A Social-Semiotic Approach to Color Analysis in Digital Media: Theory and Practice / Uma abordagem sociossemiótica para análise de cores em mídias digitais: teoria e prática

This article aims to discuss the study of color from a social-semiotic perspective. The article begins with an overview of Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s distinctive feature approach to color in their Grammar of Visual Design (2021) and concludes that the authors base their claims primarily on paintings and print media, which may skew the categories toward analog media. Drawing on color theory, mainly the contributions of Rhyne (2017), this article argues that social-semiotic analyzes can benefit from systematized and quantitative categories for color analysis, especially for digital media corpora. The article introduces several analytic categories, such as color harmony and the RGB color space, that are relevant to understanding how color works in digital spaces. The paper proposes the use of the free and open source software GIMP and ImageMagick for a qualitative and quantitative approach to the distinctive features of color and for a better understanding of the complexity of colors and their meaning potential. Based on these methodological procedures, the distinctive feature approach is revised with Rhyne’s contribution. Finally, the categories are applied to two stock images as a case study.