Of Semiotic Resources and Typographies

Semiotic Resources
This week's reading helped me to finally come to an understanding of what ‘affordance’ or ‘semiotic potential’ mean. It leads me to conclude that anything at all: words, objects, images and gestures, as soon as it is deemed as a semiotic resource, can be interpreted or in this case afford different kinds of interpretations or meanings and thus the semiotic potential can be described. However, one has to note that as much as an artefact’s semiotic potential can be described, it is still fixed to the context in which it is situated. For example, in the following:

Without the context, this image can be interpreted as a juggler, a person balancing many responsibilities which are equally important, a person who is about to cover protect his head from falling balls and etc...

The interpretations I have listed above are possible description of the image’s potential. My point here is that this image’s affordance is limitless and for semioticians to be able to describe all of its potential is impossible. To realise the true meaning of the image, it has to be tied to where and how this image is used in other words, the image has to be contextualised.

The inventory of semiotic potential is non-exhaustive as chances are; the potential is defined for a specific purpose in which affordance of the resource in other domains could be neglected.

In my humble opinion, the work of semioticians in building and gathering semiotic inventories is formidable and tedious. The examples cited in the readings singlehandedly emphasises the never ending affordances of semiotic resources. The notion of “framing”, categorised by its use in magazine advertisements and school and office buildings, suggest how domains dictates which affordances is highlighted or obscured.

Typographies

With reference to the image below, it is clear that typography is no longer representative of a print text that delivers information directly from the writer. Instead, it communicates one’s sense of identity and personality to a certain extent.

This advert, designed by Career Junction (Middle East), targets people to put their skills to better use. Skills here refer to possibly the ability of a designer to innovate the conventional print in grocery list to a “typographical image”. Thus, looking at it, one may observe how conventional typefaces communicates or screams out the respective denoting images that it represents. It is really interesting to note that typographies today are pretty much a form of semiotic resource with its own pool of affordances. I bet there are many conventional things out there that we may have taken for granted awaiting their turn to be innovated.