Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure was interested in languages, written and spoken, and he believed that the basic rules of human languages are hard-wired into us, that the structure of language has rules that are for the most part unrecognized by the speaker. Saussure's investigations of language had a lasting effect on many kinds of science, including anthropology and archaeology, as the notion of subconscious (but identifiable) structures in our languages spread to subconcious (but identifiable) structures in our behavior. The so-called structuralist movement in anthropology was led by Claude Levi-Strauss.

He argued that language, whether written or visual, is a system of signs. The meaning of a sign is generated by culture and common usage.

The linguistic unit is a double entity, one formed by the associating of two terms. Instead of uniting a thing with a name, the linguistic sign untes a concept with a sound-image.

The word "concept" is replaced by the word "signified," while the word "sound-image" is replaced by the word "signifier." The signified and the signifier together make up the sign.

Two basic principles:

1) The arbitrary nature of the sign--The sign is arbitrary because "the bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary." The idea of "sister" is not linked to the sound of the word "sister." The link between the idea and the sound--or the signified and the signifier--is a matter of societal convention.

2) The linear nature of the signifier--The signifier is of a linear nature because "auditory signifiers have at their command only the dimension of time." It "represents a span, and the span is measurable in a single dimension"--that of time.

Language can be analysed according to two different poles, or axes. On the syntagmatic axis we have the visible or audible utterance itself, e.g., "the cat sat on the mat" . On the paradigmatic axis we have the way that our utterance remains tied to and governed by the system to which it belongs. Paradigm comes from a Greek word, paradeigma, meaning example. An utterance is an example of one of the uncountable possibilities that the system makes possible. I could for instance have said, "the dog sat on the mat." This would have represented a slightly unexpected choice but perfectly legitimate. Try "the log sat on the mat." Notice that my examples relate to each other either according to their signifiers (dog and log) or according to their signifieds (cat and dog). The system into which the paradigmatic axis dips governs all possible relations between signifiers and signifieds. Poets, we notice, are often inclined to look out for the unlikely ones, for the more obvious your utterance is the more it will sound like a cliché (the moon in June).

Saussurre’s dimensions: In this example the first position in the syntagmatic axis is an article, the second a noun and the third a verb in the third person. Notice the semantic restriction on the paradigmatic possibilities.

The abscissa axis represents the syntagmatic dimension, while the ordinate axis represents the paradigmatic one. Along the abscissa certain grammatical rules pose constraints on how words follow each other. We can say that this dimension is temporal, with a casual order. An article (as “a” or “the”), for instance, may be followed by an adjective or a noun, but not by a verb of finite form. At a larger “time-scale”, pragmatic constraints rule the succession of concepts, to give a logic to the discourse.

Below are some examples of signifer and signified:

The signifier is the physical form of the sign such as sound, image, written word. The signifiers consist of five senses: smell, sight, hear, touch, sound and taste. For example:While signified is the concept that indicated from the signifiers. However, one signifiers are not determining only as one signifier but it also has many signified. Such as from the above written word of ‘Social Media’, in my mind the image of facebook was appeared but different people have different perceptions towards the meaning of it.

(28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology".Levi-Strauss’s method, known as structuralism, reduced mythology and rituals to their basic components to find an underlying pattern. His theories on primitive societies held that the characteristics of the native mind are equal to those in Western civilization and that all communities function using folklore based on opposites.

“I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact,” he said.

The Marxist social scientist who dedicated more than three decades examining the behavior of Amazonian and American Indian tribes applied the structural approach employed in linguistics to discover a common form in myth. He looked for opposing concepts -- using examples such as raw versus cooked, natural versus cultural, and life versus death -- that underpinned all ideas in society.

Levi-Strauss drew comparisons between American Indian myths and the story of Cinderella; demonstrated how some Amazonian tribes divided their villages into rival halves that synthesize through marriage; and tracked diverse folk tales through Latin America to show how they were related in form.

