Communication is an important aspect of mankind's nature, a thing without which our society couldn't function properly. Artists use this to deliver messages through their artworks in a variety of ways, and the study of communication contains two "schools" of thought known as the Process School, which deals with finding out how the whole communication process itself works, and the Semiotic School that deals with text, and the signs and codes which it is comprised of.
The communication process itself is comprised of four stages: You, Message, Channel/Medium, Destination. You are the creator of the message, the message is the idea that will be conveyed through whatever codes you apply to it, the channel/medium is the means by which the message is carried to the masses, and the destination is the crowd your message is supposed to reach.
The combination of a signifier(the thing within an artwork that depicts a familiar object within your mind) and signified(the object being displayed by the signifier) makes the sign and there are different types of signs, those being the Icon, the Symbol, and the Index. The Icon is an object rendered in its purest most simple form which is easily recognizable just by seeing it alone, the Symbol is a littlee more complex as it represents something we know in real life, but doesn't look like it and is only recognizable as what it represents because it has been given meaning by society, and Index is something that we actually see in nature that, through our own knowledge, we know to mean something is going to happen or that something has happened because of it.
