The archive · Design & Visual · Product decision · 2021
V&A's Alice exhibition uses elastic typography that stretches and shrinks like Wonderland
For a show spanning 150 years of Alice adaptations, the V&A let typography expand, shrink and squeeze across every format, echoing Alice's shifts in scale.
V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum)
What it had to solve
The V&A's immersive exhibition Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser examined how the Alice character evolved over 150 years across fashion, film, theatre, music, literature and art. With such a multi-layered story to tell, the identity had to host a mix of messages without collapsing into one style.
How it works
Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser was the V&A's immersive exhibition on the evolution of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland across 150 years — in fashion, film, theatre, music, literature and art. That breadth posed a design problem: how does one identity hold a story with countless adaptations and still feel like a single exhibition?
The creative answer was typography as a framework. A bold typographic system carried the exhibition's messaging, and its defining behavior was elasticity: type expanded, shrank and squeezed from format to format, from poster to digital screen to signage. The movement was not decoration but meaning — a direct nod to Alice's own dizzying shifts of perspective and size.
By making the system elastic, the identity could embrace the exhibition's variety without losing its character: every application deformed the same typographic voice in Wonderland-like ways. D&AD keeps the work in its awards archive, whose page records no attendance or reach numbers.
Why it lands
- Elasticity mirrored the exhibition's subject, so the visual system communicated Alice's size shifts before a single word was read.
- One flexible system could host a century and a half of different Alices without fragmenting into competing styles.
- Because the type could squeeze into any format, the identity survived the full range of exhibition touchpoints unchanged in spirit.
- The bold, playful lettering matched an immersive family show that needed to feel wondrous rather than museum-dry.
What it did
The identity gave a dense, century-and-a-half story one recognizable visual voice that could flex across everything the exhibition touched. D&AD keeps the work in its awards archive; the archive page records no attendance or reach figures.
What you can take
When a subject is defined by shifting scale and perspective, let the design system itself change size: the medium then acts out the story instead of only illustrating it.
Since then
The elastic typographic identity carried the V&A's Alice exhibition through its 2021 London run and into the D&AD awards archive, where it sits as a graphic-design case. No attendance or reach figures are recorded on the archive page; the idea's residue is the system itself — a typographic behavior, expand and squeeze, that could be applied to any future Wonderland-sized story.
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