Alan young presentation

The Value of a ‘Semiotic Sensibility’ in Graphicand Communication Design

Dr. Alan YoungAuckland University of [email protected]

a semiotic sensibility

Roland Barthes describes this image thus: ‘The signified is French imperial-ity, that is: the idea that France’s empire treats all its subjects equally. That France has dominat-ed the world and the World loves France for doing it.’

When Barthes ‘read’ the image from Paris Match, he was no longer a consumer, but a semiotician.

That is, he had changed the context to one of racial politics.


The power of semiotics is that it can be applied to any design artifact, from a film, to an iPod . . .


. . . to a building.

Semiotics allows us to use the same language across a range of vastly different design arti-facts, to understand how they ‘speak’ to us, through connation. They ‘hail’ us, as viewers, audi-ences and consumers, through signifiers and using a variety of myths. Through the continuous use of certain specific myths, objects can thus critique or main-tain and support hegemonic ideological beliefs and values—what we might term ‘ideology’.


The argument presented here is that semiotics is such a powerful way of understanding design ar-tifacts, that rather than relegating it to the ‘theory’ part of design courses, it should form a funda-mental basis for all design under-standing.

One common exercise for teas-ing out the semiotic meaning of products is the ‘Label Swap’ project, in which the key signi-fiers (excluding the actual words) of two different products are swapped. Thus, the colours, lay-out, typefaces, illustrative styles, etc. are swapped, and students are then required to describe the effect of this swap on how the product now ‘hails’ a target market.


In many cases, the product ‘speaks’ in such an alien way of the product, that it makes no sense in our current ways of un-derstanding markets.

At other times, the product simply shifts from being directed at one class, or gender, to being directed at a completely differ-ent one. Either way, the power of signification and the sense of the ‘voice’ of a product is made dramatically explicit through the exercise.

Importantly, semiotics can also be explored through exercises directed at typography, at the semiotic meanings of a film, or of an advertisement, to provide a ‘semiotic sensibility’—an aware-ness of how design infuses prod-ucts with meaning, with a ‘voice’.


Art therapists are able to analyse a specific image to understand the meanings which underlie it, by using a sensibility gained from performing similar analyses over many years, along with reading how others have also analysed images. They cannot be taught on an image by image basis, as it is impossible to cover every possible image a client might produce.

Similarly, a semiotic sensibility can only come from exposure to semiotic analyses of a wide vari-ety of artifacts, over an extended period of time.

This semiotic sensibility becomes part of a student’s world view, and their tacit knowledge; and as such impacts on the way they create, as well as analyse work.


As well as providing a language wih which to describe all design artifacts, semiotics also provides a political context from which to approach design work.

Currently, almost all university courses call for a global aware-ness and a sense of social responsibility as part of their graduate attributes. As students learn the various contexts from which to view the designs they analyse—Marxist, feminist, racial politics, and the like—they are led to question the contexts and effects of the designs they also produce.


still frame from Housing Commission project

Semiotics taught through real life projects serves to strengthen students’ political awareness, and provides alternative ways of envisaging design futures. Projects involving collaboration across disciplines, universities and even nations open up possibilities for deeper awareness of the politicalpotential of design work.

Some of the real life projects on which students have been able to work are:

Explosives Reserve: a project working with a local community to save important land from developers.

Still Lives: a project which tells the stories of people living on a housing commission estate in Melbournes inner city.


Equal Service was a project to help Melbourne’s homeless population—enough to fill the Melbourne Cricket Ground every night—such that service provid-ers would stop seeing them as a faceless group, but as individuals with individual stories of heart-break and tragedy, but also of inspirational determinination and resolve.

This project was a major contribu-tor to the changing of the laws which dealt with service provision to homeless people in Australia.


Same Difference was a project to fight discrimination against gay and lesbian members of our so-ciety. Students produced posters and t-shirt designs, an exhibition of which was launched at the Jus-tice Museum in Melbourne, and which then toured Australia.

Semiotics is more than just a useful element in the designer’s toolkit. When used over an ex-tended period, it can form a semiotic sensibility—a founda-tional way of comprehending the world. As such it impacts not only how designers analyse, but how they work creatively.




thank you