Otto Neurath and Semiotics

I wanted to come back to an earlier post I made about symbols, icons and how we each interpret them differently.

I’m a big fan of the AIGA website, my only gripe is that because I don’t live in the US I can’t join. Anyway, their site is a great repository of articles about design. It’s not quite the same as a blog since blogs often intentionally choose topics that will raise their SEO.

I came across this article about Otto Neurath and Bliss symbolics.

Otto Neurath believed that words were defunct in the world that though their inherent use it incited segregation and hatred. Which in some cases is true words and meanings can be used in order to isolate groups of people. If you can’t speak the lingo then you can’t roll with us.

Neurath grew up during post war times a strange and having lived through where propaganda and in particular words were used as part of the battle. There are of course some problems with the work of Otto Neurath and that is stereotyping.

Much of his work relies on a series of commonly understood symbols. In creating symbols they have their meaning compressed down to bare minimums. So if a symbol of a man wearing a cowboy hat represents an american in symbolics it serves a purpose as a graphic, but at the same time could be construed as culturally insensitive.

Charles Bliss the creator of Bliss symbolics constructed an entire language of symbols moving back to hieroglyphics. The amount of obvious time and attention put into Bliss symbolics makes you feel instantly sympathetic with Charles Bliss. Sadly he died without seeing his innovation being adopted by the world.

I might seem somewhat obsessed by icons, but why is any designer obsessed by icons?

I think its because icons and logos are some of the most visually complex things you can design. They have to express so much meaning in a condensed form. Not only that sometimes they have to express beyond simple meanings to abstract concepts such as emotions – fun, freedom, love, hate.

Icons can be beautiful in their simplicity but I think talking of beauty can be reserved for another post entirely.

I’m getting more interested in semiotics. Semiotics is the study of signification not just visually but also how we interpret use of an object. There are three streams of Semiotics – Semantics, Syntactics and Pragmatics.

Related posts:

How we interpret colours When I was doing my blog rounds the other day...

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