Eder Anaya makes Inherited’s EP cover a microsite you can investigate — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Inherited is a deathcore band, whose debut EP – Me, Myself & Sam – features three songs that each refer to a different known serial killer. Eder Anaya – vocalist and creative art director – conceived its release as an investigation in which the audience works out the character behind each song. The clues are spread across social media and a promotional film, and lead to an interactive microsite that is also the album cover.

“What if an album release behaved like a case file?” The Mexico City-based designer asks. The release borrows from the language of police investigations and contemporary true-crime documentaries – evidence, reconstruction, identification, discovery and the gradual understanding of a character. Anaya stresses that the subject matter is not intended to glorify the killers. He also wanted to challenge the visual language that usually comes with deathcore, which he describes as aggression, darkness, distortion, gore, chaos and extreme imagery. “The heaviness can come from the entire experience,” he tells us, pointing to the pacing, sound, typography, editing, interface and evidence, and to the tension created by not knowing the answer.

The identities behind the three songs are held back, so the audience meets them in fragments, such as a photograph on social media, a document or a detail in the film. The promotional film takes its cue from the opening of a true-crime documentary or television series, introducing evidence progressively so the audience can start making connections before everything is explicitly revealed. Anaya animated its material to keep the documentary atmosphere of the project, then built the final piece through editing, compositing, texture work and VFX. The faces, photographs and names that appeared across the pre-launch communication reappear in the film and lead back to the cover. “The film doesn’t explain the website,” he notes. “It gives you a reason to look for it.”

The microsite is a police investigation board, and the board is the album cover. “I didn’t want the cover to simply represent the record visually. I wanted the cover itself to become something you could enter and explore,” Anaya explains. The photographs, names, documents, objects and drawn elements on the board were created for the project to build a fictional investigation around the three characters, and the relationships between the objects form the clues that lead to them. “The board needed to feel discovered rather than perfectly composed,” he details. The portraits were drawn “to feel like forensic evidence.” The photographs and documents were scanned, distressed, cropped, annotated and layered into the board. Paper texture, handwriting and photocopy artefacts make it feel collected and handled. The material was made with pencils and paper alongside Procreate, Photoshop, Cinema 4D and After Effects. The labels, case numbers and names on the board are set in Klim Type Foundry’s sans serif Founders Grotesk in a restrained hierarchy. Anaya chose it for the campaign’s first phase because it evokes vintage police evidence, and it remains the primary typeface for this release, appearing in the film as titles and identifiers.

A memorama, a matching game in which pieces of evidence have to be connected, sits at the centre of the board. “We took the cover and broke the characters into fragments, turning something that would normally be static into something the audience has to actively put back together,” Anaya tells us. The board itself is the interface, and its pieces behave like evidence that can be dragged, tapped and matched on desktop and mobile. The microsite was made with the web tools three.js, SvelteKit and GSAP, alongside the 3D software Blender. Visitors are asked to turn their audio on before entering the case, and clicks, movement, atmosphere and musical fragments then build the tension and rhythm of the investigation. Matching the pieces gradually reveals the face hidden underneath. Once it is reconstructed, the character can be identified and their file opens, leading on to their song. Each song is written from its character’s first-person perspective. “You don’t simply discover the character; you eventually hear them through the song,” he concludes.