011: Spotlight on Little Creative in Theoryland®

What is truly unique to my Semiotics for Designers and Illustrators book is the Little Creative in Theoryland® comic strip. Essentially this strip is a one-page narrative infographic that visually explains key parts of Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory. The roots of our Little Creative character go back to one of my Semiotic Rosetta Stone academic research papers from 2019.

I wrote and presented the paper Little Designer in Theoryland: A Designer-centric Approach to Understanding Theory at the International Association of Societies of Design Research conference (IASDR) in Manchester. In it I established the case for creative-centred theoretical dissemination of theory. To establish my argument, I used the comic creation of Winsor McCay’s classic 1920s comic strip, Little Nemo in Slumberland as an analogy of the bifurcation between theory and practice. 

McCay’s Little Nemo famously had fantastic adventures when he fell asleep which are then lost when awakening back into his reality. Nemo's reality and the reality of Slumberland are separated and only with the right conditions can he cross between them.

Theoryland, just like McCay’s Slumberland, is a foreign place that is both wonderful and yet very confusing to illustrators and designers. Therefore, as a narrative device my book’s Little Creative has eleven comic strip adventures in Theoryland. Our Little Creative slips between these worlds when confused. However, with each new theoretical adventure our Little Creative slowly grows in confidence in understanding how theory can be applied into creative practice. 

I introduce Little Creative in the book’s introduction and then our Little Creative has a Theoryland adventure in chapters two to nine. These narrative-based infographic strips allow me to illustrate key important Peircean theoretical points. In doing so, I emphasise how non-theoreticians can understand how theory actually applies to creative practice. Our Little Creative interacts with the bespoke diagrams I have used within the book to help develop your deeper understanding of how illustrators and designers can apply Peirce’s pragmatic semiotic theory. 

As an ex-illustrator, I have had fun coming out of ‘illustration retirement’ to draw these strips. Since I was a kid, I have loved the comic strip medium. Apart from some terrible derivative strips I drew in my teens, I never produced anything in this medium as a professional illustrator. It is thanks to a former PhD student of mine, Dr Nick Dodds (whose Doctoral research focused on graphic memoire), for planting the creative seed in my mind to develop Little Creative in Theoryland® for my book.