Semiotics

Coverage

Semiotic analysis as the study of sign systems in software interfaces and communication. Covers:

• Foundational models — Peirce's icon / index / symbol trichotomy; Saussure's signifier / signified dyad; Barthes' denotation / connotation / myth layers
• Visual semiotics for interfaces — color as sign (denotation + connotation, with the never-color-alone rule), shape and position as sign channels (top-left, top-right, bottom-right, circle, triangle, pill)
• Iconography as a sign system — consistency, metaphor clarity, pairing rules, system coherence; common breakdowns (icon polysemy, opacity, cultural collision, obsolete metaphor)
• Affordance theory — real affordance, perceived affordance, signifier, anti-affordance; the rule that disabled states need a strong anti-affordance
• Code and API semiotics — naming, variable, endpoint, and error-message signs; the rule that vague names like processData() are signifier failures even when the implementation works
• Semiotic-coherence audit — the checklist for reviewing a surface across color, icon, affordance, and cross-surface consistency

The skill operates above microcopy execution and color-token math, and below formal ontology. It owns the question "what does this sign communicate to a user?", not "what should the button say?", "what hex value is this?", or "what class hierarchy do these things belong to?".

Philosophy

Every interface element is already communicating, whether the designer intended it to or not. Semiotics exists to make that communication explicit and coherent. A button that looks clickable but is disabled, a green badge that signals "good" when the metric is actually worsening, or a gear icon that means different things on different pages are not visual quirks; they are sign failures that erode user trust one micro-misread at a time.