Many of the points Alloway made about design were ones that had applied to advertising: in both disciplines, the critic needed to think in terms of “Images rather than forms, signs rather than patterns…” and thus both could take their place on the continuum of visual communication, alongside movies and art. Read remained the chief antagonist, with his theory of the supremacy of abstract form the main object of attack: “In place of Sir Herbert's ideal picture of the consumer exercising aesthetic choice in the market place, we are in need of a theory of the consumer who brings with him to the point-of-sale the average experience of his whole life. Buying is an extension of this way of life and not a momentary suspension of it in favour of abstract form.” The emphasis given by Read and the Council of Industrial Design (CoID) to form, function “and reduction of ornament has led to the neglect of symbolism… However, a designed object is symbolic from the time it is announced in advertisements, through the point-of-sale (where it competes with other symbolic objects), to its status as a possession…” Symbolism, he had written in 1956, opened up possibilities and could be “the embodiment of hopes, dreams, fantasies and despairs…” Anticipating a semiotic approach, Alloway saw objects as signs in circulation.

Images belonged to a nation's “symbol bank,” a “common stock of thoughts and feelings expressed in topical symbolic form,” but awareness of the symbolic currency did not guarantee successful design. Non-CoID British design was usually nostalgic; and Soviet design, as demonstrated by the Soviet Exhibition in London in 1961, was “garrulous, unremitting, [and] corny…, [a] ruthless heap of goods.” It “failed to give a convincing image of the leisure in which the benefits of consumption are enjoyed.” Alloway concluded that “as consumers, the Russians are naive.” Italian design was considerably more successful and the “bright new mechanisms (Vespas, Gaggias, busty young film stars)…” contributed to the country's “popular image.” Gio Ponti is praised for reasons that would have led to condemnation by Formalist critics, specifically for not being “squeamish about using publicity, [and for] being busy, flashy, pragmatic, turning out ephemeral things.