Free Semiosis 101 Transcript 4.11:

Semiosis 101

24 Sep 2025 — 7 min read

How Do Ephemeral Semiotic Qualities Help You To Visually Communicate?

Hello readers.

In this free transcript for the episode 4.11 published on Semiosis 101 on Weds 17^th September 2025, we are hanging out on the subconscious periphery of how your audience perceives and interprets meaning from what they see. As visual communicators, you illustrators and designers create meaning-bearing outcomes for your target audience.

With a small change in how you think about your ideation phase, you can enhance how you visually communicate. Your audience will interpret deeper meaning from what you have designed or illustrated, whether you realise it or not…

Watch the free episode on YouTube for the full impact…

…and here is the episode’s transcript.

How Do Ephemeral Semiotic Qualities Help You To Visually Communicate?

Okay, let us go to the edges of audience perception and explore how to semiotically strengthen our visual communication. We have seen that Peirce says that a semiotic sign is not a sign for anything until INTERPRETED as such. Semiotic sign-action begins at the weakest level of mere familiar qualities. You use these to form more complex meaning-bearing visual language…

As visual communicators, you illustrators and designers create meaning-bearing outcomes for your target audience. With a small change in how you think about your ideation phase, you can enhance how you visually communicate. Your audience will interpret deeper meaning from what you have designed or illustrated, whether you realise it or not.

In this 11th episode of Semiosis 101’s season four, we hang out on the subconscious periphery of how your audience perceives and interprets meaning from what they see. On Semiosis 101 we are exploring the pragmatic semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce in a designer-centric way. Semiosis (semiotic sign-action) is predicated on interpreting meaning, but the meaning your audience interprets is contextual.

What I mean by this is that your audience has lived experiences (lifeworlds) of their own which provide contexts. This audience lifeworld is a repository of things they are already familiar with, things that they have socio-culturally experienced, learnt and now understand. The term lifeworld is a term from phenomenology, which is simply the study of phenomena.

We all have this personal repository of things we draw on to navigate the world. We all have this context from which we make sense of the world. As creatives, we draw on our own lifeworld contexts to ideate new creative ideas. These things provide us with different ways we could ideate solutions to a client’s brief; to align our visual language to things the audience will instantly understand.

When I use the word things I am using this collective term quite intentionally. In a phenomenological context. Things are a placeholder term for whatever concept you need to semiotically represent, to connotatively visually communicate deeper meaning to the target audience.

To get all phenomenological for a moment, we are talking about triggering audience perception here. A subconscious millisecond when something has been perceived as bearing deeper meaning than it had a moment before. In this moment, Peirce’s semiotic sign-action begins as soon as a visual element in your visual language is interpreted as meaning something more …to someone else.

Subconsciously, your choice of visual language elements (which you use to create your aesthetic) can semiotically trigger possible interpretations by the audience. They can perceive your aesthetic elements as sharing familiar qualities with things THEY know. Once this moment of audience interpretation is instantly triggered, Semiosis begins to work on the audience.

Let us just semiotically unpack what I have just outlined. An illustration or design is an aesthetic piece of work for your client. This aesthetic is active rather than passive. (We are not concerned with denotative meaning). What you aesthetically create is visually communicating something to someone beyond what is denoted. That something is the concept your client requires the audience to act on.

Your aesthetic is, semiotically-speaking, dripping with encoded deeper meaning. You may wish to think of this as “tone of voice” or connotative meaning. Think of your aesthetic as visual language, using visual communication building blocks of simple marks, lines, shapes, colours, etc. to construct more complex compositions representing that concept. A design’s or illustration’s aesthetic attracts audience attention, to then facilitate them to interpret deeper meaning from what they see. Why? Why not just have the design or illustration say “this IS this?”

“A” may be for Apple but ‘apple’ can mean many different things to people. Semiosis is philosophically pragmatic, which is an action-based philosophy. Peirce sees human cognition as a system that constructs and communicates meaning as signs (no not signage). A thought begets another thought, etc. and humans build knowledge and understanding through how we share these thoughts. Therefore, his semiotic theory of sign-action (Semiosis) is a triadic cycling through a determination flow between

concept > representation > interpretation > concept >>.

With each cycle, the audience interprets more meaning from the representation of the concept. However, an audience’s perception that there is deeper meaning to unlock, can only begin if, as the creative, you first semiotically trigger them to interpret something as something else. This is why Semiosis is within a phenomenological context of how we perceive.

Let us return to the phenomenological context of our audience’s lifeworlds, and how these lived experiences offer you clues to triggering their interpretation using ephemeral qualities. I have described the semiotic triggering of audience interpretation in simple, designer-centric terms. I have provided plain three-word terms instead of Peirce’s more obtuse terminology for his first semiotic sign class: possible > familiar > instant.

What these terms refer to are three semiotic power levels, from left to right, of Perception | Representation | Delivery. SIGN ONE is the weakest level of semiotic sign-action. It is ephemeral and only has a meaning-bearing power to trigger perception.

SIGN ONE works on the periphery of perception through qualities

that possibly could be familiar to things the audience have previously experienced. If this perception is triggered by an ephemeral quality it is instantaneous. With this instant triggering any deeper meaning is simply a weak possibility. At this point of interpreting, any meaning is semiotically based on nothing more than a possibly familiar quality to something the audience subconsciously has experienced before.mIf you want to read more about this then check out the Semiosis 101 Semiotic Resource on semiosis101.online. Link is below in the description.

These weak ephemeral qualities are the semiotic building blocks which help you to encode deeper meaning as semiotic signs. They are the same visual communication building blocks you already use in your visual language: marks, shapes, colours, etc. These familiar qualities are your semiotic short-hand to retaining audience attention. Peirce calls this semiotic delivery, which triggers instantaneous perception, a Qualisign.

Peirce, from a pragmatic perspective, insists that this inquiry, “begins with tacit prejudices and prejudgements” that the audience will first draw on. The audience’s lived experiences provide them, in any new communicational situation, with a background of references to make the necessary perceptual orientation they need to interpret what they are seeing.

We do not know what we do not know. We cannot makes sense of new experiences or new knowledge without the contexts we have to frame the meaning of what we see. I like to use the example of Science Fiction or Fantasy, first using what we already know to then project fantastical possibilities we can immerse ourselves in. So, think of this as a way to grasp what Peirce is meaning.

Tacit is the knowledge we cannot explain. It is subconscious. Your audience’s lifeworlds will suggest to you the familiar qualities your audience will perceive, to trigger an instant moment of perception of possible meaning. This familiar visual short-hand to audience attention in how you represent the concept, is also referred to as Iconic representation.

Let us end this episode now on what these building blocks of semiotic qualities can be. I have stated that they are essentially the same building blocks you use when you begin ideating. As you sketch you already tacitly use marks, shapes, colours, etc. to build more complex compositions to attempt to visually communicate your concept. You already use these qualities in ways that make creative sense to you.

It is these very moments of creation that the same marks, shapes, colours, etc. should also make sense to the audience. I have said many times you creatives have always been working semiotically. So, it will not be a seismic shift in your existing creative mindset, to realise that your audience’s lived experiences can instantly provide you with semiotic qualities they will associate with your intended concept. This really is the first simple semiotic revelation that will help you to enhance how you visually communicate more effectively.

In the next two episodes we will move from Qualisigns, to delivering mediation of meaning to the audience with Sinsigns. So remember and subscribe to be notified when these future episodes are published. Or become a Semiosis 101 Producer on Patreon and…

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