Written by: Nina Kelly
Recently, my husband found an old photo of me as a child.
I was wearing a T-shirt covered in a bold repeated arrow graphic, creating a strong retro feel. Looking at it, he laughed and said, "I can see you were making a bold statement here… standing strong amongst your older siblings."
It made me smile, but it also made me wonder. Was I?
Was I wearing that T-shirt to say something? To represent a feeling? To communicate a stance or perhaps a small act of independence amongst my older siblings?
I'm not sure. Maybe I was, maybe I wasn't.
The older I get, however, the more I realise how much of life is spent communicating and interpreting signals, often without even realising we're doing it. Long before we have the language to describe it, we're already making choices about how we present ourselves and how we interpret the world around us.
Perhaps that's why I've never been particularly interested in trends. I've always been more interested in patterns.
Looking for Patterns, Not Trends
One of the privileges of spending three decades building brands is that patterns begin to emerge. You start to notice that categories move in cycles. Premiumisation comes and goes, minimalism rises and falls, and ideas of authenticity continue to evolve. Every few years, a new aesthetic appears and quickly becomes the language everyone adopts.
Yet beneath these movements, one thing remains remarkably constant: people continue to search for meaning.
Trends can be useful, but they are often fleeting. Patterns tend to reveal something deeper about culture and the way people navigate the world around them. Over time, I've become less interested in the visible outputs of branding and more interested in the systems that sit beneath them.
This is where semiotics has become such an important lens for me. Not as an academic discipline, but as a way of observing the relationship between culture, design and human behaviour.
Every Category Develops Its Own Language
One of the things I find most fascinating is that every category gradually develops its own language. Over time, consumers become fluent in that language without consciously learning it. We instinctively know what feels contemporary, what feels established and what feels unfamiliar. We recognise cues that signal craftsmanship, indulgence, simplicity or innovation.
These associations are rarely created by a single brand. Instead, they are built collectively over time through repeated exposure and shared cultural understanding.
This is important because it reminds us that brands never operate in isolation. Every brand enters a conversation that already exists, and as strategists and designers, we are contributing to that conversation whether we intend to or not. Nothing is ever entirely neutral.
Moving Beyond Personal Preference
I've always been fascinated by the relationship between those who create and those who interpret.
Designers create signals, while consumers interpret them, yet the two groups rarely speak the same language. One is making decisions around typography, colour, composition and imagery, while the other is simply making sense of what is in front of them and deciding whether it feels relevant, credible or worth their attention.
For me, this has never been about decoding consumers, as that can feel overly clinical and transactional. It's about understanding context and recognising that every brand exists within a broader cultural conversation. Every design decision either reinforces, reframes or challenges that conversation.
It also changes the questions we ask.
Too often, discussions about design become discussions about personal preference. Do we like the colour? Do we like the typography? Do we like the imagery? They're understandable questions, but they're rarely the most useful ones. A more valuable question is: what does this communicate?
That subtle shift changes the role of design entirely. It moves it beyond aesthetics and positions it as a form of communication.
Semiotics as a Lens
At BrandSociety, semiotics isn't a standalone framework or a tool we occasionally reach for. It underpins much of how we think.
Before we create, we spend time observing. We ask ourselves what language the category is already speaking, what visual codes have become dominant, what behaviours have become expected and what assumptions consumers are already bringing with them.
We also look for tensions, because this is often where the most interesting opportunities begin to emerge. The space between heritage and modernity, abundance and restraint, or familiarity and surprise can reveal entirely different ways of approaching the same brief.
The intention isn't to arrive at a single answer. It's to generate perspectives.
The same brief can reveal multiple paths forward depending on the cultural lens through which it is viewed, and that's perhaps what I enjoy most about this work. It reminds us that there is rarely one correct solution, but rather different interpretations that are each capable of shaping a different response.
Looking Beyond What Is Visible
After all these years, I don't think the brands that endure are necessarily the ones that shout the loudest or move the fastest. More often, they're the ones that understand the world around them.
Every colour, image, word and design decision contributes to a larger narrative. Over time, those narratives become familiar, and familiarity has an extraordinary ability to influence behaviour.
Perhaps that's why I continue to be fascinated by semiotics. Not because it provides answers, but because it sharpens observation. It encourages us to look beyond what is immediately visible and understand the cultural systems that are already shaping decisions every day.
There is always another layer to uncover, another pattern to recognise and another perspective to explore.
