But vernacular design should be seen not as a realm beneath and outside "the profession" but as a broad territory whose inhabitants speak a range of local dialects, from the insider codes of skateboard culture to the mass-market hieroglyphics of national brand names. The term vernacular is relative rather than absolute. There exists not one vernacular, but a potentially infinite series of visual languages, of which "mass culture" and "corporate culture" constitute distinct sets of idioms.

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