Issues > Spring 2011 > FEATURE > Can You See The Signs?

Can You See The Signs?

WORDS BY JAMES GORDON BENNETT, JR.

There are signs all around us. Most of them communicate important messages using typography, while others simply posses symbolic meaning that we may or may not associate with. The word “semiotics” may seem foreign to you now, but once you understand its importance to our everyday lives, you may look at the world of design with a keener eye.

Just the other day, while sitting in traffic, I found myself staring at what may have been the pinnacle of typographical design.
It was beautiful in its simplicity and it was a masterpiece.

The only things missing were little chubby cherubs floating around it with little chubby wings and trumpets. It definitely needed trumpets to herald its arrival.

As I sat mesmerized by the logo on the back of the truck, I suddenly heard the trumpets, but it turned out to be impatient drivers honking at me. The light had turned green. The man gesturing angrily in my rearview mirror was chubby, but he was no cherub- or at least, it had never occurred to me that cherubs might use that sort of language.

The bit of design that had hypnotized me was none other than the Federal Express logo. I smiled to myself knowing that I had witnessed near perfection. I wanted to turn to the angry little man in the car behind me and explain to him what he had missed during all the honking and yelling, but I knew he wouldn’t understand.

You see, so much of what is communicated by text isn’t in the actual words, but by type. This can be by the font used, the placement of the words, or even the spaces between the characters, as in the Federal Express logo.

If you do not know what I am talking about, take a look at the logo. Each character is tightly held to the next by kerning. It is that kerning that makes the magic happen. The logo has been shortened to just an abbreviation of the company name: FedEx and right there between the “E” and the “x”, the negative space forms an arrow. And that arrow communicates a message to us. It says motion. It says, “We move stuff for a price.”

And the cherubs smiled upon the arrow and saw that the arrow was good.

Well that’s it. We could end this article right here and all go home. We have identified and defined what may be one of the greatest typographical experiences produced by man. Although that might seem a clever way to finish an article on the semiotics of typography, the truth is that we have not even scratched the surface of how or why we are able to receive what I like to call extra-textual-messaging through type and fonts. So let’s begin again.

Have you ever noticed the text on one sign may seem warm and friendly while another can seem cold, even harsh, regardless of the words used? In many cases, this is because of the font choices –something that few people even notice. Take for example, the typical “Keep off the Grass” sign. If it was printed, using an elegant script font –
the kind you might see on a wedding invitation, you probably would not take it too seriously or you might even assume it was a joke. However, if the same sign were printed in a chaotic scrawl and looked as if it were handwritten by one of Kevin Spacey’s creepier movie characters, you would probably think twice before placing a single Nike on anything remotely green or plant-like.

In order to understand how this works – to grasp why a font used on one shampoo bottle says, “this will make your hair look bouncy”, and another says “only rich people can afford this product” we have to go back a few years. Actually, we have to go back almost a full century.

1916 was a good year. That is not to say that everything happening in 1916 was good, but as far as years go, there were a lot of things in 1916 that brought about some big changes – especially when it comes to understanding how we receive and interpret messages.

In 1916, World War I dominated the news, but there were some other things going on that were missed by the headlines – things that have had dramatic impact on art, design, and our everyday lives. For one, Monet began painting his Water Lilies series. In that same year, the Dadaist art movement was founded and, not the least in significance, the light switch was invented (do not underestimate the importance of the light switch to designers or how it contributes to a good night’s sleep). 1916 was also the year two students published lecture notes from their recently passed Linguistics professor. Those notes changed the world. Not overnight, but change it they did.

Ferdinand de Saussure didn’t set out to invent Semiotics, or discover Semiotics, or whatever you would like to call it. What he set out to do was teach an entry level course on Linguistics. As the legend goes, Ferdinand was one of those genius types that had never taught a lower level class in his life. When he was asked to teach the class, he tried to figure out a way to explain everything that was in his head. What came out of his mouth was so radical that it even changed philosophy for the next century. His students wrote it all down and then published it in a book after Ferdinand died.

Before we jump into the deep end of Ferdinand’s work, let’s first get an idea of what Semiotics is. Semiotics is a theory concerned with signs and how we interpret meaning from them.

Although that may be a little better it is still not exactly clear because in this case, the word signs isn’t limited to road signs and billboards, but it can mean spoken words, images, etc. – in short, anything that we humans might interpret as having meaning. A really weird example could be a column of smoke rising in the distance. That “sign” might be interpreted as meaning there is a large fire burning somewhere or, if you live in my neighborhood, it probably means the guy two doors down has had yet another home improvement project go terribly wrong. (I don’t understand that guy. He could be working on a bucket of water and suddenly something bursts into flames).

For the designer, Semiotics is the power of knowledge. Many designers just work from intuition, or merely mimic what they see other designers do. However, with an understanding of Semiotics coupled with good intuition, a designer can have dramatic impact on their audience because they understand what they are communicating on several levels.

Semiotics is a general philosophical theory of signs and symbols that deals especially with their function in both artificially constructed and natural languages and comprises syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics.”

