Pictograms & Semiotics

 Olympic Games

• Communicate to a global audience without written language, Olympic Games created the struggle of trying to direct and guide an international audience.
• Olympic pictograms initially created in 1964 by Tokyo who realised people coming to the event would mostly not be speaking Japanese. 
• Wayfinding system using directly pictograms - tell stories with icons.
• Lillehammer Winter Games pictograms - based on Nordic ancient history of cave paintings.

Semiotics

• 'The theory of signs'
• Signs can be a range of things such as gestures, facial expressions, marketing, music, films, food, clothes, primitive symbols etc. For instance, apple can just mean an apple, or it can mean healthy. A stop sign means stop, but it can also mean danger. 

• Immanuel Kant - German Philosopher who dealt with teleology and aesthetics.
• Ferdinand de Sassure- Swiss linguist, developed the theory of sign, signifier and signified.
• Roland Barthes- French Literacy theorist- "Mythologies' - semiotics to demystify the ideas of class structure and values that constrained people. 

• Adam & Eve -  apple can be seen as the signifier, signifying temptation in this case. Signifier can have completely different meanings based on a large variety of contexts, apple can mean healthy and also technology - brand. 

• Braille - using dots to communicate.

• Road Signs - 'iconic' signs resemble the thing they represent - bike symbol. 'Symbolic' signs do not resemble what they stand for- ford sign. 

Audience & Understanding - 

• is the design familiar or unfamiliar with the audience - age differences cause different perceptions.
• Pre learned systems can be reused - traffic lights etc, able to refer to it each time we see new, sometimes unfamiliar signs.

Images

• Good for displaying 'concrete ideas' - good at explaining for people who aren't familiar with said thing.
• Not good at describing 'abstract ideas' - religion.
• Infographics

Words

• Good for conveying 'abstract ideas' - exist more in thought.
• Also communicate things that have already been learn't.

Colour Language

• Colour can be used as an alphabet.
• Signifies meaning.