An immersive symbolic world of California mysticism, apocalyptic devotion, and eternal flame.
WEYES BLOOD: HEARTS AGLOW REBORN
Project Details
Project Type
Visual identity system, packaging design, apparel design, exhibition design, and experimental art photography.
Role
Art direction, photography, photo editing, branding, design, and production.
Programs Used
Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Lightroom, Adobe Express, and FigJam.
Deliverables
Gatefold vinyl with splatter vinyl and 2 side center labels, CD with lyric booklet, Apple Music motion integration, embroidered hat, candle, brass lighter, thong, string bikini, vinyl slip mat, and tote bag.
Gallery
Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery, Cal State LA.
Project Overview
This project builds a complete visual identity for Weyes Blood's 2022 album And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, constructing an intimate, esoteric, and humanist world drawn entirely from original photography, symbolic research, and a design language drawn directly from the album's themes.
The identity itself contains no photographs of the artist.
The music carries a distinctive tension between past nostalgia and apocalyptic future nostalgia. It sounds like submersion, like sinking into something beautiful and overwhelming. It feels heavy and luminous at the same time, full of romance, longing, and the quiet ache of being alive at what seems like the end of the world.
Weyes Blood in a promotional image for And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow. Photographed by Neil Krug.
The Concept
The process began with deep research. I scanned every lyric, studied Natalie Mering's influences across spirituality, esotericism, 60s and 70s folk and pop music, arthouse cinema, and humanist philosophy, and identified recurring motifs across her entire body of work. The identity was built from that understanding outward.
I constructed the visual world to reflect the emotional density her music is known for. Her concerts feel like spiritual gatherings, and the identity had to carry that same devotional energy. Every atmosphere, symbol, and object was shaped by my own interpretation of the album's themes.
The Identity
The system is built around surreal infrared coastlines, fire-lit floral studies, and symbolic motifs. These images explore the album’s relationship to loneliness, rebirth, collective grief, ecological fear, and the enduring desire for love and connection.
The visual language is intentionally intimate and devotional. It imagines what it means to hold onto beauty as the world tilts toward collapse and how design can amplify other artistic mediums. Through vinyl and CD packaging, custom typography, and a collection of altar-like merch objects, the project considers how music becomes mythological and how a visual system can honor a body of work that feels both ancient and futuristic, both fragile and everlasting.
A breakdown of the type and color decisions that structure the project’s atmosphere
THE DESIGN APPROACH
Display Typography
CoFo Raffiné is the project’s primary display typeface. Its baroque curves, sharp contrast, and ornamental rhythm shape the visual identity of the album. It appears most prominently in the Weyes Blood logo on the vinyl jacket and CD packaging, and in smaller flourishes throughout the system. Its looping ligatures and flourished terminals echo the project’s symbolic vocabulary of mirrored forms, connection, and eternal loops, while giving the typography a romantic and ceremonial tone.
Heading Typography
Arsenica Variable serves as the headline serif. Its sculptural contrast and carved, blade-like details introduce a Gothic, retro-cinematic quality that supports the album’s mystical atmosphere without slipping into horror or pastiche. It is used for song titles inside the lyric booklet and gatefold, giving each track a distinct and elevated presence.
Body Typography
The typeface Neue Haas Grotesk provides the grounding voice of the system. It is used for all lyric text and supporting information, which keeps the compositions readable even in dense layouts. Its clean, humanist geometry balances the ornate serif work and reinforces the emotional clarity at the core of the project.
Color Palette
The color palette was not a calculated selection, but an intuitive discovery. Sampled directly from the photography during the intensive editing process, the colors emerged to align naturally with the album's psychological themes. This creates a color system that is an organic extension of the imagery and inseparable from the world it represents.
The color palette emerges directly from the original photography.
Color Palette
Orange-Red — #E74128
Derived from the flower and fire photography. The palette’s primary heat source.
Cobalt Blue — #2D4FA0
Formed where the flame and oceanic environment merge together.
Rich Black — #110D0C
Taken from the monochrome ocean edits. A grounding, atmospheric black.
Magenta — #D74396
Sourced from fire-lit petals and glowing ocean highlights. The palette's surreal, psychedelic edge.
Crimson Red — #BA1E22
Sampled from the burning rose. A deeper, more passionate red beneath the flame.
Blue-Violet — #4F46A4
From the infrared shoreline, where fire and water territories overlap. Symbolically it sits between red and blue, devotion and dissolution, the album's two poles held in a single color.
Weyes Blood performing on stage in her usual, ethereal manner. Photograph by Hailey Collins.
This system relies on a dense symbolic language to build cohesion. Hover on an image to explore the narrative meaning of each icon.
THE SYMBOLIC SYSTEM
Weyes Blood against the glowing Los Angeles skyline. Photograph by Neil Krug.
A refined typographic anchor that provides balance and clarity within the larger visual world.
THE LOGO DESIGN
Logo Iterations
Early explorations borrowed from medieval scripts, devotional manuscripts, labyrinth motifs, and soft Gothic counterforms. The goal was to tap into symbolic and spiritual qualities, but the early rounds tipped too far into gothic and metal territory, missing the ethereal, folk-influenced, baroque, and humanist qualities that define her tone. The first rounds became too ornate and genre-specific, so I refined the forms accordingly. The Lover's Knot originally appeared in the logo itself, but it competed with the typography, so I repositioned it as a recurring symbol within the larger system rather than as part of the wordmark. This also occurred with other motifs.