~MERRIAM-WEBSTER DICTIONARY

In the dictionary definition, Semiotics is defined as a theory of signs. Some examples of different ways a person could create signs for a dog would be: to write, or say the word dog, to draw a picture of a dog, to make a barking noise (woof! woof!) or to crawl around on all fours and act like a dog (like in a game of charades).

Any of these could communicate the concept of dog to someone else. Technically, a person could replicate the smell of a dog, which would also be a sign, but let’s stay away from less savory examples.

Obviously, when it comes to typography we are strictly dealing with the written word (well, unless someone has cleverly used the letters to also make an outline of a dog), but before we get into the serious details of typographical semiotics we need to understand a few more things about how we interpret signs.

According to Saussure, any sign actually has two parts that are interrelated. The first is the Signifier, which is the form a sign takes. In our example of a dog, this could be any from the list above: the written word dog, the spoken word dog, etc.

The second part of the sign is the Signified, which is the meaning the sign takes on in the viewer or hearer’s mind. This does not mean the signified is the ultimate idea of the sign (in our case, a dog), but it is what the person experiencing the sign thinks about it -in other words, the mental process the sign promotes in the individual. Using the same example, if I say the word dog, one person might think of a cute fuzzy puppy, while another person might think of those little dogs that are so high-strung they are apt to shake themselves to death out of fear over something like a ham sandwich.

Saussure created a diagram to help explain this although the diagram is usually more confusing than a straight explanation. To remedy this, contemporary semioticians often work with a diagram closer to the one pictured to the right.

In this diagram you can see that the signified (the mental concept) and the signifier (the sound or image) work together to build a sign. Also shown in this diagram are two arrows that represent the interplay between the two parts of the sign and that one continually refers to the other in an endless loop.

How this works in typography may seem to be a clear-cut case of association. For example, if a word is printed in a typeface like Blackoak, for most people it calls to mind wanted posters from the Old West. The interesting thing is this is not because that font was actually used in the Western territories of the U.S. in the 1800s, but because it looks similar to what we have come to expect wanted posters for outlaws to look like. Blackoak was actually developed in the 1990s and oddly enough, the familiar style of typefaces we so often associate with the cowboys and stagecoach robberies had nothing to do with the untamed west at all, but were simply popular during the period.

Actually, the association of these typefaces with the Old West is really a recent development. Back in the 1800s, those slab serif fonts had a completely different association that had nothing to do with the bandits or saloons. In fact, the original association with those fonts during the 1800s came from a weird fixation people had with ancient Egypt. For some strange reason known only to the inhabitants of that era, those heavy slab serifs, were somehow connected to ancient Egypt. Maybe it was the idea that the pyramids were made from big heavy slabs of rock … or maybe it was just clever marketing to feed the new Egyptian craze that was sweeping Europe.

With this example in mind, it is easy to see that the relationship between the signified and the signifier is constantly evolving –across geographic location and across cultural eras.

What we have not covered yet, concerning the semiotics of typography is an even more important relationship, one that is very slippery. Saussure called it the paradigm.

The paradigm is a focus on the relationship of all the signs in a single system. In the case of clothing, it is all the possible combinations of things a person could wear and the statements the choice of garment makes (e.g. wearing a ninja costume versus wearing a sport jacket on a blind date). In typography, it is the choice of one font over another.

Even more interesting to designers is that the font not used also makes a statement. For Saussure this was a big deal and it will require a little explanation.

If we think back on the two imaginary “Keep Off the Grass” signs, in both
cases, the fonts used were not what would be typically expected (recall that one was an elegant script and the other a psychotic scrawl). By shifting the font paradigm from what would be expected, each sign sends additional information and makes very different statements. When it comes to typography, a designer can say as much with the font not used as the one that is used. Once you have grasped this concept, it is easy to think of many cases where this would work –police cars with protect and serve written in Jokerman, letters from the IRS that use mixed-up fonts like a kidnapper’s ransom note, or even offensive graffiti written in perfect Copperplate Gothic.

As you can imagine there are libraries full of books on this stuff, but there is also a good deal of useful information found on the Internet.

Here are a few links that will kick start your Internet search:

aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B

carbon.ucdenver.edu/~mryder/itc/semiotics.html#primers

jgbennett.com/articles/bacon1.htm

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_semiotics

spot.colorado.edu/~moriarts/vissemiotics.html

Keep in mind that most of what you can read about semiotics has been written by stuffy philosopher types –old guys that look more like Gandalf from Lord of the Rings than cutting edge designers, but that doesn’t make it any less useful. For the informed designer, semiotics can unlock the secrets of communication. My suggestion is to dig in as much as possible, after all, eventually FedEx will want a new logo and you will want to be ready.

James Gordon Bennett, Jr.
is the author of Design Fundamentals for New Media and Exploring Web Technologies for Designers. He has also written various articles on semiotics, communication theory, interactive media and several other topics. In addition to his written work, he is also an artist and designer that specializes in the areas of interactive media and semiotics. He currently holds the Dean of Instructional Technology position at the International Academy of Design and Technology- Online.