003: My writing process… the initial 'draft'

Semiotics for Designers and Illustrators (2026)

Book Newsletter 003

As my Semiotics for Designers and Illustrators book has emerged from my academic Semiotic Rosetta Stone design research to date, and its existing dissemination through Semiosis 101 on YouTube and Patreon, I already had a lot of amassed content.

Obviously a book aimed at illustrators and designers is a very different medium to short bite-sized videos and academic papers.

My Semiosis 101 videos contextualise and explain facets of Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatic theory. In and of themselves, these videos have a particular topic which I discuss in 10 minutes. These videos can thematically follow on from each other, or a fresh general thematic arc may be introduced every three or four videos. Semiosis 101’s objective is not to be a step-by-step video manual ‘to do’ semiotics. Pragmatic semiotics cannot be learnt that way.

In my academic papers there is a formality set by the publishing journal or conference proceedings. There is a level of rigour to the discussion made that is peer reviewed by other academics. This attention to rigorous dissemination of research, and the findings made from the research, provides a level of academic validity. This validity of argument can obviously be challenged by other academics. After all, academia is essentially dialectic in nature: a thesis leads to other academics’ antithesis, which leads to synthesis of a fresh thesis. This cycle continues and around this dialectic we academics go. 

The key content for the nine chapters in my book was carefully structured. Early on in my introduction I state my dialectic position of my thesis for explaining Peirce’s pragmatic semiotic theory to illustrators and designers. This academic positioning then ring-fenced my content to ensure academic antithesis of other theoretical influences was ‘bracketed out’ (acknowledged but essentially ignored). 

At the time of writing the book I was beginning to launch season 4 of Semiosis 101 on Patreon and YouTube, so I had 40 episodes worth of content already written. This amount of written content could never become a book in its script form as the conversational style of a video script would not work in a 75,000 word design book. Therefore, to begin writing nine coherent book chapters, which would progressively advance your understanding of how you could apply Semiosis to enhance visual communication, needed careful planning. To do this I went old school with colour-coding, scissors and tape to cut up the relevant points I needed to include so that I could plot the ordering of content. I’ll discuss more on this in the next newsletter post.