Semiotics

PurplePrice Mag · October 26, 2026 · 3 min read

Semiotics is the discipline that studies signs, that is, everything that conveys meaning: words, but also images, gestures, colours, clothes and objects. Applied to design, it starts from a simple idea: an object does not only do something, it always says something. A handle "suggests" how to grip it, a luxury chair speaks about its owner, a streamlined shape conveys speed even when the object is standing still on a table.

Origins: Saussure and Peirce

Modern semiotics was born at the beginning of the twentieth century from two scholars working separately: the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who called it "semiology" and distinguished in the sign a signifier (the form) and a signified (the concept), and the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. For decades it remained a subject for linguists; from the 1950s it began to be applied to mass culture, advertising and objects.

Objects as signs

In 1957 the Frenchman Roland Barthes published Mythologies, short essays on wine, detergents, wrestling and plastic. The most famous is devoted to the new Citroën DS, presented in 1955, which Barthes compared to a Gothic cathedral: a "magical" object fallen from the sky, worshipped by the crowd before it was even driven. In 1968 Umberto Eco published La struttura assente ("The Absent Structure"), which devotes much space to visual signs, advertising and architecture: for Eco, a building or an object also communicates its function and its social value. The same year Jean Baudrillard published The System of Objects, on how household objects become status symbols in consumer society.

Semiotics enters design schools

The first design school to study semiotics was the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm (1953–1968), heir to the Bauhaus, where teachers such as Tomás Maldonado introduced it into the curriculum to make design more rigorous and scientific. Ulm design, from Braun products to the graphics of Otl Aicher, is clear and legible precisely because every form had to communicate its function without ambiguity. In the 1980s Klaus Krippendorff and Reinhart Butter proposed "product semantics": the study of how people attribute meanings to objects and of how to design with this in mind, developed also at the Cranbrook Academy of Art.

From meaning to communication

Semiotics profoundly changed the way design is thought about. If for Functionalism form should simply follow function, semiotics showed that every form also has a cultural meaning, and that there is no such thing as a "neutral" object. This idea paved the way for Postmodernism and Memphis, which consciously used quotations, symbols and decoration to make objects "speak". Today the same tools are used to design logos, digital interfaces and icons, where a sign must be understood by everyone in a fraction of a second.