The narrative of Mahakali is rich with violent imagery—as is the music on the album— and it was important to Jarboe that the design frame the narrative as more polished than a regular “metal album”. The album cover was designed to be re-purposed for various ancillary merchandise.

The Jarboe/Mahakali image was created from original photography of Jarboe, retouched and hand-processed in Adobe Photoshop.
The typeface was Caslon, with numerous variants.

Mahakali was designed with two similar audiences in mind: the U.S. and the European markets respectively. Two territories with different record labels, each wanting some way of differentiating their product from the others’. Aside from the inclusion of slightly differing tracks on each release, the artwork on the CD and the liner notes booklet carried differently placed motifs. Additionally, the U.S. edition for The End Records was produced for jewel case, the European version for Season Of Mists Media was a digipak release.