Images in Dialogue: How They Talk and What They Say

Abstract

As well as being tasked with clearly communicating textual and written contents, as communication designers and design scholars, we are also, and above all, responsible for visual ones, deciding how to convey these contents; the point of view and emphasis, authorship and interpretation of the designer ensure that the communication becomes a tale, a story made up of symbols and images. The transposition from the semantic to the visual plan takes place through various types of operations which ensure that the original content is always different from its visual translation, even if only very slightly. To carry out this process we use images with different kinds of relationships which allow us to visualise, condense and convey complex concepts that would otherwise be difficult both for graphic designers to translate and users to understand. Taking into consideration a series of case studies coming from different fields pertaining to the visual sphere, this text focuses its attention on the dialogue between the images, understanding how they talk to each other, and which relationships contribute to the construction of a narrative.

Keywords

• wordless images
• talking images
• silent books
• visual storytelling
• visual communication