The gap between intention and interpretation is the material

A poster is a promise the designer makes and the viewer keeps — or doesn’t. In between lies a gap: what I mean and what reaches you. Most textbooks treat this gap as a problem. You are supposed to shrink it, with clear signs, audience knowledge and testing. I think that is half the truth. The gap is not the bug in the system. It is the material you work with.

Communication is not a pneumatic tube

The picture of communication we carry around comes from telecommunications. In 1948 Claude Shannon described a sender, a channel and a receiver, with noise in between. The model was meant for telephone lines, and there noise really is just interference. Applied to design it misleads: it pretends that meaning sits ready-packed with the sender and only has to arrive intact.

In 1973 Stuart Hall showed why that is wrong. In his model of encoding and decoding, the receiver reads a message as intended, partly, or deliberately against it. Meaning is not transmitted; it is negotiated. Whoever designs a poster is not sending a message. They are opening a negotiation.

Victor Papanek wrote in 1971 that all people are designers, because design is basic to all human activity. I also read the sentence the other way round: if everyone designs, the viewer designs too, every time they interpret something.

Culture is not a dictionary

Older texts on design communication — including my own first version of this article — like to include a list: red means danger in the West, luck in China, mourning elsewhere. Such lists are convenient and mostly wrong, because they treat cultures like dictionaries. In Germany, red means stop, sale, love, ketchup and fire brigade, depending on where it appears. The colour carries no meaning; the context gives it one.

Fig. 1 — The fire safety sign for an extinguisher. Here red means “fire protection”; at the shop counter the same colour says something else entirely.

For practice, that is good news. You don’t need to memorise a table of world cultures. You need to know where the thing stands, who sees it and what is already hanging there. Meaning is always local.

Where the deviation does its work

My method, Readymade ± 3 %, only works because the gap exists. I take a sign everyone knows — a warning sign, a label, a logo — and change it by a few percent. If the viewer read exactly what I put in, there would be nothing to discover. The work happens at the moment they hesitate: I know this, but something is off.

Fig. 2 — The post horn, shifted by a few strokes, becomes a skull. You recognise the sign at once and still do a double take. That double take is where the work happens.

In 1962 Umberto Eco called works that deliberately leave several readings open open works. In applied design the idea has a bad reputation because it sounds like vagueness. But every good brand lives on it. A logo that allows only one reading wears out. One with a little play gets charged with new meanings over the years.

When the gap has to close

That doesn’t mean every gap is good. An emergency exit sign, a package insert and a ballot paper must be unambiguous, because a misunderstanding there harms people. The skill lies in knowing what kind of work is in front of you. In wayfinding and instructions, the gap is a risk you test and reduce. In brands, campaigns and objects, it is the place where the viewer joins in the work.

Fig. 3 — The safety sign for an emergency exit window. Here the gap is a risk: there may only be one reading.

Most of the mistakes I see in briefings confuse the two. The brand is supposed to be as unambiguous as an escape-route sign, and the sign as original as a campaign. Both fail.

Before you hand in your next design, write two sentences underneath: what you mean and what someone else might see in it. If the second sentence stays empty, you have either designed a sign or not looked closely enough yet.