Beltaine is a book designed as part of the Uphor worldbuilding project — a fictional mythology built through collaborative storytelling. The book serves as a ritual object within that universe, blending poetic narrative, speculative folklore, and visual storytelling into a cohesive, symbolic artifact.
The challenge was to design a book that felt embedded in a fictional culture, while remaining legible, tactile, and emotionally engaging for real-world readers. It needed to embody myth without relying on clichés, and express a visual language that hinted at history, spirituality, and emotion — without explanation.
I started by defining the book’s core “voice” — quiet, reverent, a little eerie — and mapped out the visual and narrative rhythm of the pages. I experimented with layout structures that would suggest ritual or pause, rather than linear storytelling. The visual identity drew from natural symbols, invented letterforms, and a soft, shifting color palette inspired by spring rituals and dusk light. I used type not only for legibility but as texture — letting words blur into marks or fade into space when needed. The design system extended to the book’s cover, inner layouts, and paratextual elements like symbols and colophons, treating every detail as part of the myth.
The finished book is a narrative artifact — part poetry, part object, part spell. It guides the reader through a layered experience of text and image, emotion and silence. The visual identity balances softness with weight, using gentle serif typography, minimal layouts, and symbolic motifs to reinforce the fictional world it belongs to.
Beltaine was exhibited at the Berlin academy for art and design, and received strong feedback for its immersive tone and visual coherence. More importantly, it became a testing ground for how I use editorial design, emotional pacing, and brand logic to create deeply engaging reader experiences — even when the story is fictional.
