Polari, a secret language spoken by the gay community in Britain from the 1940s to 60s, is detailed in the literature Fabulosa (Baker, 2020). The oppressed group designed the unique colloquial speech aid to seek comrades while concealing their identity from a hetero-patriarchal society. Polari's bold adaptation of diverse language sources represents the community's inclusivity and fluid identity. "Bona to vada your dolly old eek" translates to "it is nice to see you." This simple sentence demonstrates their unique use of language as a non-standardised form of communication. It incorporates elements from Italian or Spanish ("buono" meaning good), Romany ("varda" meaning to look at), Victorian slang ("dolly" meaning attractive), and back slang ("eek" or "ecaf" as "face" spelt backwards) (BBC4, 2004, 4:01).

Alongside its fluid nature of lexicon that implies an ever-changing queer identity, Polari is significant in that its drastic change from heyday to cessation reveals how homosexual representation in modern Western history and the public's perception of it radically transformed within a few years. The marginalised group who were desperate to be visible and developed the communication mechanism began to be less visible, ironically, once the Sexual Offences Act decriminalised homosexuality in 1967 in the UK. Because secrecy was the key to the language's presence, once it was no longer needed and visually driven expression of homosexuality, such as guys captured in Gay Semiotics (Fischer, 1977), took the identity off to hypermasculinity, the delicate utterance ended up naturally disappearing from the queer scene. Polari's cultural and historical legacy lies in being the final evidence of mutual verbal communication before the expression of gay identity became solely dependent on visual symbolisation.

Nowadays, Polari sharply contrasts with the emotional fatigue the gay community has on hyper-sexual, type-based app communication, highlighting its weight of a meaningful and lasting connection. A survey (Kim, 2024) reveals that even today, where diversity is respected, gay individuals tend to rely on indirect communication, such as implicit, vague, non-verbal signals, as opposed to straight individuals. The result means that gay people still decode signs and gestures sent by others, leading to an interpretation that social acceptance of the identity might have significantly improved, but in-group communication has not.

More in-depth research on the pros and cons of the digital evolution shaping intimacy through apps and text are discussed and published in the Journal of Sociology (Hobbs, Owen and Gerber, 2016). According to it, same-sex couples are more likely to find relationships using online dating apps than opposite-sex couples, with 70% of gay American couples having met their partner online (Rosenfeld and Thomas, 2012). Although the article concludes on a positive note, remarking that 'modern romance' can provide greater agency for people through its extensive network, it still recognises that there are a group of people who identify their exhaustion on how the profile photos or the 'ideal self' builds 'superficial' interaction, not sharing a fair narrative of an individual's personality. From this, the floating image's symbolic role in gay communication is noticeable. Whether to portray the ideal representation of gay identity or to explore the indefinite headless torsos on apps, gay people are constantly exposed to images and prompted to decipher the tacit, underlying hints.

The sensitivity of gay communication, whether verbalised, visualised or textualised, is indecipherable without understanding semiotics, a subject of decrypting the underlying implication of language, image, photography or any interpretable medium. In the book Semiotics: The Basics (Chandler, 2002), the author explains the close relationship between language and its semiotic function in a social context, emphasising that deconstructing signs can reveal whose realities are privileged or suppressed (Chandler, 2002, p. 15), as commonly used words in a particular society in a specific period, always reflect aspects of predominant groups of people at that moment, bypassing the existence and identity of the marginalised. The more highly coded the signifiers are, the more oppression in its social context is predictable. The book also emphasises that understanding uniquely signified codes of a cultural group is essential to being a member of that culture (Chandler, 2002, p. 148). In this sense, the act of interpreting Polari or imagery representing gay identity is a direct engagement with the community and its culture.

Gay Semiotics, Hal Fischer (1977)

Hal Fischer's photographic series (1977), portraying people from San Francisco's gay community in the late 70s, clearly demonstrates how the gay liberation movement freed their identity and formed a unique subculture of implying/decoding homosexuality through symbolic objects such as handkerchiefs ('Handkerchief code', 2024). Each work consists of black-and-white photography and small white text analysing the coded meanings of non-verbal gay archetypes. Despite the determinate elements, the photographs flexibly incorporate both portrait and landscape orientation, keeping the collection diverse while maintaining aesthetic consistency. The combination of formal image-making and casual text creates an ambivalent atmosphere, leaving complex, contradictory emotions: organised yet out-of-box, cynical yet humorous and delicate yet provocative.

The most distinguishable element setting this work apart from other photography projects is its use of text. It adheres to the graphic design hierarchy, featuring the signifier's name or piece's title in all caps, bold, digitally typed text, with the decoding discourse below. Unlike the headings, the artist handwrites each description, evoking a sense of personal letters. This intimate choice reflects his close connection with the community and underscores that interpreting the signal is personal and cannot be formalised. The thin line connecting text and image enriches the project's analytical and structural aspects, setting the artwork's tone.

The work's salient point is noticeable once compared to other art from the era. While 70s art and design focused on 'visibling' diversity through colourful, daring, and loud embodiment, the artist intertwined different theories and visualising methods like structuralism and linguistics into his photography. This application refined the work's visual language, leading to subverting the notion of queer art from 'superficial' to 'conceptual'. By doing so, his work appeals to the public's acceptance of this new form of queerness in art.

