Active Semiotic
- Simplifies a complicated world
- Looks like it isn’t designed at all
- Emojiis are fantastic example of meaning expressed in no more than 20 px across
- Road signs exist to stop people killing each other driving heavy machinery at speed
The Project
- Practically test and explore the world of the graphic symbol in contemporary cultures and the physical and digital environments
- Practically testing and exploring semiotic theories
- Understand how they can inform your work as a graphic and media communication designer
- Test in audience
- Context and formal symbols
- Target audience in the environment
- The Schedule
- Intro and briefing
- 21/28/07 Development workshop
- 14 March one to one
- 18/25/02 development tutorials
- 09 one to one tutorials
- 16/23/30 May studio tutorials
- Use graphic design to communicate the design process
- 04 June Explorations Unit Submissions
Task
- Produce three symbols that communicate oppositional meaning and someplace in between
- Parameters
- Your signs may be symbolic, indexical, representational, or figurative
- TO BE SUBMITTED DIGITALLY
- Pixel perfect resolution
- Make sure what you are producing is part of the RGB system
- Include exact colours and HEX codes
- Include a technical interrogation of the idea and symbols
- Graphic consistency and meaning
- Research this
- Charles Peirce
- Philosopher, logician, scientist, pragmatist
- Early writer and thinker on the way in which we read signs and interpret the world
- Charles Peirce
- Read this
- Ways of Seeing
- How to See the World
- This Means That
- The Highway Code
- Understand design science
- Visual Summary
- Analysis and schematic, diagrammatic, comparison
- Screengrabs from a newspaper and other articles
Content
- Provocation
- Is there a need for this projects?
- How do we make them?
- Why do we use them?
- Explore philosophy, need, social movements
- Symbols exist to be translated and understood and responded to
- Understand the journey f a message via the
symbol
- Sender à who
- Intention à aim
- Message à says what
- Transmission à what means
- Noise à interference (symbols being misread)
- Receiver à who
- Destination à what result (the intention of the person)
- You can choose to ignore symbols and instructions
- Peirce’s Three Semiotic Elements
- Sign
- The graphic representation
- Signs are encoded, its meaning is derived from its context
- Object
- The thing which the sign refers to
- Interpretant
- The sign’s meaning
- Signifier
- Signified
- Connote
- The emotional or between-the-lines meaning
- Denote
- The exact meaning
- Sign
- A typology of Signs
- Icon or iconic
- Has a likeness or semblance of the actual thing which it represents
- Derives from Christian ‘icons’
- Understand the progression of icons
- Index or indexical
- Is directly connected to the signified (the actual thing)
- It refers to other things, like a bunch of lines for fingerprints
- Refers you to the things you want to see
- Thumbprint refers you to the thumb
- Communicate via symbol which implies something else
- The “do not consume” has been taken out to take us away from the thought that we are spending
- Symbolic
- Imposed symbolic meaning or culturally accepted meaning
- This is interpretative
- Heart symbolic of romance
- Rely upon cultural conventions
- Roman numerals
- Really interesting to thing about IV as a character
- It’s a convention that we understand that numbers look like certain things and strokes
- Extended research
- Skeuomorphism (iOS UX/UI icons)
- Visual mimicry of the real space
- Real world sheen over the digital idea
- Paper noise when it goes in the trash can
- Scared of the idea of data being transferred
- Aniconism
- Non figurative symbology
- Look at Islamic aversion to prophet depiction
- Anthropomorphic representation
- Made to look and feel human
- Skeuomorphism (iOS UX/UI icons)
- Icon or iconic
- We do translate the world, it’s how our mind wanders
- Misreading
- When we do not have the full information,
meaning is lost
- People read completely different things
- A biologist sees a tree in a different way than a child or an engineer or an artist
- People read completely different things
- The typology of an oak tree
- Experiment
- When we do not have the full information,
meaning is lost
- Research
- Cigarette
- Smoke is indexical
- Cigarette is iconic
- Circle is symbolic
- Circles mean mandatory
- Triangles are warning
- Red is warning or do not
- Slash means no
- Nike
- Non-Euclidean
- Imparts speed and tick mark
- Otl Aicher pictograms
- Munich Olympics
- New visual language
- Semifor
- Airports and ships symbol communication
- The Neurath Group
- Marie Neurath
- Otto Neurath
- Gerd Artnz
- ISOTYPE
- International System of Typographic Picture Education
- Margaret Calvert
- Look at the redrawn sign 2016
- Susan Kare for Apple graphics
- Francesco Saroglia
- Pure wool mark
- Cigarette
Contemporary Applications
- Where do we see signs? (reader)
- How do we respond to them? (active)
- How do we understand them? (context)
- Electronic Passports
- Contactless
- Wifi symbol
- Olympics symbol
- Word symbols
- Microsoft save icon
- Play, pause, and record
- Record like a camera eye
- Why?
