Hall, Sean. This Means This, This Means That: A User’s Guide to Semiotics, Laurence King Publishing, 2012. pgs 21-67
Question & Prompt
- How has language shaped design historically?
- Can visual design accomplish things that language cannot? Why?
- How are signs, signifiers, and the signified employed in visual communication? Provide examples from contemporary or historical advertising.
- How are non-literal devices used to convey meaning in advertising? Provide examples from contemporary or historical advertising.
Reading Response
Language can change how we see the world. It has influenced the world itself. For Designers, languages have different meanings. Whether it be signs or the language itself. Same goes with design. Depending on the design, it can influence the world in many ways. Using concepts like signifiers and the signified, we can see the world in a different way. For example, dogs. We can talk about a dog and never guess what kind of dog I’m talking about. We can take a word and look at one way or another.
Visual design can accomplish many things a language can’t. Other than conveying a message to the consumers, it can also convey different messages to the consumer or anyone else. For example, we can look at the color red as blood or dangerous while in some other situations, you can look at it as love or a lucky color in China. With visual design, we can express our feeling visually. You can also use emoji to show many emotions while language can only portray how you’re feeling right now. You can use emoji to tell many things to the viewer, whether it’s how you feel or using the emoji indicate a certain item or person. Like how we describe the meaning of red, we can also look at emoji as something in reaction to the meaning of red or describe your emotion.
One way signs, signifiers, and the signified are employed can be through nature. For example, a rose. We can be look at a rose as a specific type of flowers only if we look at them. There are situation where the the meaning of a “rose” will change. For example, if you decided to give your love ones a batch of roses, it means that you loved them. If you go to this website, there’s something surprising about the roses as there are different variety colors of them and also different meanings as well. We can look at the rose as a symbol. It can mean many different things beside a simple flower. We can look at it as a normal object or we can also look at it as an emotional object.
https://www.ftd.com/blog/share/rose-meaning-and-symbolism
There are many non-literal devices that can convey meaning in advertising. Let’s take the car’s oil and compare to CocaCola. This is a metaphor to show the car’s oil price and the price of CocaCola. You can’t drink car’s oil but you sure can drink CocaCola. What it’s trying to say here is your car oil is more expensive than the CocaCola or the drinks that you drink. Fuel’s nowadays are very expensive compared to before. According to the image, the car’s oil is 3 cent expensive ($1.55 for 1.25L) than the CocaCola back in 2005. Imagine how much expensive would it be now compare to back then. This simple ad representation shows car oil prices are more important than your drinks and that prices may be higher when it’s something important to society. Prices tend to rise because the resources are limited and can run out if sold cheaply. Since car oil’s very limited in this world, they are sold more expensive than the CocaCola we drink that isn’t so valuable.
Hypothesis Annotation
- Arbitrary
https://hypothes.is/a/2jmVbhMtEey4ZFu-WED72Q
- Descartes
https://hypothes.is/a/uNBpghMvEeyVphtL3iS-jQ
- Rewording
Recent Comments