How to Create a Book Cover InDesign Tutorial & Template
Table Of Content
If you can afford it, you should probably hire a book cover designer. If you’re on a budget or have a background in design, you might get away with designing your book cover yourself. If you are not a confident designer and create a subpar book cover design, your book sales will suffer. For type-centric cover designs, the best source of inspiration has to come from British designer David Pearson.
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Arrange elements thoughtfully with enough blank space for visual breathing room. Symbols – Determine objects, motifs, colors that represent themes or events in your book metaphorically. We'll go through everything step by step in this course—but if you'd like to learn more about InDesign, check out our Free Adobe InDesign for Beginners Course too. The spine is the center of the book's cover, where all pages are bound. It holds your book together and, if done well, will make your book stand out on the bookshelf.
Steps
Today, we'll share some terrific book cover examples and tips on how to make your cover stand out from the pack. Book cover design has changed with the popularity of online booksellers and ebooks, but the basic principles of good design still apply. Designing a cover that catches a reader’s eye is key to the success of a book. Translating your vision into a tangible draft, seeking valuable feedback, and iterating based on insights helps fine-tune your design to perfection. Testing the final design among your target audience ensures it resonates effectively, offering the opportunity for further adjustments.
It serves as a strong marketing tool
Test various color schemes to find the one that conveys the right mood. A design brief is a written document that outlines your book’s essence, intended audience, visual preferences, and specific design elements you envision. It serves as a roadmap for you or your designer, ensuring that the design aligns with your expectations and goals.
Step 5. Choose Typography and Text Elements
You’ll rarely see a character’s full face on literary fiction and mystery novels. They might be backlit (as is common in thrillers) or obscured by some design feature. Unique to Chatbooks is its subscription service, which allows you to receive a softcover, hardcover or mini photo book each month.
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For one low monthly fee, this subscription-based marketplace offers tons of graphic templates, fonts, logos, add-ons, and more. Let's take a look at a selection of the premium book cover templates and mockups from Elements. By continuing the basic background design around the entire cover, you avoid the spine or back cover looking bad due to printing errors. This ensures that your entire book cover looks professional and consistent. If design doesn’t fall within your realm of expertise, fear not—consider enlisting the assistance of a professional designer. But understanding the basics of what’s important in a book cover design will allow you to work more effectively with whichever designer you end up working with.
1 How to Draft the Front of Your Cover Design for Books
You also get to see how the cover looks right away, and you can ask the designer to make some changes if necessary. There are several book cover design types with specific features. We’ll discuss custom book cover design ideas, principles, and elements. Remember Martin Lake, who I mentioned doubled his book sales multiple times with a simple change to his cover design?
Reedsy designer George Stevens's cover for The Pain Habit takes author Drew Coverdale's metaphor of a 'journey to recovery' and represents it as a trail map up a mountain. In this post, we'll dive into the elements that make up a cover design to better understand the crucial role they play in contributing to a book's appeal. For physical paperback or hardback, you will also need spine design and back cover design. Don’t forget to check the small version of your final book cover. You can ask family, coworkers, and friends on social media which cover they prefer between a few different designs. But I would recommend asking your local librarian or bookstore clerk, too.
Keep this in mind when hiring a photographer, illustrator, or designer. This is where new photography is commissioned for the cover design. These days, you only see this style of cover on celebrity memoir covers, where the big selling point is the author. In our discussion with Raúl, we talked about the humor of the story, but also the bristling romance of Classic Hollywood. The relationship between our two heroes is like Hepburn and Bogart in The African Queen; like Han and Leia in Star Wars.
Here, I’ve set the Font to Columna Solid, Size 10.5 pt, Leading 13 pt. Use the swatch colors we created earlier to add a touch of color to the typography. You’ll learn how to set up a paperback (softcover) version of the full cover in Adobe InDesign and create a collage effect with the help of Adobe Illustrator. We’ll bring in a bit of stylish typography too, to give the cover a modern design. Redesigning covers for classic novels is becoming increasingly common in publishing design; allowing publishers to market vintage classics to new, younger audiences. Discover some of the best examples of recently redesigned covers here.
Rocket Bride is a space opera targeted mainly at a romance-reading audience. It centers on a princess who’s engaged to an evil land developer and the roguish intergalactic smuggler who helps the princess escape on her wedding day. Like oil and water, chalk and cheese, these two heroes are unlikely accomplices — and maybe even unlikelier lovers. Thankfully, publishing is a trend-driven industry, and the creative choices of top publishers are reflected in the books you find on your local high street. Elizabeth Berry is the updates editor at the Good Housekeeping Institute, where she ensures product reviews reflect accurate information. Prior to this role, she was an editorial assistant at Woman's Day, where she covered everything from gift guides to recipes.
The professional back cover design contains the blurb and information about the author. Sometimes, an author’s logo or a small picture is also included. The design elements you use on the covers can become your distinguishing feature. The cover creates the first impression of the book and its author. It triggers the potential buyer to pick up the book from a shelf or an online store. Photographs – For non-fiction books and some contemporary fiction, stock photography may be a better fit to show real people, objects, and environments related to your topic.
As they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” so the imagery you choose for your book cover will convey key messages about genre, tone, and content at a glance. As you analyze, also consider additional factors like symbols that represent your plot, props that signify setting, and figures that portray characters accurately to the description. Dig deeper than just appearances to understand why images, fonts, colors were chosen for maximum connection with readers.
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