What’s in a name?

It has been suggested that graphic designers might be regarded as semantic engineers. This requires an explanation of the semantic but not, I hope, of the engineer.

Semantics is the study of meaning in language. One of the subjects founders, Ferdinand de Saussure, famously said:
‘”The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.”‘
by which he means the relationship between the artefact carrying the meaning (a word, a symbol, a kiss) and meaning itself is random, based on individual understanding and needing no logic. This means That only because in this social circumstance we know the two are linked. Fair enough? All clear and understood?

This all becomes more than a little tricky when we’re dealing with meaning in the real world. Why? Because the world and the ways we communicate the world are also symbols: symbols which are arbitrary and formed by local social context. And so on all the way down. The whole thing is fractal, with levels of granularity that are consistent (and never conclusive) as deep as we look.

But knowing this we all still fall pray to the error of letting our own internal interpretation override those people who made an artefact in the first place. Humans make meaning whenever they open their eyes and ears, letting the world in. We’re hard-wired meaning makers. We stare at the stars and tell tales of gods and monsters; we gaze at the clouds making shapes in the sky. More dangerously we encounter things made for reasons of communication by others and read our own messages onto them.

In this photo we have the logo for the  Seaview Yacht Club. An institution founded in the Victorian Era. But what does the logo say to us?

Seaview Yacht Club logo

Perhaps it’s just me, but I started looking for any other visual clues that the Nazi party was alive and well on the Isle of White. Now I’m quite sure that there is no connection between the yacht club and the Nazi party, but the symbolism is remarkable. The four ‘S’ forming a typographic swastika, the colours – red, white and black; semantically it’s all quite indicative of unpleasant associations. Did the designer make a mistake, was the designer intending to encode a secret message? In all likelihood not. But the associations are there.

So what can we learn from this? Well perhaps that the term Semantic Engineer is a bit optimistic. ‘Engineering’ is a somewhat precise term for the kind user led work we do except in one important way. The engineer always has an aim that must be addressed, and aim which if not achieved allows us to qualify their work as failing. So while we can be said to be intentionally reordering pre-existing semantic components to communicate, as an engineer works with other artefacts to compose a new meta artefact, the medium we work in is so plastic as to make the precision implicit in the term engineer an ambition rather than a statement of fact. We are engineers, not artists, in aim if not in objective. In this we should be happy to adopt the name.