Kelli Anderson is an artist/designer living and working in Brooklyn, New York. She works on traditional graphic design styles and is always experimenting and exploring new ways of working. Everything she creates begins and ends in her home and she also teaches Art History at Pratt every summer.
I first came across Kelli Anderson in my first year at university. We watched a TED talk about design to challenge reality. During her presentation she spoke specifically about a personal project she completed for friends who were getting married, that involved making their wedding invitations to include working record players out of paper, meaning that each recipient could fold the invitation and spin the wheel to make it play music. I found this absolutely fascinating, who knew you could be so creative with paper!?
This project has always stood out to me, so when I heard she was one of the speakers at this year's Curated By... conference, 'Disrupted By...', I knew I had to go and see her. Once again she spoke about the wedding invitation that she created, but she also talked about some other projects that I found equally as fascinating.
She talked about a few projects that involved using coloured paper to make stop motion animations which I really enjoyed learning about. It reminded me of the animation work that I completed in first year which I had a lot of fun working on. I have not even considered animation work since then but the projects Kelli talked about made me think more about this and perhaps including some animation work into my final year portfolio. Projects that Kelli talked about that I definitely recommend you look at are:
Talking While Female - http://kellianderson.com/blog/2014/10/talking-while-female/
Tinybop - http://kellianderson.com/blog/2013/08/illustrating-tinybops-1st-app/
A Paper Record Player - http://kellianderson.com/blog/2011/04/a-paper-record-player/
Although these projects are all quite digital, as I'm sure you can guess from the materials used Kelli is a more traditional graphic designer in the sense that she likes to be hands on and experimental and be print based. If you take a look at her website, http://kellianderson.com/blog/, you will be able to see that she works on a lot of print based projects and her heart lies with more traditional graphic design techniques and processes. What you can also see from her website is that Kelli has a signature style that shows in her work no matter what she is working on. You could put one of her infographics, animations and identities next to each and be able to tell immediately that they have all been created by the same person. This is what I particularly love about Kelli and why she is such an inspiration to me. She knows exactly what projects excite her and what she wants to work on and she knows how to execute them in an innovative way while keeping a distinct and consistent style. This, more than anything, is what I want to develop this year. I want to be able to create a varied portfolio with a range of projects that you could still connect to the same designer should they be split up.
I could talk about Kelli's work all day but I won't, I just highly recommend that if you haven't already you visit her website and check out her work! She is a very talented designer and hearing her speak at the conference was a great experience. Besides her innovative projects she also is inspiring in herself and her character and listening to her passion for these projects reminded me why I am choosing this creative path and motivated me to take more risks and be more free and creative with my work.
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