Meaning and Message: Introducing Semiotics - Monday 21st November

In this lecture we looked at semiotics and how all good designers are semioticians. It was about looking deeper into things and taking a step back to see why we understand things. The idea that signs mean different things to different people is something which we don't always realise. I found it particularly interesting that at least 75% of all inputs received by the brain are things which our visual sense accounts for. The main theory of Ferdinand de Saussure in which he states no ideas are in the mind before linguistic structure is interesting as the concept of every idea being triggered by something that we have seen is a fairly reasonable proposal and makes logical sense. We then looked into the different names for the categories of sign each of which have been come up with by different theorists to name different categories of signs. The main overview is the word being the signifier and the image being the signified.