Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk Guðmundsdóttir is an idol of quirky, avant-garde, electronic music, fashion, and visual representation.
Björk is a grand influence for artists and designers alike, and uses graphic design to manifest her artistic vision. In every single album that Björk has released, she enters a new world; her visual world coincides with the realm of her music, and for the entire period of promoting her albums, she becomes this alter persona of each album’s representation.
For example, in her album Biophilia, Björk had orange hair, and used the theme of biology, flowers, and fauna in her album cover, tour, and even fashion. As for the latter, for nearly 30 years Björk has not only approached and appreciated fashion as a transformative art form, but also became an icon, or patron, of the art world and an unequivocal inspiration for the world of graphic design.
Through her visual representations, she shines light on quirkiness, avant-garde personas, inspiring people to let their weirdness shine and be who they truly are. In addition, her visual representation reaches beyond the gender binaries, by creating androgynous, alien-like entities that do not have a distinct gender. By allowing her followers to enter her intergalactic world, she creates an ultimate experience of escapism and allows individuals to forget their daily hardships and let their true selves shine.
As an artist who vociferously adheres to graphic design and typography in order to manifest her artistic persona, Björk and graphic design manifest a symbiotic relationship, inspiring each other for generations and coalescing the sphere of music with that of the visual world.
