Durex Logo Gives Text Meaning

I’m one of those people who loves looking at billboards. I’m pretty sure it comes from my years of driving in Houston’s awful traffic; they always provided me with a source of entertainment, as I would slowly make my way through bumper to bumper traffic on my way home from school. This week when I presented the Roland Barthes article “Rhetoric of the Image,” I thought of the billboards and advertisements that I had come across over the years, trying to find some that would serve as good examples of the key terms he wrote about. Then I started thinking about text, since his whole argument centered around the importance and linkage of images and text, and I remembered this ad, which is probably among my favorite of all time:

I remember the first time I saw this ad, I didn’t immediately know what product the ad was for. Then when I saw the little “Durex” icon on the bottom right-hand corner, the message clicked, and I thought it was one of the most creative ads I had seen in a while. This ad fits pretty well with Barthes idea that the linguistic message is present in almost every image; in this case, however, the idea is almost reversed. Instead of the text providing more information about interpreting the image, the image helps the viewer make meaning of the text. I could read the text and comprehend the message, but the image was what helped me construct the meaning that the creators of the ad wanted to convey—that Durex was the only brand of condom that would succeed in preventing unwanted pregnancies. In this sense, it was the image that worked as a “relay” more than the text. The image provided a supplemental source of information, which enabled me as a viewer to comprehend the message of the advertisement. The image and text are still reliant upon one another to get the full idea, but I thought it was interesting that after seeing so many examples of how text can make meaning out of an image that I found that an image, even one as simple as a tiny logo, could create the meaning of a text.