Abstract: As a new methodology, semiotics is gradually entering other disciplines. At the same time, valuable semiotic discussions are no longer limited to the initially established field of semiotics. For the subject of visual communication, it is a very meaningful topic to study the relationship between symbols and their referents, as well as the impact of the degree of abstraction of visual symbols themselves on information transmission and meaning expression. This can not only improve the efficiency and accuracy of information transmission, but also enrich the language of visual communication design and help meet the aesthetic requirements of modern people]
Keywords: visual symbols; degree of abstraction; meaning Expression
CLC classification number: 6206 Document identification code: A Article number: 1009-337012003105-0021-03
Semiotics originated from linguistics, but now it has penetrated into philosophy, Today's semiotics in many disciplines such as literature, natural sciences, and art has become "the study of marks, or the process of marking, or the function of marks." Valuable semiotic discussions are no longer limited to the initially recognized field of semiotics. It has a methodological significance. The research method of semiotics can also be applied to modern design. Visual communication design itself is a kind of symbolic expression, and designers use it to convey their own thinking process and conclusions to the audience. It can achieve the purpose of guidance or persuasion. It shines in modern design. The history of semiotics as a research methodology is not long, and it has not formed a system. Due to space limitations, this article cannot fully discuss the application system of semiotics in visual communication design. It only focuses on the relationship between visual symbols and their referential content. relationship between.
1. Symbols and their functions
The British writer Swift told such a fictional story in "Gulliver's Travels": Several professors in a country were motivated by Concerns for human health led to a plan to abolish the vocabulary. They believe that speaking an insulting word will cause more or less damage to the lungs. Therefore, to make up for it, when people talk about specific things, they bring physical objects with them so that they can express themselves with objects. The consequences of this plan can be imagined. When the two academics met on the street, they first took off the heavy backpacks from their almost-broken backs, took out the items in the bags and talked for more than an hour before putting away their respective parties. Tools, helping each other put the load back on their backs, and then parted ways to say goodbye. The story may sound absurd, but it cleverly and profoundly hints at the nature of language symbols.
Simply using something for something cannot be called a symbol. Only when something "represents" other things does it become a "symbol". According to the theory of semiotician Roland Barthes, a sign is composed of two parts: "signifier" and "signified". The signifier is a material intermediary, the signified is its psychological representation, and the signifier and the signified are combined. The process of integration is called signification, and its product is the sign. In fact, all human thinking activities and information exchanges depend on the existence of symbols. The human consciousness process is essentially a symbolization process, and thinking is nothing more than an operation of combination, transformation and regeneration of symbols. Symbols are the medium for human beings to understand things. As an information carrier, they are a tool for storing and transmitting information. They are also a material means for expressing thoughts and emotions.
In view of the special significance of symbols, the philosopher Popper once proposed the theory of "three worlds", believing that the "symbolic world" is the "third world" that is different from the "natural" physical objective world and the human spiritual world. "Three Worlds" refers specifically to "the world of the objective content of thought, especially the world of scientific thought, poetic thought, and artistic works." 21 Using Popper's theory, we can infer two relationships between a symbol and the thing it refers to: first, the symbol transcends the realm of "factual things", and what it replaces is the objective physical world ( That is, things that exist in the first world), the symbolic meaning at this time is more abstract than the thing it replaces. Even for a realistic painting, the author has gone through certain selection and organization to embody the essence of the scene being reproduced, so the degree of abstraction of the painting is still higher than the scene itself.
Second, symbols are specialized in reproducing the “abstract force pattern of vitality” of things,131 that is, they replace things such as human thinking and concepts from the second world. At this time, its degree of abstraction is lower than what it replaces. The symbol at this time should be able to give a specific shape to a certain type of thing or a certain type of "mode of force action", such as using a specific person to represent the entire concept of "humanity", or a piece of music recorded with staffs and notes. melody.
