This essay will focus on a concept that nearly everyone has read and the impact of it on

contemporary design and advertising. “Myth” is the concept that Roland Barthes has researched
and dissected from mass culture. Roland Barthes is an important person in the development of
semiotics and the cultural theory of the 20th century. His work shows how the signs, meaning,
and ideology operate in modern society, especially in mass media and popular culture. The
“Mythologies” book, which were written by him was published in 1957, has dissected everyday
media phenomena from advertising to wrestling matches to show how bourgeois ideology is
embedded in and reinforced by popular media. The key function of myth in media is
naturalization: turning historically or socially constructed values into taken-for-granted truths.
According to Barthes, myth removes the history from a sign. It “empties” the original meaning
and fills it with ideological content, making the arbitrary seem necessary. Roland Barthes’s
concept of myth has revealed how advertising and design have been using this “myth” to
operate the ideology for their benefit. The paragraph below will discuss this matter further.

To understand more, semiotics will be discussed further. Based on the information in “Semiotics
for Beginners” written by Daniel Chandler, it is shown that humankind is driven by the desire to
make meaning. Humanity surely is Homo significant, or meaning maker. Both creation and
interpretation are processes saturated with meaning — meaning that manifests through ‘signs’.
Signs take the form of words, images, sounds, odours, flavours, acts, or objects, but such things
have no intrinsic meaning and become signs only when they are invested with meaning.
Anything can be a sign as long as someone interprets it as 'signifying' something, referring to or
standing for something other than itself. Humanity interprets things as signs largely
unconsciously by relating them to familiar systems of conventions. It is this meaningful use of
signs that is at the heart of the concerns of semiotics. ‘Sign’ consists of a signifier (sound image
in the mind) and a signified (concept or 'meaning'). To understand more about the relationship
between the signifier and the signified, let's take an example. The word 'Open' (when it is
invested with meaning by someone who encounters it on a shop doorway) is a sign consisting
of a signifier: the word ‘open’ and a signified concept: that the shop is open for business.

A signifier is a physical object that can include sounds, images, or letters and conveys a
meaning. A Signifier can represent ‘Denotation’, which is what the human eyes see. The literal,
direct, and objective meaning of the dictionary definition. A Signifier can be seen in three forms:
Icon, Symbol, and Index. An icon is a signifier that has a physical resemblance to the object it is
referring to. It is recognizable and does not need to be learned. Some examples of an icon are
an image of a tree or a water bottle, people can recognize those objects only by seeing them. A
symbol is a signifier that has no physical resemblance to the object it refers to, and it must be
learned. Some examples that represent a symbol are a traffic light and a road sign, there a no
physical resemblance to “stop, slow down, and go”. So people have to create new objects and
then insert meaning into them, and teach other people about that new meaning in those objects.
In this case of the traffic light, the colors on the traffic light originally do not resemble “stop, slow
down, and go”, it only has meaning when people are filled with meaning and then teach other
people its new meaning. An Index is an existence created by the physical presence of the
signified. The signified will be explained further in the next paragraph. The smoke is an example
of an index, as it indicates the presence of fire.
A signified is a personal interpretation of a signifier. The idea or connotations it creates is what’s
signified. For example, the concept of a cat is signified after hearing the word ‘cat’. In semiotics,
the signified corresponds to connotation—what the sign suggests beyond its literal meaning.
Signified can consist of paradigm and syntagm. A Paradigm is a group of similar ideas or
concepts that are interchangeable and overall affect what is signified. For example, an
advertisement features a model wearing a black dress, the signified of a black dress is power,
elegance, mystery, a white dress is purity, innocence, softness, the signified of a red dress is
sensuality, boldness, passion. These different dress colors belong to a paradigm of signifieds
related to style or attitude, and the designer selects one to convey a particular message. They
are not just colors, they represent a system of culturally constructed meanings. Syntagm is an
individual word or idea that is changed and causes the overall meaning to change with it, or in
simpler explanation, "A single word or idea that, when altered, shifts the entire meaning". For
example, a chain of signifieds of a female model in a black dress and sunglasses stepping out of a
luxury car is luxury, power, wealth, and confidence, creating an overall message: the image of a
modern, successful, independent, and attractive woman.

A sign is created when a signifier invokes a signified concept in someone’s mind a sign has
occurred. The relationship between a signifier and the signified is arbitrary. For example, the
word “dog” in English has no natural connection to the actual animal in real life. It is simply a
convention, and it is learned through language. A sign must consist of both a signifier and a
signified. It cannot have a completely meaningless signifier or a totally formless signified. A sign
is a recognizable combination of a signifier and a particular signified, and this relationship can
be called signification. The signifier of the word ‘open’ can stand for other signified concepts,
such as a push-button inside an elevator (‘push to open door’). In the same way, many signifiers
could stand for the concept of the word ‘open’. Another example is the small outline of a box
with an open flap printed on a packing carton, which signifies ‘open this end’. For each different
pairing of signifier and signified could deliver various meanings, which are ‘Sign’.

Mythologies is a concept that the French theorist Roland Barthes researched. He believed that
‘myths’ are a second layer of meaning behind the first meaning created by a combination of
signifier and signified, which is the so-called ‘sign’. For further discussion,Myths represent the
second layer of signification, in which a cultural sign is removed from its original context by
popular culture, stripped of its initial meaning, and transformed into a naturalized, seemingly
universal truth. Myths serve to naturalize ideas of the ruling class, making culturally specific
values appear as Natural Eternal truths. This process of naturalization removes the constructed
nature of these values, making them seem like common sense. In the first order of meaning, a
sign can be made if it is culturally acknowledged. For instance, an action of giving other people
a rose could be a representation of passion. So “giving a rose” is a signifier for “passion”
signified, and both of them create the signs. But those signs do not just appear randomly from
the air; the signified and the signifier must be bound with the meaning (which is the sign), and it
has to be repeated over and over again. If not, it would not have the status of a sign because it
is not culturally acknowledged. For example, if a person replaces the signifier of the previous
example, which is “giving a rose” with “giving a rock”, it would not become a sign because only
that person would acknowledge it, it is only specific only to that specific person, other people do
not acknowledge that signifier with the concept of “passion”. Myths are a second layer of
meaning, which comes when a sign becomes a signifier for another signified that can mean
something else. The previous example involving the act of giving a rose may be interpreted
within the framework of first-order semiotics, the signifier of the rose and the signified of passion
created the signs, and that sign can become a signifier for other signifieds to create a second
layer of different signs. There are several cases of Roland Barthes’s Mythologies that were
applied to advertisements that will be discussed in the paragraph below.
The first case study is about Apple, the most famous technology brand.