Semiotic Analysis of Education Oriented Poster Designs

Posters have been created by combining drawing, color, photography and typography elements, and today they have become a communication tool that has gained both aesthetic and functional qualities. The aim of poster designs is to raise awareness about societal issues. This communication tool reflects the characteristics of the target audience with its messages in line with certain principles, while also creating a functional form according to its subject. There are different methods to analyze poster designs, and semiotics is one of these methods. Semiotics systematically interprets and reveals sub-texts by analyzing and interpreting signs underlying images. Within the scope of the study; semiotics was handled under certain headings and analyses were made on educational posters of international and national artists and Ferdinand de Saussure 's method was used. The examples selected for analysis consist of four posters from a juried design competition held in 2011 under the theme of “Right to Education” addressing the topic of education from various perspectives. In line with the analyses, it has been determined that the semiotic analysis method can provide clearer data. In addition to this, the importance of using this analyses has been revealed with the method used in the research.