Free Semiosis 101 Transcript 4.18:

Semiosis 101

07 Jan 2026 — 8 min read

How CAN YOU CREATIVES Strengthen Your Meaning-bearing Impact?

Hello readers.

In this free transcript for the episode 4.18 published on Semiosis 101 on Weds 7th January 2026, we begin to synthesise the thinking from the last 17 episodes. Let us now summarise how Semiosis can help you clarify the intended visually communicated messages.

Like a Trojan Horse, semiotic signs sit there in your aesthetic in plain sight. Dormant. Waiting for the signal to spring into semiotic sign-action. Once sprung, Semiosis gets to work on the audience.

However, once perceived as visually meaning-bearing by your audience, the visual elements in your aesthetic (semiotic signs) trigger them to interpret. The semiotic sign-action can now begin to semiotically convey deeper meaning to them…

Watch the free episode on YouTube for the full impact…

…and here is the episode’s transcript.

TEDI London examples used with kind permission of Hudson Fuggle © Hudson Fuggle 2021. Thanks to Ian Fuggle and Sarah Jane Chapman for their support.

www.linkedin.com/company/hudsonfuggle/

www.instagram.com/hudsonfuggle/

How CAN YOU CREATIVES Strengthen Your Meaning-bearing Impact?

As this fourth season begins to conclude the crafting of your fresh semiotic mindset will be our focus. Let me be as succinct as I can in summarising a semiotic strategy I have explored over the last 17 episodes…

• Semiosis begins with a sketch during ideation.

• Semiosis enhances visual communication initially from what is perceptually familiar.

Meaning is semiotically conveyed from a simple grounding…

As visual communicators, illustrators and designers you do not want your amazing creativity to miscommunicate. In this 18th episode of Semiosis 101’s season four, we begin to synthesise the thinking from the last 17 episodes. Let us now summarise how Semiosis can help you clarify the intended visually communicated messages.

Like a Trojan Horse, semiotic signs sit there in your aesthetic in plain sight. Dormant. Waiting for the signal to spring into semiotic sign-action. Once sprung, Semiosis gets to work on the audience. However, once perceived as visually meaning-bearing by your audience, the visual elements in your aesthetic (semiotic signs) trigger them to interpret. The semiotic sign-action can now begin to semiotically convey deeper meaning to them.

Your aesthetic (whether a design or illustration) has not changed. The audience’s perception of it has. The semiotic communication of the encoded meaning does not always come in one single “aha” moment. The very nature of Semiosis means that interpretation of meaning happens as an effect on the mind of the perceiving audience. Subconsciously, maybe with milliseconds or over a longer period of exposure to the design or illustration, the embedded meaning is connotatively revealed - through nested levels of semiotic signs.

To help you develop your semiotic mindset, this fourth season of Semiosis 101 has discussed how Semiosis, as a pragmatic semiotic theory, has more alignments with human-centred design approaches. Although in his design book The Pragmatic Turn, Klaus Krippendorff is sceptical about semiotics, he does state that, “one cannot observe meanings, only their effects on behaviour.” Your audience can SEE your aesthetic. What they understand is up to them.

Whether you intend to or not, every mark, stroke, shape, colour, etc. you use in your visual language can carry meaning. When you use a stroke of a brush to simply indicate a tree limb, this stroke is simultaneously a paint stroke AND a branch. What makes a paint stroke a tree branch? The stroke’s shape sharing a familiar quality to what we know as a “tree branch.” The paint stroke is semiotically dormant. Its possible meaning-bearing of “tree branch” will only be understood ONCE PERCEIVED as a possible meaning because the quality of that stroke has a familiar quality to something that has been experienced.

The target audience are solely responsible for their perception. You creatives are responsible for how to visually trigger that perception. Semiotic sign-action helps you to encode that trigger.

As designers and illustrators, you already are creating meaning-bearing elements within your visual language, as you create your illustration or design. Encoding semiotic signs is a natural progression of the very creative process you already follow. Applying semiotic sign-action into your visual language begins with simple adjustments of the simple visual qualities you use.

