Blue-green landscape painting is a major genre of traditional Chinese painting with a unique colour language and rich cultural symbolism. Amid the rapid development of cultural and creative industries, the innovative transformation of traditional art in contemporary design has become an important research topic. Based on Saussure’s semiotic theory, this paper takes the colours of blue-green landscape painting as a semiotic system of form and meaning. Combining the needs of modern cultural and creative design, it proposes an application logic:’symbolic recognition—semantic analysis—semiotic translation—contextual reconstruction’. The conclusion provides a theoretical and methodological reference for the modern application of traditional Chinese painting elements, cultural product design, and visual communication.