Cover Design

Obviously, this course is not about graphic design or illustration. This chapter merely gives some basic advice on how to approach creating the right cover, using tips that anyone can execute (regardless of skill or expertise).

How? By embracing a core truth I’ve learned after years of designing.

It doesn’t need to be beautiful, is just needs to be not ugly.

I have picked up books based on a stylish cover … which was just a few simple shapes and a pretty font. At the same time, I’ve ignored books purely because their cover was messy and the text unreadable.

Your only job with cover design is to communicate the book (to the right target audience) and not screw it up.

What do I need?

Typography

You need a font (which you’re allowed to use commercially). You can find great ones at Google Fonts. Many other great websites exist, but you’d need to carefully check if the font is “commercial use” or not. If it’s “personal use”, you need to buy a license to use it for a book cover.

For the title, you usually want a thick and bold font. This ensures it’s readable at all sizes, no matter what happens around it.

For other elements, such as the author name, you’d typically want something to contrast it. If the title consists of sharp capitals, perhaps go for something thin and more elegant. Sometimes, you can find such contrast within the same font family. (That is, the same font has different variations or styles you can use.) Otherwise, you have to find a matching second font.

Two fonts is the maximum. If you really need to, you can go for three fonts, but that’s pushing it.

A good example are my Wildebyte books. The main font for it (Megrim) is very nice … but too thin for the cover. Using it made the title just completely unreadable. So I had to design my own “thick” version of it and use that.

Obviously, most of the time you just want to find a thick font that already exists. No need to learn how font design works just for a book cover!

Finally, a common question is: which should be bigger, the title or the author’s name?

And the answer is: whichever is most recognizable.

If you’re an unknown author, keep your name small. Focus on this fancy book, a cool title, and new content. If you’re already a more established author, make your name the biggest thing, as that’s what people will recognize.

Colors

Again, you want a color scheme. But there’s no need to learn color theory or spend hours picking perfect combinations. Just visit a website like Coolors.co and generate random schemes until you find one you like. Then stick to it.

It’s as simple as that. Remember the mantra: it doesn’t need to be astonishingly beautiful, it just needs to be NOT UGLY. Sticking to a color scheme—generated to be pretty by the website—guarantees this.

• Pick one color as the general background. (You want one that’s either quite dark or quite bright. A midway color makes it impossible to put anything on top of the background.)
• Pick another color for the text. (Title, author, any other major element.)
• Then use a third one for highlights. (Those are like the cherry on top. Highlight colors are subtly added, but make a design pop much more.)

When in doubt, go for contrast and legibility. It’s tempting to use loads of colors, but don’t. If it leads to unreadable text or a blinding rainbow, just pick solid black/white for your text. Keep it simple, keep it NOT UGLY.

Check the image below. Good typography (legible, distinct, contrast) and a strong color scheme (recognizable, bright, not-clashing) are better than overcomplicating and trying too much.

Illustration

This is the hardest part.

Many book covers feature a full-page illustration of some sort. You won’t find these lying around: you’ll have to create one, and preferably one that suits your book. If you have any design or painting skills, you can go for this.

Also notice, however, how many books take shortcuts.

You can go for a minimal style. No illustration, or only a simple icon. The whole background is a flat color and you choose a pretty font to make the cover look attractive. (The right font can make up for a missing illustration.)

Especially non-fiction books do this all the time. Pick up any non-fiction book, and it’s usually just …

• One flat color
• Bold text for title and author
• And a simple icon of a computer, or post-it, or pencil, or whatever seems relevant, in the center

You can also go for a pattern. Instead of drawing something difficult (like a dragon, or a knight, or whatever), you simply invent a pattern. Your book is themed around flowers? Draw one pretty flower, reuse it across the whole front. Your book is a modern, abstract book? Simply repeat a bunch of squares and circles on the cover.

The beauty of a pattern is that …

• It’s simple and easy to do. (Even with no artistic skill, you can find or create some simple icon/drawing to repeat.)
• But it fills the whole cover, so it has a huge effect on the look.