This French television documentary recounts in english subtitles shows the extraordinary career of the father of structural anthropology, Claude Levi-Strauss, whose theories not only impacted that field, but linguistics, mythology, and pop culture studies. Author of Tristes Tropiques and The Savage Mind, Levi-Strauss is a profound intellectual, a confirmed ecologist, a fierce defender of the diversity of peoples and cultures, and all with the temperament of an artist or poet. Consisting of selected interviews from the 1960s through the present, Claude Levi-Strauss Par Lui-Meme presents the anthropologist's story in his own words.

Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp 29 April 1895 – 22 August 1970 was a Soviet formalist scholar who analyzed the basic plot components of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irreducible narrative elements.

Vladimir Propp analysed a whole series of Russian folk tales in the 1920s and decided that the same events kept being repeated in each of the stories, creating a consistent framework. His seminal book, Morphology of the Folk Tale, was first published in 1928 and has had a huge influence on literary theorists and practitioners ever since.

Propp extended the Russian Formalist study of language to his analysis of folk tales. He broke down the tales into the smallest possible units, which he called narratemes, or narrative functions, necessary for the narrative to exist. Each narrateme is an event that drives the narrative forward, possibly taking it in a different direction. Not all of these functions appear in every story, but they always appear in this order.

'The study of the fairy tale may be compared in many respects to that of organic formation in nature. Both the naturalist and the folklorist deal with species and varieties which are essentially the same.'
Vladimir Propp Morphology of the Folktale

Graphic Design-Modernism

Influence of cubism, or maybe specifically Synthetic Cubism, seems to come from a structural design of the picture plane. The grid. There is also the use of reducing pictorial space and figures to hard-edged geometric forms.
Juan Gris seemed to use the apparatus as a way to find a medium between art based on perception and art based on the relationships between geometric planes.

Fernand Leger’s paintings reduced his subject matter to compositions of made up of colorful shapes. He also fragments his subjects and uses letterforms to form stylistic representations of his visual experience.

Until recently, the word ‘modern’ was used to refer generically to the contemporaneous; all art is modern at the time it is made. In his Il Libro dell'Arte (translated as ‘The Craftsman’s Handbook’) written in the early 15th century, the Italian writer and painter Cennino Cennini explains that Giotto made painting ‘modern’ . Giorgio Vasari writing in the 16th century, refers to the art of his own period as ‘modern.’

In the history of art, however, the term ‘modern’ is used to refer to a period dating from roughly the 1860s through the 1970s and describes the style and ideology of art produced during that era. It is this more specific use of modern that is intended when people speak of modern art. The term ‘modernism’ is also used to refer to the art of the modern period. More specifically, ‘modernism’ can be thought of as referring to the philosophy of modern art.

This website below explains the roots of
modernism and is very useful:

Josef Muller-Brockmann

Swiss designer Josef Müller-Brockmann established himself as one of the most important and prolific voices of twentieth century graphic design, setting up his own studio in Zurich in 1936 and working until his death in 1996 for numerous clients, creating a countless quantity of design for posters, which he considered “barometers of social economic, political, and cultural events, as well as mirrors of intellectual and practical activities.”
Müller-Brockmann began his career as an illustrator, where his aesthetic sensibilities first took root, but it was not until his turn to graphic design that he found his true calling. He is perhaps best-known as graphic design’s foremost proponent of grid systems to assist in functional, objective design, which he discussed in detail in his books Grid System in Graphic Design and The Graphic Designer and his Design Problems. The grid system allowed Müller-Brockmann to organize his subject matter to create more effective design, to not be overwhelmed by the seeming chaos and complexity of design decisions.

Since the 1930s, graphic designers have been using grid systems to structure the layout of their work.

Early pioneers of the grid system include Swiss designer and teacher, Josef Muller-Brockmann (1914-1996), who believed that the skilled application of a grid system speaks volumes about the character and ability of the designer. Influenced by Modernist ideals of structure and clarity, grids were developed to promote a sense of order and consistency within designs.

