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
• 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
• 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
• 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
  • The typology of an oak tree
    • Experiment
• 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

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
• 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
• 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