2. The abstract nature of visual symbols
Language symbols are only a part of the entire symbolic world. Another important part is visual symbols, that is, those that are perceived through human vision. symbol. Visual symbols have many special advantages in transmitting information. It relies on graphics to express intuitively, and its symbolic nature is unmatched by other types of symbols in terms of expression of human spirit and emotions. Compared with language symbols, visual symbols convey information more quickly and have broader connotations. Visual symbols also play a huge role in the process of human understanding of the world. Human beings' cognition of a thing is essentially his cognition of some of the most basic and prominent structural features of the thing. "Showing things by things" is not the most ideal and scientific way of conveying information. Therefore, human beings have been constantly establishing various visual symbols to help themselves in their cognitive activities about the world. These symbols are not mechanical copies of the original objects, but substitutes formed after active organization or construction and reorganization of thinking. They are the most direct expression of the essential characteristics and structure of things. They are one of the experiences of human beings in long-term cognitive activities. L, and generated under rich associations.
The content that a symbol refers to can be either more or less abstract than itself, depending on the nature of the content it refers to. The same is true for visual symbols. From another perspective, as a visual symbol, the degree of abstraction of graphics itself will also affect the transmission of information. If this symbol is quite realistic, on the one hand it gives flesh and blood to the structural skeleton of a certain concept and conveys the meaning in a realistic image, on the other hand it may also result in the opposite situation. For a painter or sculptor's work, the more closely it resembles the real thing, the more difficult it is for the author to use it to express a certain idea of ??his own. This is because the more specific the image of a graphic is, the more features it displays, and the harder it is for people to determine which feature is the most important. At this time, the essence of the symbol or the symbolic meaning it contains may be ignored by the viewer. Old-fashioned traffic signals in some Western countries use a realistic snake image to remind drivers to slow down. This method indeed attracts the driver's attention more than the four words "slow down". However, the image of the snake itself is not a "full-time" visual symbol used for traffic signals. People can see other characteristics from it (such as being slender and curved and causing fear, etc.), or people may think that it is a reminder to protect wildlife. Animal signs.
It can be seen from this that concrete visual symbols can allow viewers to quickly identify what a poster or a signboard is showing, but it is not easy to see a deeper level of abstraction. significance. In this case, it is quite necessary to abstract the image of visual symbols. It can help us accurately extract certain special properties. But it is not that the more abstract the image of visual symbols, the more important it is for the expression of meaning and the transmission of information. The more beneficial it is. If a visual symbol with a highly abstract appearance has little or no similarity between its image and the thing it marks, its symbolic effect will be quite limited, and it may even sometimes hinder the transmission of information. The most obvious example is the character "Broken", which means "a place of good luck" in Sanskrit. After Hitler used the reversed "Broken" as the Nazi emblem, the two were different due to their high visual similarity. The symbols are often confused.
When such a highly abstract symbol is used, since the symbol itself does not directly reflect the typical visual characteristics of the content expressed, the referential relationship between the signifier and the signified is often artificially prescribed. .
In this case, the environmental background in which it is located plays a very important role in conveying the information. The designer must add some explanatory connections or background information to make the viewer understand, otherwise it will cause serious consequences. Ambiguity. The author’s intention is a question worthy of in-depth discussion. The following will take logo design as an example to discuss this issue.
Trademark or logo design in modern visual communication design often uses a highly condensed graphic as a visual symbol, allowing viewers to identify a company, a brand, an organization or a certain company. a concept. As a symbol, trademarks and logos should solidify and express abstract concepts such as the company's business philosophy, product quality, and organizational structure.
