Layer Semiotics of Young Adult’s Fiction Covers (Novel Series of Today’s Young Adults)

Semiotics is a science in which signs, are studied, identified and classified. Framing the picture converts it to a text with an indicator and signifier function, in which various layers can be explored. Sometimes, in the adolescents’ books, the only available picture for the entire book is the cover picture. Since the audiences of these pictures are young adults and they are capable of understanding complex and hidden concepts; the pictorial metaphors, semiotics and abstraction can be retrieved. In this paper, the layer semiotics of the cover picture of four novels, (the chosen works of the novel series for today’s young adults published by Institute for the Intellectual Development of children and young adults) are considered in order to read different layers of codes using the inner relation of pictorial text to the written text. In these four novels, it seems that the illustrator of the cover photo has read the narrative text and has attempted to spread up a comprehensive pictorial text in order to introduce several semantic layers to the audience by taking the structure and type of the written text into account.