As Pase Rock said “We must read the signs.” Ferdinand De Saussure believed in semiotics which places emphasis on finding meaning in the symbolisms and signs in the world. It is quoted to be “A science that studies the life of signs within society” and that from those signs we can derive meaning. Image serves as one of the largest known practices in semiotics. The linguistic sign is broken down as the signified which is what the drawing or spoken word is supposed to represent in real life (a cat, dog, etc.), and the signifier which is the concept that is represented by the signified which makes up the sign which is the relationship between the signifier and signified as a whole.
As you can see the above image is composed of feathers; the sign has feathers in it. In the sign above there is the signifier which is the feathers and the signified concept which can be many things. When we see feathers the signified concept can be birds, flights, the feathers themselves. If you take the color into account we can get specific with the signified concept and assume that the concept can be parrots or peacocks or any other multi-colored bird. The combination of the signified concept and the signifier in the picture combine to make a sign. The signifier and the sign which are both the same thing (the picture and what is depicted in it) but the major difference is that the complete sign encompasses meaning (the signified concepts). That is an example of the basic way we use semiotics in today. We can strip it down even more and replace the image with the simple word “feather” to show how linguistics is a practice of semiotics. If a sign on the street said “feather” on it then the signifier would be the word itself written down and the signified concepts would be things like birds, flight, wings, etc. The concepts represented combined with the signifier or the word itself that made you think of those things fuse together to infuse meaning into our language and makes a complete sign.
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