Grid Systems in Graphic Design’ 1968

“We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.”
— Otto Neurath

Gerd Arntz: Graphic Designer from Idea Books on Vimeo.

As a politically engaged graphic artist and designer Gerd Arntz (1900-1988) portrayed the world in wood and linoleum cuts. During the 1920s, he conveyed his vision on social wrongs and the rise of Nazism in Germany in his prints. He did this in a simple, direct style. Together with Otto Neurath he designed the symbols for the ‘International System Of Typographic Picture Education’ (ISOTYPE). This book displays many Isotypes and explains the system and its context, and fives an overview of Arntz’s life and work.

Bayer is exactly as old as the century. He was born in Austria in 1900 and became a student at the Bauhaus in Weimar when he was 21. His main interests were typography and advertising, but as there was then no workshop in these subjects at the Bauhaus, he studied mural painting under Kandinsky.

True type font "Herbert" is inspired by sketches of Herbert Bayer, well-known Bauhaus graphic designer and typographer.

Herbert is a low contrast display typography whose function is mutually aligned in the correct blocks. It consists of 3 section that is characterized by different width of individual letters that are in the process of settlement in order to achieve different align blocks of text.

Design for a single alphabet type. Herbert Bayer, 1925.

The metaphor of “transparent type” was coined by Beatrice Warde, Monotype Imaging's famous marketing manager of the 1930s and 40s. She once wrote in an article that good type is like “a crystal goblet” which allows content to be more important than the container. Warde contended that the best types do not get in the way of the communication process: these faces are virtually invisible and allow words to make the statement–not the type."

By the mid 20th century there were a number of structural theories of human existence. In the study of language, the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) suggested that meaning was to be found within the structure of a whole language rather than in the analysis of individual words. For Marxists, the truth of human existence could be understood by an analysis of economic structures. Psychoanalysts attempted to describe the structure of the psyche in terms of an unconscious.

In the 1960's, the structuralist movement, based in France, attempted to synthesise the ideas of Marx, Freud and Saussure. They disagreed with the existentialists' claim that each man is what he makes himself. For the structuralist the individual is shaped by sociological, psychological and linguistic structures over which he/she has no control, but which could be uncovered by using their methods of investigation.

Originally labelled a structuralist, the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault came to be seen as the most important representative of the post-structuralist movement. He agreed that language and society were shaped by rule governed systems, but he disagreed with the structuralists on two counts. Firstly, he did not think that there were definite underlying structures that could explain the human condition and secondly he thought that it was impossible to step outside of discourse and survey the situation objectively.

Jacques Derrida (1930- ) developed deconstruction as a technique for uncovering the multiple interpretation of texts. Influenced by Heidegger and Nietzsche, Derrida suggests that all text has ambiguity and because of this the possibility of a final and complete interpretation is impossible.

Roland Gérard Barthes (12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, social theory, anthropology and post-structuralism.

Myth: Roland Barthes in Mythologies explores this further by looking at the mechanisms through which meanings are produced and circulated. He is interested in ‘How’ things mean.Mythologies (1957) contains 54 short articles on a variety of subjects and trends that took place in France in the 1950s. He looks at film, newspapers, magazines, events, photographs, toys and popular pastimes such as tourism and wrestling. He is interested in how apparently apolitical activities are expressive of certain ideological positions.

For Barthes, Myth subtly obscures, distorts and hides truth and reality. So much so that the reality is robbed from us. Barthes argues that myth functions to naturalise an ideology.

This is Roland Barthes famous example of exploring myth with a cover of Paris Match.

It is now possible to complete the semiological definition of myth in a bourgeois society: myth is depoliticized speech. One must naturally understand political in its deeper meaning, as describing the whole of human relations in their real, social structure, in their power of making the world [....] Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact. [....] In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves.” Barthes. Mythologies (1957),