Fonts & Titles: Book Cover Design Crash Course - Part 1

Welcome to day one in my new three-part series!

 For three Tuesdays in a row, I want to share some tips about the incredible art of designing book covers.

I've spent hours and hours researching, observing, critiquing, experimenting with, stressing over, and having fun with book cover design. And I'm still not tired of it. Matter of fact, I spent hours yesterday making sample covers for this blog post, knowing full and well that there wasn't even a story to go with any of them.

However, for a lot of y'all, stressing for hours over the perfect book cover probably isn't your idea of fun. 

But that doesn't mean you get to skip doing it. I know that a lot of people will tell you that you should always hire a professional to create your cover. And I'm not saying that isn't a good idea. 

But I know that professional book covers are expensive, and that a lot of indie authors don't have a couple hundred dollars lying around to buy one.

So, hopefully, I can help you out! Instead of showing you the bare basics of designing a cover, I'm going to show you a few tips (with examples) that I've figured out through a lot of trial and error.

Now, let me say, none of these are hard and fast rules. They're suggestions that I've come up with. If these suggestions aren't working for you, then don't use them! Generally, though, these suggestions should make your covers look a lot more professional!

I've seen far too many indie book covers that weren't designed well, and I want to help stop that. Just because we do nearly everything ourselves doesn't mean that we can't make our covers look just as professional as traditionally published books'.

Now, let's get started! 😄

*Note: All of the covers were designed by me on the free Canva website, my favorite place to create book covers and other graphics. Unless otherwise noted, all of the stories and authors are completely imaginary; I made them all up yesterday. Please don't use any of the covers in this post without my permission.*

Readability

A book cover can be absolutely beautiful and follow every other guideline, but, if you can't read the words on it, is it really doing a lot of good?

One of your first concerns when making your cover should be that everything on it is readable. However, that doesn't mean you have to slap on a block font with a bold color. Let's look at some examples:

This book cover has a lot going for it. Nice fonts; beautiful, well-filtered picture; and a nice layout. But the words on it . . . 😬 Yeah. Little hard to read, aren't they? 

Now, imagine if you were seeing the cover on an Amazon page, where it wasn't blown up as big. It'd be really bad then!

So, your first instinct might be to lighten the whole picture. That would make the dark fonts easy to read, right?

Well, yeah. But . . . just take a look at it.

😶 Not good. I call that "whitewashing" the picture. Suddenly we've lost a lot of the charm of that beautiful picture, and now all of the writing (and the little marks on the corners) looks like it's a separate layer that was just slapped onto the picture. 

In designing a cover, all of the pieces should add up to look like one whole. That's not what's happening here.

So, what if we changed the font to a really pale pink (that matched the sky) and then darkened the picture?

Bad idea. Again. Not near as bad as whitewashing the picture, but blacking the photo out is still not the best option. 

Once again, we lost a lot of the picture's original charm. And - though not as much as before - the words still look tacked on.

But what else could we do? Because of the original picture's color scheme, no good font color will work well. 

And we could change the fonts to something bolder, but that might mess up the cover's mood. I really like those fonts. Not too hard to read, especially for the title (the most important part), but still unique and pretty.

I love the pale pink font color. But, since it won't show up on its own, what if we added some "backsplash" to the title?

That's a book cover I would definitely take a second look at. Matter of fact, it might be one of those I would take a chance on - even if I wasn't sure I would like the story - just because of the cover!

Let's look at our next cover!

This black & white, bold, simple design jumps out at me. But - there's one problem. 

Yeah. Some of that text is too hard to read.

A simple fix would be to turn down the "contrast" of this picture. Like this:

Not awful, but . . . we lost a lot of the boldness of this cover. Now it looks pretty mundane.

Let me just insert some advice - pretty much never will turning down the contrast be the best solution. Maybe it'll help sometimes, but it generally makes the whole cover look unprofessional and mundane. 

So, it's best to avoid turning the contrast down significantly.

But what would work here? Changing the text color to black would be worse, and any other color would ruin the black & white theme. And we've already covered adjusting the brightness (bad idea!!). Backsplash would also mess up the cover's effect.

Let's try changing the font that "Find," "Katie," and "a novel" are in to something bolder. 

Some people would probably say to change the other font to something easier to read, too. But I would say not to. The biggest reason? It fits the title. You have to look harder to "find 'me'." It might sound corny, but it makes the cover so much more powerful.

Also, we'll add some shadow behind the title and some "lift" behind "a novel." If you're using the Canva website (not the app), these are in the "effects" section on the top toolbar.

