By David Sless, Ruth Shrensky
Illustrations by Alex Tyers
Getting your message across? No
Ask anyone what communication is, and they’ll tell you it is all about getting your message across. Sorry to disappoint, but most communication doesn’t work like that. Even though ‘getting your message across’ seems the simplest, most obvious way to think about communication—and it’s been around for centuries—it’s not at all useful for information design.
Davis Sless
If you want to explore how people really deal with the information you design, you need to step back from the cliché of ‘getting your message across’. You need this book. It will help you peel away the clichés, it opens up new methods for thinking about what goes on between people and information, and as a bonus, it is easy to read.
A New Semiotics is an introductory guide to the field of semiotics.
Assuming no prior knowledge of semiotics, this accessible text takes a fresh look at semiotics and suggests that many of the forebears and many contemporary contributors to semiotics have misconstrued the nature of their work.
We start be asking ‘What is semiotics?’ This book consists, more or less, of our answer. We’ve designed it as a journey towards a new semiotics, scattering bits of an answer as we travel, like Hansel and Gretel lost in the woods. We hope you find a friendly gingerbread house at the end. It was a journey for us, too – we kept discovering things on the way.
David Sless and Ruth Shrensky
Published by Routledge, London, 2023