The cross wears stories

Symbols don’t just represent concepts; they host stories.

Take the swastika. In one story, it was auspicious, spiritual, ancient, and sacred. In another, it was contempt, nationalism and genocide. The symbolic drift of the swastika has always impressed me. For all my fellow designers, it’s a reminder of the entropy of symbols.

Similar shape. Different stories. 

That’s the semiotic power of a symbol. They can host just about any story, no matter its complexity or abstract concept. It’s a reason why nations, religions, and ideologies are usually represented by symbols. But people need to believe in them for them to work. They’re arbitrary symbols we trust. So the success rate isn’t very high. In other words, it requires more understanding. The audience must learn the meaning. Symbolic images are less intuitive, and their meaning usually drifts or decays over time. 

What do you see when the image stays the same, but the story moves?

Iconic signs, on the other hand, are easy to recognize and decode. A street sign showing kids crossing is iconic. Iconic signs and images look like what they mean. A lot of businesses end up using iconic logos because they are polysemic. Basic enough to recognize, yet abstract enough to still have room to direct meaning.

A single sign or image can have multiple meanings.

It’s important to remember that signs hold meaning. They are not the story, so their meaning changes. Who gets to change them and when depends on the audience. In the art world, it's called stealing; in finance, it's called fraud; on the internet, it's called a meme. 

Memes are a wild hybrid when it comes to signs. Did you know that a meme can be iconic, indexical, and symbolic, all at once? They reformat the semiotic meaning of an image. So they have the abstraction of a symbol, the clarity of an icon, and the context of an indexical image. This layered meaning gives them scope to speak to niche audiences, but it also makes them volatile when viewed outside their cultural frame.

They’re signs in motion. 

So what does the girl’s cross mean? It depends. Whose meaning are we decoding... Like a tattoo worn for oneself. She’s anchoring her identity. But to the viewer, to those who noticed the cross, it might signify something entirely different. Faith. Rebellion. Irony. Seduction. Purity. Contradiction. The cross becomes a mirror, reflecting the stories we bring to it. When paired with a tight '90s mini dress, the sign becomes even more volatile.

It may trigger a memory. A bad feeling? 

Visual communication is never singular. It’s a body of interpretations. Fluid. Overlapping. Sometimes contradictory. Every gaze reads a different story. And yet, somehow, we agree. Not always. Not entirely. But enough to build systems, signs, and shared rhythms. We agree, sometimes, on some things. But beneath that agreement is a quiet chaos. A swarm of captions and a multitude of emotions. Think of it like a dancefloor: each person moving to their own beat, every story dancing in its own rhythm. And yet, when enough people sync up, a consensus emerges. 

Some of us live in that negotiation.

We jump between stories, code-switching between meanings. That's the work of a commercial storyteller. To listen for rhythm. To find coherence in contradiction. That’s the wonder of a story and the chaos it carries.

So yes, the girl wears a cross. But the cross wears stories. And we, the viewers, wear our own.

Food for thought.

Using sound + image to signify complex feelings.

From a graphic design perspective, sound behaves like a compositional tool to define rhythm, spacing, and emphasis and tune meaning.

Sound creates an emotional topography that influences the Rasa of the story. In my last Food for Thought, I referenced a Mike Mills documentary as an example of how sound changed the meaning and emotion of a story.

Mike Mills' 1999 documentary AIR: Eating, Sleeping, Waiting and Playing approach to telling a story is all resonance.

I found the ambient sounds carried more narrative weight than the beautiful arthouse black and white footage alone. Sound can play a big role in a story. Pay attention to how much space it takes in the narrative. Its potential to emphasize can also be distracting. Because sonic decisions change the texture, contrast, rhythm, and space of a story. We use it to strengthen and weaken the meaning of an image.

In graphic design, texture adds physicality: paper grain, halftones, or metallic gradients. I’ve seen sound behave similarly in a story. Layering them creates an atmosphere that positions the meaning of what we see. I find it to be a wonderful way of directing objective reality with emotional flavour, like overlaying handwritten notes on a photograph.