Now, take a look.

Oh, yeah. Now I'll definitely pay attention to this book! The text is easy enough to read (aside from the intentional "Me"), but the cover still has all of its bold effect. Even more bold effect, actually, now that the main font is bolder!

Font Choice & Color

We talked a little about font choice and color above. But let's dive into it a little deeper!

First off, let's talk about the number of fonts on your cover. As you might have noticed, I've used exactly two fonts on every one of these covers. That doesn't mean I don't use effects to vary those fonts, though!

A good rule of thumb that you might've heard before is never to use more than three fonts. However, I would say to not use more than two fonts, though you can add effects, italics, etc. to them. Using exactly two fonts keeps the cover from being boring, while still holding it together well.

But, like pretty much any cover design advice, that's not a hard and fast rule.

Take a look at this book cover:

The picture and the colors and the arrangement are nice looking, but . . . I'm pretty sure you know exactly what's wrong here. Whose idea was it to use those clunky fonts on dainty cover like this????

Font choice can really, really set the mood for your book cover. Or it can totally ruin it, like in the above example.

For the font that the most of the title is in, it's not really bad. Just far too bold and clean for this cover.

See the font that the author's name is in? 😬 Aside from the fact that it doesn't fit this cover, it looks a preset computer font. 😐 Bad idea. 

If any of the fonts on your cover look like they could be the preset for your word processor, then you should probably change them.

In a world inundated with books, your book cover should stand out. That means that even your font choices should be unique.

Now, this is just changing the fonts (and rearranging a little for size):

Now, I'd probably give this book a second glance (besides to cringe at the cover 😄)! And it doesn't even look like a genre I like!

Moving on.

Using the very first cover, let's talk about text color.

This is a personal pet peeve of mine, and it's one of the easiest ways to make your cover look unprofessional.

Unless you have a good reason and it really, really fits the book and cover, don't use a really bold color for your text. I have seen way too many covers that used a bright red or blue or yellow to make the text stand out. We just covered professional ways to make your text stand out - so use something more like that.

Not like this:

😐 That's worse than any other cover we've seen today. You don't have to be an expert to cringe at that.

You know the crazy part? I've seen covers like that. Some of them are even worse. At least our color comes close to matching (okay, so clashing) with the picture. And at least our text isn't bold.

Now, even if you don't have a readability problem, you need to be thoughtful with your color choices.

For instance, look at A Tennessee Dream's cover again - except I changed some of the text colors.

Red on pink?? Seriously?

Y'all, please pick a text color that matches. Suspense book covers can sometimes get away with seemingly random color choices, but even those are made to look good. 

This poor cover? No.

Size

The size of the words on a cover is very much genre specific. 

To see what I mean, look back at Find Me and A Tennessee Dream. 

Find Me looks a lot like a suspense book, or at least something similar. But, if I adjusted the sizes, it wouldn't look as good, would it?

Not only is "a novel" so big that it kind of steals the show, but now the cover has lost a lot of its impact. For a suspense book, it's normal to make the text take up most of the cover.

However, let's look at a calmer cover - A Tennessee Dream.

What if I made the text so that it took over most of the cover space?

Suddenly it doesn't look so calm and elegant. 

Arrangement

Your text arrangement can be what makes your book cover normal - or unique.

What do I mean by this? I mean that, if you just slap some text - no matter how much you follow my other suggestions - onto a nice picture, that's somewhat normal.

But, if you base your text arrangement off of the story and the rest of the cover - instead of a normal concept or template - you can stand out.

For instance, compare these two covers:

 

The first one is nice. The text is readable, the fonts and colors match the picture/theme, and it's fairly unique.

But the second one? 

   

Suddenly, the text is interacting with the picture. The tagine and the author's name are written onto the photographs, cock-eyed to match.

And everything about the text is matching the theme. Like the word "Perfect" is cock-eyed and the c is backward, the phrase "a novel" is tilted the other direction.

This cover is unconventional. The "by" before the author's name - even though "a novel" is far away -; the way the tagline is completely uncapitalized - even though it has a period -; the placement of "a novel" to the left of the title . . . it all shouts that this is not "Picture Perfect."

Exactly the effect I was going for.

So, when you put your text onto your picture, make sure to think outside the box. 

Make it fit your story, not the standard form.

Well, that's all I have for today! I hope that was helpful, and be sure to come back next Tuesday for the next part - pictures!

Until the next time!

Let's talk! Did this help you in any way? Would you be interested in any of these stories, just based off of their covers?