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Abstract This thesis aspires to design a “visual sign” that represents pain which can be employed successfully on painkiller packages design. In order to design a sign that conveys the true meaning of pain, first a historical review is presented which reveals how our perception of pain changed over time influenced by cultural understanding, scientific discoveries, and religious beliefs. Current signs of commercial painkiller packages were analysed employing the semiotic theories developed by Greimas, Pierce, and Barthes. These analyses along with quantitative data, acquired by surveys, demonstrated the lack of an adequate sign that represents pain. Considering the painkiller packages as a form of still advertising, Greimas semiotic square was applied to position advertising in the paradigm of informative, persuasive, and/or deceptive. This analysis was applied to top seller painkillers packages. In order to analyse the meaning of the visual sign in the packages, Pierce’s semiotic triad was employed to uncover what messages and meanings are conveyed though the visual sign. The packaging is then analysed using Barthes methodology of Rhetoric of the Image looking at the three messages; iconic and non-iconic, and linguistic denotation and connotation. The inadequacy of pain representation is due to two factors; the first is the incapacity of the language to express such a complex sensation as pain, and therefore, the challenge for pain itself to be represented; the second is the lack of applying semiotics in the process of graphic design, which leads to unthoughtful designs. In our present days, experts and well-known authors differ in their understanding of pain. Although the differences compliment the meanings of pain, they add to its complexity and mythical nature. Inspired by Wittgenstein observation that we learn the language of pain by interacting with adults, and therefore influenced by it, a search for pain language in infants and early childhood was required to better understand the phenomenon. This was conducted through linguistic analysis on CHILDES corpus, the results were employed in a new “visual sign” which then was applied in a new design. The proposed new design was guided by the linguistic and the semiotic analyses which proved to be more successful as evident by quantitative data obtained by a survey.