FireSigns

FireSigns invites students of graphic design to explore the signs of their métier. Steven Skaggs convinces his readers with creativity and didactic talent that a semiotic approach is indispensable in this endeavor, and offers semioticians a gold mine of graphic signs, the careful analyses of which convey the insight that graphic design is indeed a semiotics laboratory.

Winfried Nöth, Professor, Postgraduate Program in Technologies of Design, São Paulo Catholic University; author of Handbook of Semiotics

This book blends ideas from semiotics, psychology, and graphic design into a truly remarkable model of how design evokes the interpretation of objects. Using visual semiotics as a basis, the book highlights the importance of visual cognition in the processing of meaning. It also shows brilliantly how we are all guided by patterns of form in coming to perceive objects as functional signs.

Marcel Danesi, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto; author of Brands and The Semiotics of Emoji

I perused with pleasure FireSigns by Steven Skaggs. It is a masterful, richly illustrated theory of graphic design that doubles as an excellent introduction to semiotics.

Paul Bouissac, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto; editor of Encyclopedia of Semiotics

At last we have a well-conceived, well-articulated excursion to harness the gamut of relational factors involved in our search for making meaning in graphic design. Particularly valuable for its down-to-earth style, FireSigns unravels and illuminates, with sensitivity, personality, and authority, the complex network that is graphic design. Students, theoreticians, and practitioners will appreciate the value of semiotic theory for design presented by this book.

Thomas Ockerse, Professor, Graphic Design Department, Rhode Island School of Design