How to use these media Techniques to improve your messages and intentions in what you say and believe in.
What do I mean specifically? Well, this is all known as “Semiotics” and is the study of signs, signals, and symbols where it will be explained what it means to make a signifier and how to make something signified as it could lead to many more people understand you, your ideals and your idealogy.
Coming to a basic understanding:
But what does this exactly mean? well, what you are seeing in the image above is exactly that, it’s a dog, it’s a sign. “What even is a sign” Well signs and symbols are considered a unit of meaning for our interpretation and understanding used for communicating ideas across just words and images alone. Anything that has meaning behind it and represents something else is a sign, that is why the “it’s not a dog, it’s an image of a dog” is important because it represents the idea and concept of a dog.
Not all signs are visual, they can be audio, text, or really anything you can get creative with, this is not a black and white or even a grey system it’s a very open and free concept that can be applied to a lot of this you want to allow it to as it also allows us to understand icons and myths. To expand upon this concept of the sign system, “The signified is the notion, the concept, or meaning the signifier refers to.” this is always arbitrary, which is both a good thing and a bad thing depending on what you want to do, which is important on why you need to use this correctly if you want to make your point across effectively, Signs can be vague if you want them to be, but if they’re not meant to be.
Examples:
Example of Image: 
Example of Text:
But how do we know and how do we portray this?
This is where Connotation, Decoding, Denotation, and Encoding come in, it’s how you and the audience interact with your product (or you as the audience, how you decode an encoded product) and how you see a product at both the base and deeper level, the first thing is Denotation which just means the Literal meaning of Item. Let’s use the USSR flag as the base for everything going forward; What you see here is a Red flag with a hammer sickle combined into one merged symbol with a small red star with the outline and the main symbol being Yellow.
The Connotation is the meanings behind these signifiers, which I won’t go into full detail but the Red means red means the pairs commune of 1871 which was the birth of many left-wing ideologies, the hammer and sickle meaning the works of the word of the industrial and the farmers, The star being communism bright future of the USSR’s goal of a global communist commune. Encoding is the process of deciding what will be denoted and what is the connote behind it and decoding is what audiences see from it, and the base-level takeaway from the USSR flag from someone with a base-level understanding is that “This is the flag of the USSR because it has the red associated with communism, the hammer and sickle one of the many communist symbols and a star depicting a Bright Future.” This is how you effectively use Signs, Symbols, and effective theming.
References:
“Semiotics Theory” – Ferdinand de Saussure
https://www.britannica.com/science/semiotics
Images I didn’t make: A bundle of dog images I found on Reddit, A free to use image, Ussr flag
https://www.reddit.com/r/dogpictures/top/?t=all, https://pxhere.com/en/photo/19778, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union
