Reading Response: Baldwin & Crow

Personal Response:
After having read snippets from Visible Signs by Crow and Visual Communication by Baldwin; some of the terms that we had went over in class briefly made more sense to me. I also will admit that during the second time of reading, I kept stopping and writing notes on just about every page. What really stuck out to me was how interesting the two readings were. As of recent, I realized that one aspect of design that sticks out to me is the open interpretation of designs as well as art in a whole. What a designer always has to deal with is making the best choices for a project that have the connotations, connections, signs, icons, symbols, indexes, order, overall presentation, color, and the list pretty much continues.

Design just like writing is critiqued on not only the pieces that the design is made of, but the whole composition; giving the designer the job of either creating a whole world, or adding to an already established world. The difficult part of both of those situations is being able to create a new world that various people can understand; but just as stated in the readings, everyone has their own interpretations based on what people have experienced and learned so far in their life. Which I think, makes design one of the most specific detail oriented professions, with the most ample opportunities to offend, mislead, educate, as well as change the way one thinks. In order to do this though, designers need to learn how to interpret communication on all of its levels.

What really stuck out to me in these readings was:

• Communication varies based on the viewing/interacting crowd
• Theory is expressed through the order of abstract principles + is never a permanent solution
• 3 areas to understand semiotics – the actual signs, group organization and the context found in
• Relation between signifier and the signified appears random
• i.e. the word bank, the sound of the word bank, and the visual of a bank– all do not look the same, but hold the same meaning
• “The word ‘dog’ does not bite, the word ‘gun’ cannot kill you and the word ‘pipe’ does not resemble the object used to smoke tobacco”
• Emotional response to words is never constant between people or the same person
• 3 categories of signs:
• Icon: looks like the sign
• Index: is closely associated with the sign, similar to a synonym
• Symbol: no logical connection, has to be learned
• 3 levels relate to signs: firstness=sense, secondness=fact, thirdness=mental
• Syntagm is the linear relationship of a set of signs, whether it is the letters that make up a word, the words that make up a sentence, the objects that make up a sculpture, or the squares that make up a quilt
• Paradigm is collection of items that have one thing in common, but are all items are different
• i.e. a box of used crayons – all crayons are made of wax and all started out the same shape, but there are different colors and eventually different sizes
• Designers must design while keeping in mind items that must stay constant due to cultural meanings such as color meaning in stoplights
• All items have two levels of meaning – denotation (what is intended) and connotation (what is understood)
• A sign is split by three requirements – the signifier, signified, and be understood
• Signifier: visual word form or sound of visual word of the object
• Signified: a representational meaning, referencing something other than the object itself
• Understood: the agreed and accepted cultural connotation