BLOG 24: Communicational Situations and Proximity
Semiosis 101 - 5 minute semiotic read
When you ideate you are developing ways to structure your design or illustration to successfully answer your client’s brief. To illustrate or design effectively is not simply a matter of aesthetics. It is not simply about demonstrating your artistic prowess or ego, but about effective visual communication. Effective visual communication is not simply doing what your client likes either.
As an illustrator or a designer the communicational situation you find yourself in is essentially putting yourself into a proximity between yourself and your target audience on behalf of your client. This is not a binary relationship but a triadic one, which goes beyond the dyadic semiotic signifier/signified into how your target audience will interpret your visual language.
For you to successfully visually communicate the messaging your client desires, you need to
connect with your audience. This puts you into a proximity with their own reference points. Semiotic sign-action is predicated on audience interpretation.
As visual communicators, illustrators and designers, your aesthetic bears meaning to your target audience. Your visual language decisions have an effect on your audience’ perception of your design or illustration. To see, to perceive, and to interpret is the desired effect you want to have on your target audience. Your audience are not passive consumers but proactive in interpreting what is meant. The visual language you use in your designs or illustrations facilitates some reaction.
Professor Jorge Frascara argues that from this reaction you have an impact on your target audience’s behaviour. With a more focused semiotic frame of mind, you can apply Semiosis’ semiotic framework during ideation to craft your visual language and deliver the desired meaning and facilitate a desired action. Pragmatic semiotic sign-action and a proximity to your audience’s reference points can enhance your visual language.
I am advocating a cognisant move on your part from this limited approach during ideation, to a more empathic and qualitative communication situation. From this cognisant ideation position, you will open yourself to audience-focused ideation (second-order thinking), and away from god-view ideation decisions (first-order thinking).
As you ideate, if you can appreciate what your audience’s lived experiences (lifeworlds) reveal about their socio-cultural reference points are, you can gain insights on initial qualities they will associate with aspects of the intended concept. These are qualities that if you semiotically employ in your visual language they will find perceptually familiar.
In considering your conceptual proximity to your audience’s prior reference points, you have a working dialogue with your audience. This Frascaran communicational situation is where you can ideate what will semiotically attract and retain their attention.
I am now obviously re-framing your design or illustration ideation phase through a pragmatic philosophical lens of Peirce’s semiotic sign-action - Semiosis. In doing so, I am drawing your attention to the “ACTION” part of Semiosis. This “ACTION” is not the action of the creative. Rather it is the “ACTION” of the visual language used as an effect on the mind of your target audience.
By employing second-order thinking you treat your target audience as knowledge agents. By re-calibrating your creative mindset in this way you can understand that what you create will also have a subconscious effect on the minds of your audience.
Frascara speaks of three essential functions of any form of visual communication of a message: attention needs to be attracted, retained so that then it can begin communicating. Semiosis structures this. I more fully discuss this in my 2026 Semiotics for Designers and Illustrators book, and in several Semiosis 101 episodes on YouTube and Patreon.
By consciously placing yourself in a communicational situation with your target audience, your visual language decision-making can become more semiotically effective. By giving time to consider your ideation’s proximity to the socio-cultural reference points of your audience, your design’s or illustration’s aesthetic can become more semiotically targeted.
Remember, the visual elements you use in your visual language are all potentially meaning-bearing to your audience.
By ideating at both a micro (single signs) and macro level (composed semiotic signs) you can manipulate the semiotic sign-action in how these visual elements mediate what you intend. A proximity to your audience’s prior lived experiences places you in a communication situation, in which you semiotically control the latitude for what meaning is visually communicated. By treating your audience as knowledge agents your ideating can avoid mis-communicating the concept.
Semiosis 101
