Comics and Semiotics
I used to love reading comics and manga growing up. My stepdad was a huge Marvel and DC fan as a kid and kept his vast collection neatly stored in the basement. He introduced me to graphic novels and read to me every night until I was old enough to pick up the pages myself. Needless to say, I’ve read a fair share of comic books throughout my life. Now, with my background in mind, I was elated to see that one of our readings included a comic book about, well, comics! What can comics tell me about media theory?
Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics opens up with Scott breaking the 4th wall and talking to the reader about comics are to him. Others view comics as cheap, poorly-drawn caricatures with limited literacy. Their view on them is narrow, but Scott argues that ‘comics’ is the word for the medium itself, not an object. Like McLuhan’s theories on media as a medium, Scott refers to the medium — comics, as a vessel that can hold ideas and images. This to me was an interesting connection to Heidegger and his theories on being. So far we’ve touched on how Heidegger’s and McLuhan’s philosophies led to development in design, such as affordances, and predictions of technology, like the global village or world wide web. At this point however I had not thought about applying these concepts to other mediums. Scott also does an amazing job of explaining these philosophical concepts in a simple manner by using elements of comics, illustration, storytelling, and language, to communicate his ideas. As a form of art and entertainment, I thoroughly enjoyed learning about the sequential art and its often overlooked complexity.
In class, we discussed the same elements found in comic books and their relationship to design. In comics, artists use interpretations of real life objects — illustrations, to communicate a story. In design, we use icons. Why then do we use real objects as metaphors for icons? To put it simply, icons are easy to understand. Iconography is mostly universal, and it communicates a message without the need for words. This is extremely important for making places and objects accessible to people even when they don’t speak the language. From bathroom stalls to profile tabs on an app, I believe that icons have done a better job at communicating ideas than any language could ever do. Ferdinand Saussure explains that icons are signs, and signs are signifiers of a real thing. For example, both the icon of a man and a picture of my stepdad are signs: they are not my stepdad but representations or signifiers of my stepdad.
Charles Sanders Pierce goes a step further with his triadic model. For him, there’s a representamen, and object, and an interpretant in signs. He also mentions the significance of one’s social and cultural upbringing. I found this especially interesting, since I have struggled expressing myself since I moved to the US. My first language is Spanish, but I brought up bilingual. It wasn’t until I moved to Savannah, GA in 2016 that I realized that translating an emotion or a saying was not as simple as reading it off of a literature book. Even when I was abroad in a Spanish-speaking country, I would find that certain phrases I would say or someone native to the country would say. We develop concepts and vocabulary based on our cultural and social upbringings, and even when there’s a translation, it doesn’t always have the same meaning.
Out of all the philosophers I learned about this week, Roland Barthes’s analysis on meaning were the most relevant to my design and art practices. He explains that signs have a connotative (social) and denotative (literal) meanings. These meanings are vast in art, and as an artist I hope to evoke both connotative and denotative feelings and thoughts. In design, color, font, imagery, etc. has the purpose to evoke meaning when we use or look at a product. Airbnb for example uses a warm reddish pink, round casual font, and colorful illustrations to seem approachable, friendly, and fun. They want you to feel at home. This would be the connotative meaning. To expand on this example, Stuart Hall’s ideas of codes is the meaning that signs give to people, however, a brand’s intended meaning is not always read the same. I can argue that Airbnb’s approachable, friendly, and fun design is its dominant code because it is the most common and intended perception of the brand. Someone else might feel rage from the color red and annoyance at the caricature on their screen. They might have an oppositional view of their codes. Or maybe there’s somone in the middle of these two, someone with a negotiated view. These meanings assigned to codes are extremely important, and as a designer, I have a responsibility to convey the intended message to as many users as possible.
