BON IVER POSTERS MOODBOARD

I researched different posters of Bon Iver as a starting point to see how the folk rock band would be marketed to the masses on billboards to sell their CDs or promote their upcoming tours. I found it interesting that as opposed to more mainstream genre artists such as pop or RnB artists, an actual photo of any of the band members was not shown; instead abstract art was used to represent the band consistently throughout the posters. They all tended to use bright colours, popping pink and blue and red.

The first poster is reminiscent of a more graphic novel type of art and the rest are either cartoon-like (e.g. the last poster), and full of intricate detail or kept simplistic but conceptual e.g. the second poster with a window drawn in place of an eye on the silhouetted woman's face. This reflected the convention of the folk artists to be introspective, looking in themselves for honesty and meaning in life and not so focused on how their physical bodies look. The art represents their inner selves, and shows that they are more focused on the music than materialistic things or glamour as would be seen in a hip hop artists' poster that would feature bling and designer clothes.

A running theme throughout the posters was also that nature and animals were frequently used: autumn leaves bleeding into a can of Bon Iver, a large elephant, a giant bear, a bird etc. This shows the folk artists simplicity in going back to basics, without the need of excessive man-made things, what nature has made is enough to help them create music and inspire them, shown in the unusual way the animals are represented e.g. in unusual colours a blue and pink chicken, or the elephant being stuck in a tree of hands with a rabbit's head.

The only time anything similar to a human is seen is on the final poster where a cartoon version of a man in beard, beanie, scarf, and simple converse jeans and shirt with his guitar depicts the artist similar to how they dress in real life and how folk artists appearances are shown in both my Digipak research and music video analysis: the simple clothes reflect humbleness on the part of the artist, showing they are not interested in materialistic things, deep thinkers whose focus will be the music not the money that they can make from their music.