It tunes the semiotics of an image.

Not all situations require such a boost in meaning. I tend to supplement images with sound, mostly to convey complex ideas. Particularly, symbolic and emotional subtleties that are hard to distil from an image alone.

Think of sound as editorial emphasis.

Sound anchors a mood in the same way colour can. When paired, they can be very emotive. They are mood2; colour and sound form a kind of emotional syntax. They are fun to play with and an effective way to communicate complex emotions.

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Food for thought

Raise your hand if you overthink stories.

Unpacking ideas with people, over dinner, in the classroom, in conversation, is easy for me. My thoughts gather shape in the moment, dancing with the attention of the listener. I speak freely. I flow.

All that changes when I try to write them down.

The meaning of each word and sentence hardens. There’s a kind of finality to writing that creates friction for me. My focus turns, and I begin interrogating myself while typing. 

Listening while speaking; decoding my own words mid-sentence. 

“When you are in the middle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion... It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”  — Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

I came across the Margaret Atwood quote while collecting stories for this Food for Thought, in a film called “The Stories We Tell” by Canadian filmmaker Sarah Polley.  

What if I approached writing as an interrogation? like in Polley’s film. I could use the questions to lead the story…

I asked the computer Copilot what it thought about this.

Apparently, this is a kind of “second-order thinking”; I had to look it up… Basically, I’m writing while simultaneously imagining the story it generates in another person’s head. Which is likely possible for me, since most of my work requires attention to perceived meaning. I make a living thinking about what other people are thinking about—questioning the questions…

So what do I do with this? Could I just get Copilot to do it for me—can we do that now?

I'm tempted to just share a bunch of links and say nothing. Let them figure it out, I think to myself… 

Can I call it mine, if I add some yellow?

A picture is a bridge to an idea; a word is a definition of an idea. When it comes to graphic design, my ability to translate someone else's gaze is useful, but it seems to complicate the process when it comes to writing. Managing the tension between authentic impulse and anticipated reception is strenuous. It usually stirs doubt in me and spirals into over-editing.

Raise your hand if you are hyper-aware of other people’s imagined interpretation.

That means you have the tool for nuanced storytelling with relational depth. People like us are attuned to signs and how they're received. Most people stop at first-order thinking. Overthinkers have the ability to consider the ripple effects of a decision. We are second and third-order thinkers.

So are we editing for resonance or approval? 

I would say: resonance.

Mike Mills' 1999 documentary AIR: Eating, Sleeping, Waiting and Playing approach to telling a story is all resonance. The story leverages confusion; It embraces the act of telling, with all its imperfections, hesitations, ellipses, and repetitions. It shifts between observer and participant. Instead of pretending to be an invisible observer, the director is in the film as a character in the story. 

Perhaps there’s a way to leverage critical thoughts as a narrative strategy?

Take Barbara Kruger as an example. She doesn't just interrogate, she questions the viewer/reader. Her Direct Address approach flips passive observation into active participation. The story confronts the critic.

But that’s not my intention. These Food for Thought stories aim to provoke thought in the same way two people would explore an idea in a discussion. 

That makes me think of the last part of the Atwood quote: “it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.”

The resonance of a conversation is hard to summon when alone with a blinking cursor.

When I write, the idea can’t ricochet; it just sits there. Attempts to create a dialogue collapse. The rhythm disintegrates. I have to come back a day later to read it with fresh eyes; pretend I’m replying to someone else’s idea.

Then I pick up the fragmented thoughts and try to build a bridge between them. It’s like “a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood”. There’s a gut feeling that somehow, these ideas are related, but not sure how. So I wrestle with them and bend them into different shapes; come back a few days later and bend them some more… 

Can you feel the pauses where I hovered over sentences, unsure if they belonged? I do this again and again—moving words and sentences around on a page, until they fit the gut feeling.

Maybe these Food for Thought stories aren’t meant to resolve. Maybe the interrogation is the telling.

Food for thought.