Reflections on the Creative Use of Traffic Signs’ “Micro-Language”

To help visual studies (and multimodal studies with a visual component) mature into a serious humanities discipline, it is crucial to be able to unveil patterns in the way visuals can communicate. Finding patterns requires first of all that it should be possible to identify recurring “building blocks” in visuals. Only if any recurring elements are found, it is sensible to ask whether any “rules” or “conventions” exist that prescribe how these elements can interact to create meaning – and how they cannot. In this chapter it is argued that since traffic signs constitute coded information, it is possible to use and adapt traffic signs' templates as a kind of visual "speech acts" to convey novel meanings, whose interpretation is steered and constrained by this speech act character.