William Playfair was responsible for the invention of information design in the 18th century. Your next work is to play off the world of information design to create an informative work using, grid, icons and a table to create typographic hierarchy. You may base your 'narrative piece' on a book or a movie. There can be no less than ten icons associated with your piece.

Each piece must have a name and two letters associated with it like the Big Lebowski piece in the PDF. It must be no smaller than 17 x 14 inches.

The grid and imagery must relate to the narrative piece you are trying to create.

I. “Theory of Symbols and How They Relate to Ideas”
‘Semiotics, signage and organization of concept.'

 I. Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Peirce

Saussure was a linguist whose interest's lie in the way language developed. This was part of his lifelong study into the nature of symbols and universality. Universality being the common effects that certain images had on a broad cultural sampling of people.The meat and potatoes of his research that we will concern ourselves with here is his concept of the signifier, the "shape" of a word, its phonic component, 'i.e. the sequence of letters or phonemes e.g. /kæt/
and the signified , the ideational component, the concept or object that appears in our minds when we hear or read the signifier e.g. a small domesticated feline (The signified is not to be confused with the "referent". The former is a "mental concept", the latter the "actual object" in the world.'© 2011 Wiki

At the same time he was involved with his studies in Switzerland, back in the U.S. there was another person interested in the world of signs and their effects on human behavior. The work of American Philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. His study in semiotics paralleled Saussure’s. Peirce defined semiotic study in 76 different ways (which makes you wonder if he ever could decide what pants to put on in the morning?) We will use the following definiton that he devised in class. It reads as … “a sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its interpretant, that the later is thereby mediately determined by the former. (EP2,478).” Charles Peirce

Does any of this sound familiar? When you cut through the dense and sometimes opaque definitions, one can see that typography and the creation of symbols or logos are designed in such a way that meet Pierce's criteria as a semiotic sign.

Both Saussure and Peirce analyzed semiotics or semiology (depending on which of them you spoke with)into three parts: a sign, an object, and an interpretant. This same tri-partite relationship, if you can call it in Platonic terms, is how we use language and the symbols of language to determine meaning. Pierce independent of Saussure created :

The Representamen: the form which the sign takes (not necessarily material);
An Interpretant: not an interpreter but rather the sense made of the sign;
An Object: to which the sign refers.

 

The interpretant differs across cultures and language. What we will focus on in this class is Western Culture, because it is what we can most easily understand, but it is important if not imperative to note that Western culture could be argued as dominant at this moment in history but this is always subject to change.

The sign is not to be taken literally as a sign post, but rather a ‘representamen,’ representation or ground of a concrete object as
well as an abstraction or concept. We will develop this further as the class progresses.

Expanding on Saussure who was looking at signs in terms of linguistics instead of philosophy, and in relationship with our interest in Communication design, there are two parts to a sign.

1) The image, form or object that the sign represents being the ‘signifier.’
2) The ‘signified’ which is the concept it represents.

As further explanation, as this is a complex and hairy subject to jump into, here are a few things to remember:

Semiotics: The study of signs.
Langue and Parole: The system of language and utterances.
Signifier and Signified: The components of a sign.
Synchrony and Diachrony: Meaning of signs.
Syntagm and Paradigm: Relationships between signs.

All of these are directly related to how we communicate as artists, and it will help us understand how people are affected by the work we do by understanding what if anything we can glean from the research into semiotics and its relayionship to typography.

II. Roland Barthes: Rejecting the idea of tradition

Editor's note: This essay that I adapted to the ideas proposed by Barnes can be used as a guideline into the tradition of the artist, and why they always struggle to redefine an object in a unique way.

Rejecting the historicist approach to art where the practitioner copies the narrative of the master until they develop their own
“voice,” Barthes proposed that the structure of an original model, idea, concept (or creation) of the master must be reconfigured. The artist
must abandon the traditional representation and construct by substituting original parts with wholly new parts creating a freely “new” organism. Simply said there should be no copies or clones, but rather wholly new are at the very least derivative works that conceptually may tell the same story but reinvent the visual idea.
To illustrate this notion of structure, Barthes used the story of Jason and the Argonauts. Jason ordered by the Gods to complete
a long journey in one ship that HAD to be the same ship upon completion of the quest in order to succeed, replaced it in
piecemeal fashion as it deteriorated due to the rigors of the journey until at long last all that remained of the original ship was the
name “Argo.”

This is a metaphor for the conceptual theory of semiotic construction of symbols and is loosely based on de Saussures
definition of language, but in essence what is happening is that the structure in essentially boatlike…but it is not the same boat. Simply, but possibly confusingly stated here, is that there is a requirement that there be a difference of
signs within a system or paradigm which nevertheless requires the structure to be noticeably similar (…Such as a FONT family.)

This is not an arbitrary rule but a rule based on observation of languages from a variety of cultures.
Example: The alphabet consists of a number of dissimilar characters or components who work together within a system.
Each symbol (or sign) within the system work together to create a new structure which when reconstituted to make symbolic conceptual representations (aka words) has the potential to make an entirely new contextual representation based on each sign within the system. (whew!…that’s a mouthful.)

For instance the word: C/A/R/T creates this: or this …two similar representations based on historical context.