Overlays

With respect to social media, overlays refer to visual or graphic elements put on top of an image, video, or live feed that serve to enhance the content's appearance or deliver additional information in a way that is both artistically and functionally effective. These elements can take many forms, such as text, stickers, or emojis, and are common on visually driven social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube. Logistically speaking, graphic design elements may serve a variety of purposes beyond mere aesthetics or branding, such as to make the content more disambiguated.

For example, subtitles added directly onto videos may serve this function, but in what is also a very common overlay per semiotics, given that most people in today's internet-dominated world are already accustomed to reading on-screen. However, graphic elements and other overlays may also have functional purposes that aren't immediately obvious. For example, hashtagging serves to visually delineate bits of content for better logical unpacking of what the viewer should take note of.

Both '+1' as an overt signal to be understood as 'thank you'; '#hiking' as a signal of what to focus your attention toward next; and 'Saying ____ is as egregious as not saying <<gesture>>' as graphic commentary, are ways overlays can more interestingly or directly get a point across.