Symbol, one of the important expressions of culture, and its learning (semiotics) is widely used in the design of cultural and creative products. By synthesizing the existing research and application results, this research studies the value and methods of applying semiotics theory in the field of cultural and creative product design. Through analysis of domestic and international literature, three types of semiotics in the design of cultural and creative products and their merits and shortcomings are sorted out, and future research strategies are proposed. Both signifier and signified are used in cultural symbol interpretation, extraction and application in cultural and creative product design; symbol ternary relation is used to construct a model of cultural and creative product design, and trichotomy is used to extract cultural symbols; semantic dimension, syntactic dimension, context dimension and pragmatics dimension are used to construct a model of cultural relic element interpretation and a model of regional culture interpretation. It is concluded that the semiotic theory has been deeply researched and has a great application value in exploring the external representation and internal meaning of culture and providing analytical ideas for product design, but there is a lack of detailed research on the methods of extracting morphological symbols from the perspective of energy and reference, less consideration of user factors when coding cultural elements based on the cultural product design model, and the interpretation order of the interpretation model of cultural heritage elements is not clear enough. Therefore, the future research strategies are proposed to address these shortcomings.