3. Expression of the meaning of visual symbols
With the advent of the information age, human beings have gradually entered a high-speed, almost disorderly life state. Human beings urgently require that information can be transmitted in the simplest, fastest and most efficient way. In the field of visual communication design, visual symbols as information carriers are required to be able to convey the meaning they represent to the audience in an instant. As mentioned above, if a graphic as a visual symbol is too abstract or too specific, it will directly affect the efficiency of information transmission. Therefore, as a designer, how to grasp this "degree" and how to explore the greatest potential of visual symbols so that they can convey the design in the most intuitive, accurate and rapid way
Figure 1 is the trademark of a dairy company , taking the nature of its product - milk droplets as the basic element, the graphic is abstracted and becomes a visual symbol that replaces the actual product. The author reduces the object he wants to describe into a very simple and clear pattern. This direct way makes it easy for us to understand what the company's products are. But since it is just an abstract pattern of a droplet, we cannot learn more about the company through this symbol, such as product features, business philosophy, etc. If a visual symbol as a trademark or logo is only abstracted from an objective reality (product), it can only become a substitute for the real thing at best, and is not helpful for people to understand the content in the spiritual realm. Zhou Yiding is a symbol of unloving 2000 Wansai is a public welfare activity that helps people with disabilities. The author's task is to solidify the abstract concept of "love" and express it in the form of visual symbols, so that when the audience sees this logo, they will naturally think of " The author chose some graphics and concepts that we are already familiar with as a medium to express the concept of "love". The audience can easily see the abstract shape of a hand from the overall pattern. People familiar with sign language will quickly see that this gesture represents the word "love". As a symbol, it first conveys the metaphor of "care". Give it to me.
At the same time, after abstraction, what interests the viewer is not the hand itself, but the content of the gesture. The audience can also recognize the shape of the Chinese character for "heart" and see the image of a dove, thus recalling the already familiar meaning (. Finally, the strong and erect three fingers make us seem to see the perseverance and perseverance of the disabled The precious spirit of fighting against fate. What the author Bu wants to express are quite abstract concepts, but these concepts are conveyed to us through graphics. These graphics themselves are visual symbols, and they are combined to form a new vision. The symbol, that is, the logo itself, fully expresses the main spirit of this public welfare activity - care and self-improvement.
It can be seen that the content of visual symbols with profound metaphors often comes from. In the human spiritual world (Popper's so-called "second world"), and its image comes from the objective material world ("first world"), the purpose of visual symbols is to transform the abstract concepts generated from the designer's thinking activities , solidified through specific graphics, and then conveyed to the audience through visual language.
In order to make this kind of spiritual communication and information transmission faster and more effective, the selection of visual symbols and graphics must be based on the recognition of both the designer and the audience. Therefore, the designer must choose things that people are familiar with as the source of visual symbols. Simplifying the degree of abstraction and expression of meaning of visual symbols into graphics with an appropriate degree of abstraction, as a carrier of concepts, building a bridge in people's spiritual communication. In this way, it simultaneously embodies what Rudolf Arnheim calls the "formal complexity" required to express abstract concepts and the visual perception theory that realistic images move closer to "pure form."
Visual communication design is a means of using visual language to convey information and communicate the spiritual world of people in a material way. With the advancement of science and technology, the development of the times, and the continuous improvement of living standards, people's aesthetic concepts are also changing accordingly, so the tasks left to designers are becoming more and more difficult. The enrichment of visual language relies on the discovery of more visual symbols, and all kinds of visual symbols are hidden in the vast natural world and the human spiritual world, waiting for us to explore. Although this kind of searching is a long and endless process, it is a powerful driving force for the continuous development and progress of design.
References:
[1] Introduction to Li Youzheng’s Theoretical Semiotics [M]. Beijing: Social Sciences Literature Press, 1999, page 2.
[2]Li Bocong. The symbolic world in the high-tech era [[M" Tianjin: Tianjin Science and Technology Press, 2001, page 6.
[3]"American] Rudolf Arnhai M. Translated by Teng Shouyao, Visual Thinking - Psychology of Aesthetic Intuition [[M]. Chongqing: Sichuan People's Publishing House, 1998, page 178
[4] Yin Dingbang. Graphics and Meaning! M]. Changsha: Hunan Science and Technology Press, 2001.
[s] Wang Shouzhi’s History of World Graphic Design{M]. Beijing: China Youth Publishing House, 1