Pragmatic semiotics begins from simple instantly perceivable qualities, which feel familiar to the audience, to lead them to a possible meaning. Remember perception of meaning lies dormant until triggered. By aligning qualities to your audience’s lived experiences, strengthens the chances for interpretation to begin. Once that instant moment of perception is triggered through a weak possibility of meaning, from a quality that feels familiar, the audience can begin to unlock more meaning. Semiotic sign-action has begun.

concept > representation > interpretation.

=/= Semiosis.

Your visual language uses simple visual elements to craft more complicated compositions or images. So, just as your final complex aesthetic nests more simpler details of marks, shapes, colours, etc., encoding complex semiotic signs in turn nests weaker semiotic signs. Think of a Russian Babushka wooden doll. The larger doll nests a smaller doll inside it, and that one has a smaller version nested inside it, and so on. This analogy is useful to help you see that you are already, in an uncontrolled way, encoding semiotically.

Applying semiotics is not a huge rethink on how you work. Rather it is a more mindful use of your visual language, to align it with your target audience’s lived experiences. Why? Your target audience’s lived experiences provide you with insights on what they will find familiar. Whatever your client’s wants you to achieve - their concept, Semiosis helps you to structure your choices to visually represent this concept. You may prefer to call this “tone of voice,” but let us call this semiotic encoding of meaning. Your visual communication outcomes will be enhanced by a visual language that aligns itself to your socio-cultural contextual understanding of what the audience knows.

In previous episodes I have given many examples of this (so check them out). There is no point in believing that visual elements will always have the same meaning in different contexts. In the West black is the colour of mourning, while in the East it is white. Orange in one socio-cultural context means imprisonment, and in another socio-cultural context it means religious intolerance. Meaning is contextual. Interpretation is also contextual. Therefore, your visual language decisions are contextual too. Your audience should be centred in your ideation to help you enhance your ability to successfully communicate the intended messages. If you want to read more about this then check out the Semiosis 101 Semiotic Resource on semiosis101.online. Link is below in the description.

Obviously we are not discussing denotative but connotative meaning. Semiotic meaning is released through many passes through Semiosis’ determination flow, from perceiving what is there in plain sight as subtly meaning-bearing beyond the denotative. After perception is triggered, the audience will only interpret for as long as they decide. They subconsciously circle through concept > representation > interpretation as many times as they desire.

In reality, the audience flows from representation > interpretation > concept > representation… The creative encodes the concept within their representation for interpretation. Your visual language, semiotically encoded with meaning-bearing elements, therefore releases more meaning the more the audience perceives it.

Let us use a real example created by Hudson Fuggle for TEDI-London in 2021. This segment from a longer promotional video pans across a circuit board, which makes it appear out of scale. This representation is intentional. But what concept is it representing? Semiotic sign-action only instantly starts once we perceive the circuit board has a familiar quality, which reminds us of a possible resemblance it shares with a building complex.

We know TEDI-London is recruiting students.This contextual information suggests that that the circuit board/buildings in fact are mediating an existent connection to an educational campus. In this visual example, these possible buildings are now suggesting they can be interpreted as meaning a campus. With further attention we may interpret and resolve that when we interpret the circuit board now as a campus, it is now a proxy for TEDI-London. Socio-culturally we learn to agree that in this specific context we interpret TEDI-London’s campus.

In this semiotic mediation of one thing representing other things, the creative and audience are within what Frascara calls a communicational situation. The visual communication of meaning is subtly structured to semiotically release its represented meaning when perceived and interpreted. Your aesthetic can release different levels of meaning to different people within your target audience. Nothing will visually change. The aesthetic will remain the same, but what the audience interprets depends on their own perception.

One person may only ever see circuit board and no additional meaning. A second person will interpret TEDI-London’s campus.

Your strengthening of the impact of your visual communication comes first from your creative mindset adapting to this obvious fact. Semiotically your visual language is encoded with meaning. Your audience’s perception should be mediated to the client’s intended concept, so that the semiotic release of encoded meaning will be interpreted. That release of meaning will be interpreted AT DIFFERENT LEVELS …and that is fine. Your meaning-bearing visual language will naturally do this if you semiotically apply Semiosis to structure it.

In next week’s penultimate episode, we will discuss how your new semiotic mindset can help you to work with sign-action. So, subscribe to be notified when this episode is published. Or become a Semiosis 101 Producer on Patreon and watch season five episodes now, months ahead of YouTube …plus exclusive Patreon content.

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