Typeface Design Rationale

This typeface’s purpose is to serve as branding for Björk and therefore is representative of not only her music but her art and her personality. It’s a very personal typeface that has been heavily influenced by factors such as her heritage, interests and her inspiration. 

To encompass a vast musician and visual artist such as Björk into a singular typeface, the main concept was to represent her visual work and characters through their links to tarots and her interest in mythology, natural metamorphosis and poetry. To represent this, the typeface’s initial starting point is Lucida Blackletter as looking at the history of when poetry and tarots became popularised during the 15th century, Blackletter was the calligraphic font used. Lucida Blackletter was then distorted and warped to not follow strict gridlines and in the process, lost its sharp edges to convey an organic and soft nature that Björk heavily conveys through her work. The typeface was distorted in a way in which the glyphs can be arranged without a strict grid structure to convey the fluidity and emotional nature of poetry and her music, while also being able to fit together so that they appear as though they can be merged together and metamorphose. 

The use of circles and general roundness to the font is not only conveying a more organic connotation but also related to musical notes to represent her classical music training and her love for music notation which is a common theme throughout many typefaces designed for her.

Björk’s professional life and music career is about the idea of traditional merging with modernisation whether that’s through her physical movement from a rural town in Iceland to London, or through her mergence of classical instruments with electronic music and technology. The digital distortion of a font that is otherwise traditional represents that aspect of her as even the process of this typeface is meant to have a personal connotation. 

The logotype keeps the typeface as it is however is experimental with sizing, kerning and arrangement to represent her experimental approach to everything in her career. The only change that is not shown anywhere else in the typeface is the three accents above the ö as the umlaut is very iconic as branding for Björk as it’s representative of her Icelandic origin. The inclusion of there being three dots instead of two as a conventional umlaut has is to enforce the symbolic and visual representation of her heritage through not only making it the focus but also conveying historical ideas such as the decorative elements of Icelandic rune-marks and mythological symbols, and also the idea of atoms making up nature that is part of the Icelandic culture.