BLOG 03: Iconic Semiotic Building Blocks
Semiosis 101 - 5 minute semiotic read
Designing semiotic visual communication is a natural part of our existing design process.
Graphic designers and illustrators describe their ability to visually communicate to a target audience, as something they “just do.” Polanyi in his book The Tacit Dimension clarifies that we tacitly “know what” and “know how” to solve [design] problems.
This is tacit knowledge …a knowledge we cannot tell. Instinctively, creatives are
doing whatever is needed to answer the brief, as creatively as possible, to a budget, to a client’s needs … and hopefully that will connect with the target audience. That's what the creatives’ design school training taught them to do.
But in design or illustration practice there are theoretical frameworks underpinning, whether you realise it or not, that can enhance your effectiveness. Semiosis is one such theoretical framework for success.
What Polanyi is talking about here - from a visual communicator’s point of view - is that “knowing what” is to be done (Wissen) leads to “knowing how” to do it (Können).
So placing this into a context of designers or illustrators answering a client’s brief, to visually communicate “something” to a target audience, tacitly your design school training gives you the confidence to achieve this.
As Semiosis 101 has a semiotic agenda, I argue that a strong underpinning of theoretical knowledge of Semiosis enhances the “knowing how” to enhance the effectiveness to connect with the target audience.
Why would an intervention of Peirce’s semiotic theory to your established practice enhance your ability to connect?
Semiosis’ triadic semiotic sign-action power embeds the audience within the design process as an integral partner with you, whether you’re a designer or illustrator.
In Peirce's semiotic sign-action, the power between the concept to be visually communicated, affects how its visual representation then facilitates an interpretation in the target audience.
The client sets the concept to be visually communicated (sometimes this needs teasing out and clarified by you, the creative). Then through the visual language you choose, you craft the best way to visually communicate that concept - that message - to your target audience.
How you decide to enhance the visual representation of the concept is structured by Semiosis - semiotic sign-action.
Unlike the Saussure’s signifier|signified semiotic model, Semiosis, at a macro level, brings the client, the creative and the audience together, within a semiotic determination flow between concept, representation and interpretation.
At a micro semiotic level, the your representation choices can be enhanced at the Iconic, Indexical and Symbolic levels to hook the target audience.
These levels of semiotic building blocks are integral in all aspects of how we design or illustrate.
By stopping and considering that the visual language you choose is, on a semiotic level, always communicating something to your intended audience. By becoming mindful of this sign-action allows you to tune your visual language to HOOK the attention of the target audience.
This begins at the Iconic level of representation, where the connotatively communicated intended concept/message either begins to work on the audience …or not. It is in “knowing how” that the application of Semiosis helps you to enhance how you can visually HOOK your audience’s attention.
Then once HOOKed your aesthetic decisions can begin to visually communicate more and more to that audience, keeping them engaged longer.
When I say semiotic building blocks, I am equating Peirce’s Icon in visual communication as visual element, which are visual resemblances to something the target audience is already aware of.
I refer to this is in a designer-centric way as Iconic representation, the lowest level of Semiosis. In your visual language, Iconic representation focuses on visual elements that have shared qualities to familiar visual things that your target audience has a perception of.
These Iconic building blocks merely hints to your audience that there is something else connotatively happening. That is where you can begin to semiotically encode concepts/messages.
Or not.
Before a semiotic sign can begin to work it first needs to be perceived AS a semiotic sign by the target audience, or they just walk on by.
Semiosis 101
