Deconstruction and digital typography

Abstract

Writing has traditionally been regarded as simply a tool to record verbal thoughts and discourses. Even Saussure, the father of modern linguistics and of semiology, could not rid himself of this prejudice, as pointed out by Derrida. However, many visual artists, poets and graphic designers have long been trying to show the potential of typographic design to arouse emotions and to indicate relations in addition to its symbolic notational function, a trend dating mainly to the lithographic posters of the latter half of the nineteenth century. With the appearance of Modernism, the logocentric view of writing came to prevail among European graphic designers, due largely to rationalist movements which gave birth, after the Second World War, to the so-called Swiss school of design, whose minimalistic approach became very influential all over the world, under the denomination of International Style. It was only in the 1980s, with the appearance of the personal graphic computer and the spread of deconstruction theory among students of graphic design, that typography was able to show all its communicative potentialities, insofar as both its iconic and indexical features were emphasized by many of the new digital designers, in addition to its symbolic characteristics, a development which allowed the re-introduction of both the subject and his/her history in the rhetorical practice of design