Semiotic analysis of Norwegian party Ventre’s website (venstre.no).

Venstre is a Norwegian social liberal party founded in 1884.

Design in general

The party’s website consists of a green background and a big rectangle divided into smaller rectangles. In the top left sub-rectangle there’s an animation which runs each time one visitis or reloads the webpage. This animation also acts as a menu button. There’s also a menu to left, where one can find in-depth articles, profiles of the most known politicians in their party, and videos.

On the right side there’s a search box and a menu of more in-depth articles about their political views, and the news items are in the bottom square.

The color green is dominant throughout the webpage, especially on the logo. As to what this color symbolizes I do not know. It is the color of the party, the same way Høgre uses blue, FRP red, etc. It’s easy to think that it symbolizes environment, but since the color has been chosen so long time ago, and in a different political context, I believe it to be expressing something else.

Design Guidelines

The party’s design guidelines can be found on the party’s website. It tells activists and supporters excactly which colors and fonts to use.

As to the provenance of these colors, fonts and decorations it does not tell.

Video site

The Video part of the site seems to just be links to videos hosted and presented by other websites. They are presented as news, with a short textual introduction to each video.

As I search harder I find a link to Venstre’s (official) profile site at YouTube. This might be an attempt to communicate with a growing YouTube community, where the discource is not only video and sound, but also texts, comments and communication around the videos posted. The colors on this profile site are also largely based on green.

Some of these videos are “produced” and edited, or clips from TV. Others are “YouTube style”, low-quality and spontanious posted clips, for example from public speeches or other relevant events.

It seems Venstre’s members have a tradition of presenting themselfes in self produced video clips. This mode of discourse indicates Venstre’s grassroot and community appeal.

Connotation

The semiotics reflects the party’s commitment to small businesses, environment, education and sociality.

The first menu item, “Småbedrifter” shows four persons in a typical office environment. The people are situated around a meeting table with a laptop computer. This seems to appeal to small sized businesses which often utilizes meetings and laptop, and are often dressed formally.

The second menu item, “miljø”, depicts a hand holding a globe. This reflects Venstre’s care for environment and nature. The hand holding the globe is a connotation to religious and existential imagery. Venstre seem to want to project the sense of caring, in relation with ethical issues often associated with religion, although Venstre is not a religious party.

Kress writes: Moral discourses are, for many people in the West, no longer systematically and explicitly known. They have gone underground. Most of us have only a few keywords, a few icons, a few exemplary stories, to hint at the submerged and no longer explicitly known, but still powerful systems of Christian morality, and their philosophical offshoots.

The third menu item, “Sosialt ansvar”, depicts a crying child with his face in his hands. This might be an attempt to appeal to our conscience, since a child in pain easily does that.

The fourth menu item, “Skole” depicts a schoolgirl raising her hand. This is also trying to appeal to our conscience in using a child. The motif is a classic, premodernistic schoolbench, with the classic red apple. This provenance of this is school and education in a manner known from comics and fairytales. Comics and fairytales are also modes known to, and often associated with children.

Finally there’s the politician giving a statement. These are rotating images which will be selected randomly as the user (re-)visits the site or hits reload. Venstre have chosen to have both a male character, dressed in suite and tie, and a female in a dress. This is probably to show that they stand for equality of sexes, as the majority of modern parties do.

The wide use of people in their imagery probably reflects that Venstre is a party by and for the people. This is not about technology or art, it’s about people and social issues.

Conclusion

Venstre’s website is rich on content. One might be overwhelmed by all kinds of choices, topics to read about, videos to watch, blog posts and in-depth information. As opposed to some other Norwegian parties’ websites, it seems that they focus on the website as a portal, with community generated content, close communication from the most prominent politicans (blog) and various practical information, as well as news.

It does a good job in informing, and using semiotics from both today’s important political issues and the party’s designprofile. However, it becomes somewhat untidy, since there are lots of elements and they are all lumped together. I see this relevant to what Kress writes about “guided interface” on page 103 in the book.

I would advice Venstre to be more consistent (menus etc), tidy, and in a larger degree take advantage of different modes of discourse. The same content could be used, but with entirely different articulation.