Language is something everyone has and everyone uses. There are so many different languages that people speak but yet there is technically no universal one that everyone knows. Luckily signs and signifiers bring people together universally and sometimes even in the form of graphic design.

Design gives people a universal language. When people cannot understand each other or things linguistically, design is the one thing that makes almost everyone understand. For instance many people understand that a big red circle with a line through it means “no” or “cannot”. Or that a person on a big yellow sign means walking. Communicating through symbols and signs can be another form of language, that being the language of design. Signs, symbols, and icons create a sense of connection and it allows everyone to speak a global language.

I found it interesting in the reading that it says, “The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image…the latter is not a material sound…but the psychological imprint of the sound.” I never thought of language in this form before and in the reading the combination of a concept and a sound-image is known as a sign. It touches in the reading that sound-images are “Apparent when we observe our own speech. Without moving our lips or tongue, we can talk to ourselves or recite menatally a selection of verse.” In a way that is almost a universal language as well. We all think, we all have thoughts and we talk to ourselves in that psychological language.

Language and design relate to one another in today’s culture because when people dont understand something in someone else’s language, design steps in and becomes everyone’s universal language. Designers use a visual language which is one of the most effective ways of learning and understanding. Things like certain fonts, colors, and shapes start visually communicating to a person. You can almost immediately understand something when that something is visually represented. You can see all signs of visual symbols such as a stop sign, a pizza place sign, and even the street light. People automatically understand that yes this is a pizza place, or yes this is where i have to stop. All of these things visually communicate to someone in some form or another.