The Final Logo
The final wordmark focuses on balance, clarity, and the quiet symbolism that runs through the project. The “O O” ligature creates a single continuous shape, giving the logo a sense of unity and forward motion without overwhelming the typography. The reworked “W” and soft curves of the “Y” introduce subtle historical influence while keeping the overall structure contemporary and readable.
Rather than echoing the ornate qualities explored in the early sketches and wordmarks, the final mark is restrained and intentional. The logo provides a clear anchor for the system, functioning less as an illustration and more as a steady typographic presence within the larger visual world.
A physical release rooted in Weyes Blood's affection for analog texture and classic formats.
VINYL PACKAGING DESIGN
The Album Cover
The typeless cover for And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow follows the lineage of iconic no-type records like Kimono My House by Sparks and Weyes Blood’s own Titanic Rising. These album covers build mystique by letting the imagery speak first, and this project uses the same strategy. It also responds to a practical reality of contemporary music consumption. Album covers are now primarily viewed at thumbnail scale on streaming platforms, where typography often becomes illegible. A strong image reads at any size.
The full-bleed photograph merges the burning flower with the surreal coastline, creating a single emotional landscape. This image becomes the album’s entire thesis: a heart caught between ignition and immersion, pulled by fire and water. It reflects an alchemical polarity where fire represents passion and anger while water represents sadness and the collective unconscious—themes heavily explored through the album’s allusions to social isolation. These elements are personified through Grapevine, where the California landscape serves as a surrogate for the body being overrun by fire, and God Turn Me Into A Flower, which transforms the heart and body into a delicate, burning centerpiece. This elemental friction leaves the identity suspended in a state of constant transmutation.
The absence of typography invites the viewer to encounter the world directly, without framing or explanation. It feels mythic, cinematic, and immediate in the way strong album covers do, offering a visual mystery that unfolds the longer you sit with it.
The Front and Back
The back cover brings the symbolic system full circle. The labyrinth border that frames the lyric gatefold interior reappears here as the outer edge of the jacket, making the entire physical object feel contained within the maze. The Lover's Knot sits centered above the track listing, anchoring the system's primary symbol at the point where someone first picks up the record and reads what's inside. A glowing effect on the border and typography gives the back cover a luminous, otherworldly quality, as if the object itself is lit from within. The background is a Gaussian blur of the ocean photography, dissolving the coastline into a deep violet and magenta color field that feels both photographic and abstract.
Side A and Side B
The custom splatter vinyl echoes the project's palette and the natural textures found in the ocean, flame, and floral photography. Its hazy surface moves between smoke, water, and sand. The physical material of the record becomes continuous with the visual identity. The object and the image are one thing.
The center labels extend this narrative as sequential storytelling embedded in a physical object. Side A shows the moment the flame first catches on the flower. Side B shows the flower fully enraptured, completing the arc from spark to engulfment. The act of flipping the record becomes part of the design. Time and physical interaction are built into the system itself.
The Lyric Gatefold
The gatefold extends the world of the album into a physical reading experience. Where a standard lyric insert is a flimsy sheet of paper, the gatefold opens into something you hold while the record plays, substantial, deliberate, and immersive. Reading the lyrics this way, with the music playing and the artwork surrounding the text, is closer to sitting with a book than consuming a digital file. It honors the album as an object worth slowing down for.
The labyrinth from the symbolic system frames the entire inner spread, making the lyrics feel like something discovered inside a maze. The symbols appear throughout as navigational markers between songs. The infrared coastline bleeds across the right panel, the California landscape holding everything in place.
A compact devotion to the project's visual language, housing the system’s intricate symbols and textures in a tactile format.
CD PACKAGING DESIGN
Front & Back Cover
The CD edition comes in a jewel case accompanied by a 12-page lyric booklet. The front disc face shows a vivid blood moon, saturated and volcanic. The reverse shows the same moon in monochrome, cold and geological. The same object, transformed by light. It mirrors the album's central tension between what burns and what endures, between the luminous and the stark.
The jewel case back carries the labyrinth border and Gaussian-blurred ocean background from the vinyl, keeping the two formats in conversation with each other.
The Lyric Booklet
The 12-page lyric booklet mirrors the gatefold in spirit. Each song is framed within an arched window and accompanied by the symbol that corresponds to its themes, carrying the symbolic system through every page. The labyrinth border unifies the CD booklet with the rest of the packaging.
Practical pieces that extend the project’s atmosphere beyond the record.
MERCHANDISE COLLECTION
The Final Outcome
Hearts Aglow Reborn demonstrates what it looks like to build a complete visual identity system from the inside out. Every decision, from the typeless album cover to the botánica candle to the Side A and Side B narrative arc, came from deep research into the source material rather than surface-level aesthetic choices. The result is a system that holds together across vinyl packaging, CD design, digital integration, apparel, and merch objects because every element shares the same conceptual foundation.
The project was exhibited at the Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery at Cal State LA as part of the 2025 senior capstone exhibition Vitruvia, where it functioned as a complete installation rather than a portfolio of individual pieces.
It shows a capacity to work independently across photography, branding, packaging, print, and digital formats while maintaining a unified visual language throughout. It also shows that the most rigorous design thinking does not always begin with a client brief. Sometimes it begins with a lyric, a landscape, or a flame.
* This is an independent student project created for educational purposes. All rights belong to Weyes Blood / Natalie Mering and the respective copyright holders. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by the artist, label, or associated entities.