- Through technological change and development
- Dietary
- Basically, change
Graphics
- Context and the arrangement of visual elements informs meaning and aids communication
- Arrangement is as important as colour and meaning
- Traffic lights have an exact order and an “in-between”
- Its not as simple as good and bad and stop and go
- Red
- Signifier: Red
- Signified: Stop
- Orange
- Signifier: Orange
- Signified: Caution
- Green
- Signifier: Green
- Signified: Go
- Dice
- Even objects designed as objects become symbols
- Some signs are accidental
- We see, we don’t see, we understand, we don’t
Seed Themes
- Boiling temperatures
- Traffic speeds
- Gender identity
- Geological timescales
- Open/close/ajar
- Identity
- Wayfinding
- CONSIDER THEMES WITH BINARY END POINTS AND A SPECTRUM IN BETWEEN
Where does my Symbol Sit?
- The connection between social and science
- Human aid/environmental/warning/travel
Reading Meaning
- Experiments
- Circles, squares, and triangles are universal
- These create psychological feeling
- You must try to understand the language of it
- Colour
- Shape
- Negative space like an outline of a box
- Blue
- Very special objects
- Blue was a precious colour, difficult to make
- Semiotics and signs don’t actually mean anything
- Everyone has a completely different idea of what that means
- It’s completely intuitive
- Deutsche Bank Logo
- Negative space
- Remember it
- Association
- Branding attempts to associate a feeling with a corporation, event
- BP
- Rebrand from shield to sunflower
- From strong to sustainable
- They want to distance themselves from anything bad
- Cross
- Possible differences, we learn different things
- Visual Signs by J. David Crowe
- Visual Research
- Circles, squares, and triangles are universal
- Context
- Even when the image is iconic, you need context to understand what it means
- Like the UK no vehicles carrying explosives
- Erik Spikeman Transit
- In context, they make total sense
- Appropriation
- Taking something from one source and introducing it to another
- Like a danger sign for a club music
- Photography next to symbols creates a new meaning
- Images don’t really mean anything
- Anchorage
- Text can be used to anchor an image by providing an explicit denotation
- When we see things, we gain new knowledge
- Combination of text and images
- Texts guides the reader through the signifieds of the image towards a meaning chosen by the author
- Two things
- Confirm the meaning
- Fixes and anchors the meaning
- Can be wilfully provocative
- Recreate a meaning in a different way
- Confirm the meaning
- Relay
- Text and images are in a complimentary relationship
- The process of relay liberates the image of its obvious connotations by opening up meaning
- Interplay with the audience
- Making unusual connections
- Defamiliarisation
- Transforms and object from something ordinary into something unusual
- It allows us to see in a totally different way
- We work to decode that
- Strangeness is compelling
- Signal Signifier
- Making strange
- The currency of the creative is the ability to make unusual connections
- HOW DOES THE WORD AFFECT THE MEANING OF THE IMAGE