Picture Perfect: Book Cover Design Crash Course - Part 2

Welcome to Day 2 of my cover design series!

 Let me preface this by saying that, more than last time, a lot of these things I'll mention are opinion. And some of these "rules" are even more breakable than the font "rules." These are opinions and tips that I've learned over the past years, but they're not set in stone. 😊

Without any further ado, 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. Please don't use any of the covers in this post without my permission.*

Picture Choice

Now, there are a lot of common mistakes people make when designing book covers, but one of the most common is picture choice.

There are a whole lot of examples of this, and the most common one might be cheesy stock pictures.

Now, aside from the fact that you might want to look into specific copyright (even for free stock photo websites) if you use identifiable models, you have to choose the right picture. For a person, you probably don't want them to look too unnatural, like they're just posing for a picture. 

You also need to be a little extra careful if you have their face on the front; for me, at least, someone staring at me can be unnerving and turn me off from the book. Not always - but sometimes. And I'm certain I'm not the only one.

With these warnings in mind, books with people on the front can be some of the most grabbing. They can seem much more personal than a book with only a landscape scene on the front.

If you do want a person on your cover, there are plenty of ways to do it and make it look good! One that can be particularly stunning is a silhouette cover. Aside from the aesthetics of it, a silhouette cover leaves the reader room to imagine just what your character looks like.

Another, more common option is to just pick a picture where the model isn't looking straight at the camera - a side profile picture, one taken from behind, one where the model is looking down, etc. Many covers don't even include the model's face.

Let's look at an example of a nice cover, but one that looks slightly unprofessional because of the picture choice:

Now, I love the fonts and the concept and the colors in this picture. But . . . the model looks like she's posing, and she's looking straight at the camera. Not that it's a bad picture, but not exactly what looks good on this cover.

What if we found a different picture, and even rearranged the elements just a bit so that they matched?

There we go! Now I don't have somebody staring at me from the cover of my book. Not to mention that the new arrangement looks pretty cool!

Of course, sometimes it's best to have the model looking right at the camera! A friend of mine was writing a story where quite a bit hinged on the color of the main character's eyes. The book cover I made her had a girl (actually, it was just part of her face) staring at you. For that book, breaking this guideline was important! 

So there might be several times when you realize that the picture you need doesn't fit these guidelines. With design, you sometimes should just go with your instinct!

Another common thing to do for book covers is to use a landscape picture. This is definitely not always a bad thing. But, oftentimes, the cover ends up looking too generic. Also, it doesn't always have a focal point (I plan to touch on that next Tuesday).

Not that landscape pictures are always bad, but be cautious of using them.

Filtering & Adjustment

You have the perfect picture, the perfect fonts, the perfect layout.

But something is just.not.working.

I suppose you could call this a "pro-tip" - it's a simple way to make a book cover look more professional. And it can take less than a minute.

Filter.

Now, you can do no more than adjust one or two settings a tiny bit, or you can give the picture a complete overhaul. But, with some filtering and adjusting, you can make your whole cover look so much more professional!

If you use Canva (the website), you should see two buttons labeled "filter" and "adjust" on the top bar. "Filter" is preset filters, which can make it really quick and easy to give your picture just the right touch. I like to use "adjust," though, so I have more control over it. With a few quick tune-ups, the whole mood of the book cover can change.

Let's look at another example cover:

The book is nice-looking! However, that picture looks like you stepped outside and snapped it. Beautiful picture, but not edited specifically for this book cover.

What if we did just a few tune-ups to it?

Can you see the difference that made? It makes the mood of the whole cover much more uniform. Now I feel like I can have a little better idea of what the book is about.

I can't tell you any fancy instructions about how to filter a picture for a book cover. So I'll just tell you what I tell one of my friends: "Just play around with it until you get the hang of it." Of course, the first time I said that, it sparked a conversation about the differences in our personality types, which could explain why I love to figure things out while she wants clear instructions.

But I'm going off on a tangent.

Seriously, though. If you just keep practicing, it might not take you long at all to get the hang of filtering pictures!

Blending & Stacking

I don't have any examples for this section, but I just wanted to take a minute to talk about it.

Blending. This is when you take multiple pictures, arrange them on your cover, and blur their edges together. This can look good if you know what you're doing and you're careful about not putting too many pictures together. However, I've seen far too many book covers where the blending didn't go right.

Stacking. Here, I'm talking about removing the backgrounds from multiple images and then "stacking" them together onto your background. Bad idea, unless you can make it look very professional.

The bottom line is - be careful of how you put multiple images onto one cover. If you can do it professionally, that's great!!! But, if you can't make it look really good, it might be better to just stick with one image. 😉

That's it for today! I hope you enjoyed!! See you here next week for the final installment!

Let's talk! What did you think of the before and after covers for today? Do you enjoy filtering pictures? Did you find any helpful tips in today's post?