Semiotic Landscapes in Commercial Communication: A Preliminary Reading of Greek-Cypriot Shop Signs

The Double Function Of Shop Signs: Commercialmessages And Techniques Of Aesthetic Integration

The shop sign is one of the most attractive tools for visual communication. They are part of our everyday life. Treu (2012, p. 323) states that “[i]n present day parlance, a (commercial) sign has loosely come to be understood as any kind of graphic in the built environment, be it an advertisement, a shop identification, or a set of directions”. Shohamy (2008, p. 142) also considers shop signs (sometimes called shop-front advertisements) similar to advertisements in newspapers and magazines. Both advertisements and shop signs are used to promote a product, the main difference being that advertisements are published in the press or broadcast over the air, while shop signs are displayed in public space. We will add that, despite the specificities of electronic communication, one could say that ads in digital space have a similar anchorage function. The power of the anchorage function requires the effective synergy of multiple semiotic systems (language, image, color, typography, graphics, proxemics) as well as intersemiotic translation and rhetorical techniques. As Pires De Carvalho (2011, p. 48) mentions:

We will argue here that the specific urban context sets its own informational and aesthetic demands upon shop sign design, besides the ones purely connected to the products on sale in each store.