What Is Sign & Signal?
Sign & Signal is a design and technology publication that focuses on modern trends and developments. It combines a periodical magazine approach with news about new developments that will affect working designer. Its audience is creatives and makers in the technology sector. Example articles may include an article about color spaces like RGB, HSL, and now OKLCH and how it’s interesting and different. Or it will have stories I write where I spend a month making a project like an AI website and the story will read like a narrative like “I tried making an AI website and this is what I figured out”. It will have updates for designers like interviews with designers, news about design in tech, and overall elevating the digital design culture by making it into a magazine. Inspiration includes magazines like +81 and websites like Venture Beat and Dezeen. Instead of making it update focused like Dezeen though the articles will be longer and more substantial, more like tutorials that help you learn to use something (like OKLCH or how to make an AI model). Finally it will also have my personal product designer portfolio in it. The magazine will be published online but also have a print edition that is designed, printed, and can be ordered. The articles will have part of them for free and the rest will be paid. The articles will be about a variety of topics and could include design interviews, tours of design sites either online or in real life (like a building or museum or something), and stories about trying to make things. The focus of the site will be on longer articles that are interesting to read and related to design and tech, but will have a variety of narrative approaches. Whether it’s about a new development in technology, or a story about the author making something, it will focus on things that are actually useful to the reader, instead of just opinion pieces and “hot takes”. As a resule, the articles will be a little longer and use more sources and citations. The business model will be to either pay per article or pay to be a member, and the print edition will also be paid. It is going to be an evolving brand and publication that changes and grows over time. Here are some of the beginning projects that are planned for it.
The name comes from semiotics, the study of symbols and language. Because design is about communicating through shared meaning, I wanted to study this topic and write about it, and this gave rise to using the name “sign”. I wanted to write about theories of meaning here on this site. Rather than one of the very heavy academic articles on this topic, I thought it would be fun to have a modern and straight forward article that’s designed very nicely so it’s easy on the eyes to read and easy to understand as well. These are leaning more into abstract theory just for fun, and there may not be a specific application to it. I don’t want to stretch this into “this is how you would use this” if it’s kind of lame to do that. Sometimes just theory is fun.
Also reviewing some other more heavy theoretical or academic stuff and making it fun and topical. For example looking at Super Studio’s work, or philosophers whose work touched on the design work like Peter Sloterdijk. This sort of making popular the academic I think is something a lot of people would be interested in, since it’s pretty hard to even be aware of these types of works, let alone spend the huge amount of time to read the original source material (and find it).