Kelli Anderson Why should a pop-up book about type exist?
This talk is about teaching type as a hands-on explorable explanation. While most art school students are exposed to art history and aesthetics (and understand, for example, why different paintings look the way they do), the same cannot be said for type, which often remains cut-off from its rich aesthetic history.
As Aldo Novarese pointed out, If you look carefully at letters, you can see a secret history of the world — from the Bronze Age to the Information Age. With a surprising economy of expression, 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. However—because many of the methods, tools, and machines that shaped type are now obsolete, this history is challenging to follow.
In my classroom and on the page, I have been experimenting with the use of tactile, interactive features, to help clarify how letters have transformed alongside technological upheavals and shifting aesthetic moods. Play is an inclusive way for more of to move together through this understanding. By following the progression of typographic technology and history in a more embodied manner, we can trace 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.