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.