Supplement to the Italian Dictionary,
Bruno Munari (1958)

Decoding signified gestures is not exclusive to gay culture; its influence is time-transcending, cross-cultural, and international. Supplement to the Italian Dictionary (Munari, 1958) exemplifies a publication that deconstructs codified cultural legacy–Italian hand gestures. The images are notable; rather than portraying the hands within particular pictorial circumstances, the artist isolates each gesture from its sociocultural context. Consequently, the gestures become obscurely posed hands without pre-promised implications, leaving viewers open room for different interpretations. Similar to Gay Semiotics, the work blends imagery and linguistics, creating a neutral tone that is both conceptual and humorous.

Its presentation follows a solid graphic design system: descriptions on the left page and images on the right. This one-to-one pairing creates rhythm while preventing visual distraction. Typographic considerations for the audience's immersion are also appreciable; by eliminating any text, including page numbers, from the right pages, the artist augments the theme of 'isolating' the signifier. The publication uses a single serif typeface, including the cover, printed on off-white uncoated paper. These design decisions enhance its elegance and the documentary sense of the book.

Gunnar Smoliansky 1933—2019,
Gunnar Smoliansky (2021)

Meaning-making through images, as seen in the book Gunnar Smoliansky 1933—2019 (Smoliansky et al., 2021), can also be quite personal. This compiled re-publication of Gunnar Smoliansky's photographic oeuvre revitalises a private archive in contemporary design. The book's graphic language uses grids and varied image placement, allowing for portrait, landscape, and square orientations within a fixed-width design system. This treatment adds depth to the image, leaving a 29mm margin on the top and outside of the page. The visual and textual narrative varies between non-linear and chronological, offering viewers a transcendent experience of the artist's daily perspective.

This project evidences that the 'form follows function' design concept can also be applied to publications. To publish such a heavy design book with 473 photos per volume, a total of two, the designer may have adopted a more cost-effective design decision by laying out two or three photos per page. Instead, the photographer's decades of passion and persistence in photography are materialised by the designer's uncompromising attitude of showing only one photo per page. The design is printed on light-weight, natural white archival paper to enhance its atmosphere of visual poetry further. It is finished with perfect binding, allowing readers to engage with the cinematographic experience seamlessly. As a result, these design decisions together form an enormous volume of 1200 pages and 2020g, and their appearance as an object represents the concept of a physicalised archive.

Critical Reflection

The role of a graphic designer in contemporary society extends beyond creating visual outcomes. It involves leveraging design practices to bring the heritage of marginalised groups into the public eye. In this context, Semiotics of Polari (Kim, 2024) pioneers a unique approach, exploring the codified meanings of Polari through ever-changing gay iconography. The book is perhaps the first of its kind about Polari, visually representing and physically reifying the forgotten voices of gay individuals who lived in an era when their identity was denied. The project's weight becomes evident once the outcome is analysed through its sociocultural context and design elements back and forth.

To visualise each meaning of Polari, the author employs countless images floating around online that symbolise voyeuristic and ever-explorative traits of gay communication. The adoption of found images also points out how modern society's digital intimacy affected the visually-driven expression of gay identity dependent on fragmentary images contrary to the age of verbal communication. From the infinite array of pictures on the internet, the author unearths 88 signifiers for Polari with coherent tones, and behind this selective process was his understanding of the timeline of Western gay history from ancient Greek homosexuality to the current app-based communication. The images discovered in this way undergo visual treatment by the creator to make them look worn and faded to maximise the archival personality of the project. As Henrik Nygren Design did when publishing a photographic compilation of Gunnar Smoliansky (2021), the author develops a cinematic experience through the non-linear, time-transcending and fast-paced transition of images, symbolising the long history of the gay community and how its represented identity has evolved in changing times.

Like Munari's artist book (1958), the publication's design follows a refined and structured system. The author has created a 'to be seen—to be spoken' model, which structurally reinterprets Saussure's basic semiotic diagram and utilises it as a core layout. Further discussing the book's editorial language, the implications are visualised at the top, with the colloquial slang typed at the bottom, leaving 90 x 100 mm of blank space per page. The isolation between the two reflects the language's semiotic characteristic as an 'empty signifier' (Chandler, 2002), highly coded and challenging to decipher at a glance. All the texts are typed in lowercase letters with the exact font size throughout the publication, including the cover. This anti-hierarchical typographic decision adds a relaxed, conversational tone to the publication while theoretically dismantling the social hierarchy and power dynamic often signified by capital letters (Extra Bold, 2021).

The composition and arrangement of the content are sufficient to elicit the reader's curiosity. The author excludes explanatory text for each word, encouraging readers to freely guess the relationship between imagery and linguistics rather than micro-guiding them, subverting the notion of one-way information transfer of existing publishing media. The glossary part, where the basic contextual information lies in the text, is arranged at the end of the publication, aiming to experiment with whether the semiotics work without a prior understanding of the context or whether the reader interacts with it differently.

The book's overall aesthetic and design decisions are neutral and transparent. Unlike the stereotypical queer design ethos, it aims to represent the voices of a minority group within the gay community who expresses frustration with the singular gay identity represented in the media (Clarkson, 2008). Instead of superficially adopting the image of dominant groups within this marginalised group, the publication seeks true inclusivity by embracing different shades of queerness.

In conclusion, the project is not simply an archiving of forgotten language; instead, each design decision reflects the author's thoughts or solutions on issues such as different communication between current and past gay culture, hyper-sexualised visual representation of gay men in the apps and the dominant aesthetics in queer design at the moment. Those considerations add contextual depth to the project and elaborate its design and production. Additionally, the concept expressed in the publication form acknowledges the current absence of Polari's physical records. It emphasises the significance of documenting, preserving and physicalising queer subculture before being erased by the heteronormative society, especially the non-visible and colloquial aspects that evaporate once shown or uttered.

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