Semiotics of visual signs and the information design

Abstract

The paper outlines the semiotical representation of gender, focusing mainly on the cultural diferences that frames the signs of ‘ladies’ and ‘gentleman’ in many places - public toilettes, for examples. Grounded at first on a comprehensive bibliographical research, it deals with na internacional range of examples that constitutes the corpus. The gathered evidence is scrutinized from the point of view of cognitive semiotics, which provides the main theoretical reference of the paper. Results suggests that the framed semiotical codes tend to emphasize the connection to prior cultural references.