that can’t be communicated in abstract, encoded ways but must be experienced in an embodied manner.

I’m not anti-data. I’m just interested in everything.▪︎

Kelli Anderson is an artist, designer, animator, and tinkerer who pushes the limits of ordinary materials to seek out possibilities hidden in plain view, in humble materials. Working in between code, publishing, and animation, 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, based on research with Letterform Archive on typographic technology, will be published in fall 2025.