El bandolerisme de les imatges efímeres. La lletra en un món d'imatges digitals

Abstract

The piracy of ephemeral images. The word in a world of digital images

The advances in information and communication technology pose new challenges to visual communicators. Digital images are self-defining, and their new hardware and programs are the instruments which legitimize the birth of a new aesthetic which is not the result of an elaborated discourse. An aesthetic, however, with which thousands of hungry young people identify, young people who are determined to experiment with new techniques and to create images which exist as soon as the computer screen is turned on. The new tendencies in graphic design and digital typography are cases in point. Computers have polarized typographical education, but at the same time, they have also facilitated the process of transformation of alphabetic signs into plastic forms, free of their semantic content. This process has brought about a crisis in the concept of functionalist design at the service of visual communication. The hardware limits the criteria of readability and legibility and obliges us to look for new forms of typographic expression if we do not want to be subjected to a culture of empty and ephemeral images.