Business Cards

Business cards have arrived 🙂

Rebranding Brief: Research

Our new brief requires working together as a group to gather research and information about Huddersfield centre and local independent businesses. In order to complete this and work effectively, I have created a new blog so we can document our work and share research. After looking into poor and good branding, promotional techniques and success of businesses, we will decide on a company which would have great benefit from a rebrand. We will then work individually to come up with a new range of promotional material and logo design which I will post on this blog. However, you can find all the collaborated research by clicking the link here.

Semiotics and Theory

Todays lecture with Dr Anna Powell we learnt the basics of semiotics and colour in theory. Semiotics is important in the graphic design industry, it is having the ability and confidence to talk about and explain why things are like they are, such as explaining the communication principles of your work to a client, or saying why a visuals means something e.g sign or symbol. It is also having the ability to question why things are how they are and to think aboutand try things you hadn’t thought about before. Semiotics explore the study of signs. They work to give meaning and decode visuals whether it be symbols, non-linguistic, sound or text. They can give people different interpretations or have various meanings by playing on peoples memories, experience or emotions.

Designers are all part of a culture which share ideas and understands of the same meaning. Good designers are highly sophisticated code readers, we subconciously decode visuals to understand them and navigate our surroundings. The diagram below basically shows the components and explains how we ‘make meaning’ with semiotics.

People understand semiotics subconciously from an early age. It helps to communicate messages much easier. For example, the figures used on toilet doors to indicate which gender is allowed is a international icon understood by everyone. A well known example of using semiotics to communicate is Paul Rands ‘Eye Bee M’. It was said that the logo did not just create a corporate iD, but created ‘basic design philosophy, permeated corporate conciousness and public awareness’.

Colour & Semiotics

Colour can play a large part in semiotics. They can implying another meaning, express certain codes and give a specific message or meaning. An obvious example of using colour to communicate is traffic lights. World wide they are known to be red to stop and green to go. These again are subconciously decoded from childhood and help people to understand and navigate on Earth. Colour in semiotics can also be culturally conditioned. This means they can have various understandings for different cultures. For example, in the UK black relates to death, where in Syria the colour for death is blue. This must be considered when communicating through visuals. Branding corporates relies havily on colour, for example: Supermarkets logo’s (think of Tesco, Asda, Sainsburys..), especially when implying they have cheaper prices, e.g promotional offers are yellow or clearance items are red. Another example is McDonalds, as yellow and red is supposed to generate the feelings of important and hungry, making the restraunt seem more necessary and desirable. Below is a colour guide for logo’s to show the basic idea’s of what brands feel they want to be associated with.