Playing with the pattern, and perhaps adding some variation, can create a very nice texture for the book cover. You won’t even need an actual illustration.

Mistake: the default settings

If you adhere to the ideas above, you’re already in good shape.

• Don’t pick more than two fonts. Pick legibility over anything else.
• Use a color scheme.
• Use a simple pattern or iconography to add texture to the whole book cover.

Where else can you go wrong? Well, amateur designers usually lack the knowledge of what is possible, so they pick whatever is the easiest to create.

Design software, for example, has quick buttons for perfect rectangles and circles. They also, usually, default to perfectly black text.

This is what makes a cover “ugly”. The design is too “perfect”. The colors are too “basic”.

The eye wants variety, something interesting, natural shapes.

As such, how do you fix this?

• Prefer picking colors that aren’t “full black” or “full red”
• If you add basic shapes, deform them slightly. (Don’t pick perfect rectangles, stretch them a bit. Don’t use perfect circles, but deform them into water droplets, for example.)
• If you add a pattern, destroy it slightly. (Don’t use a perfect grid. Offset every second row, rotate the pattern, add some randomness.)

In every design, there should be one thing that clearly draws the eye and gets the spotlight. One element that stands out and does something unpredictable. Those simple tweaks already improve your designs a lot.

Mistake: doing too much

The elements mentioned (font + author, background color + pattern, and some flair with an icon or illustration) are all you need. If you try to go beyond that, you’re probably just adding too much. You’re adding noise, making the title harder to read. You’re sending mixed messages, confusing your target audience.

For beginning designers, this often manifests in a lack of whitespace (or margins). It’s very annoying when elements of your cover are pushed too close to the border. Leave generous space around all the elements.

Doing so forces you to keep it minimal and clean. You can’t add too many elements if they all need to have generous margins around them!

This also means that text is usually centered on the page, offset quite a bit from the edge.

Now this article, however, strays into the territory of teaching graphic design. So I’ll stop here. I highly recommend simply visiting my [Design] courses (on this website) and working through those if you really want a good grasp on Graphic Design.

Getting ideas

The hardest part is probably knowing what to put on your cover in the first place.

The first thing to do is that infamous market research. Check other books with the same target audience or genre. See what colors they use, what illustrations, what kinds of fonts.

If you find a pattern, simply copy it to your own cover. It’s clearly working and sending the right message.

But, as always, don’t copy everything. A good chunk of your cover should be unique to your book. You should think about your target audience and ask yourself: “what would interest them immediately when they see this on the cover?” (And also: “what might be off-putting or send the wrong message?”)

The second thing is to think about the content.

If I have a book about pirates, then I want imagery that screams “pirate story” on the front. (Treasure chest, ship, ocean, treasure map, sword, skulls, etcetera.)

If my book is about love, then I want imagery that screams “cute romance” on the front. (Soft and bright colors, hearts, lips, kissing, hugging, holding hands, etcetera.)

Think about the content and brainstorm what kind of design elements could be associated with it.

Once you have these two elements (what works for other books + what might work for your book), just … mix and match! Experiment! It’s really hard to visualize it all in your head and immediately find the right design. Just like books, covers need multiple drafts.

Keep adding and removing elements until you find something you like.

Check the tiny sizes

These days, your book cover will often be shown as a tiny thumbnail. (Either on a web shop or on somebody’s e-reader.)

That’s why you always need to check the cover at tiny sizes. Regularly zoom out on your computer, or print it at small sizes, and check if the general idea is still there. Whether the tone, genre, atmosphere, and title still come through.

This is another reason why I recommend big, bold fonts. Yes, I’ve seen many very beautiful covers with those swirly, elegant fonts. The issue is that I’ve never been able to read the title or author, and at small sizes the cover just looks like an abstract painting with no meaning.

For the same reason, I propose picking brighter colors. A dull color palette will make your book almost invisible, subconsciously ignored by somebody scanning the page. Brighter colors make sure it pops (although contrast is the other key aspect there), and also translate better to tiny sizes.

Finally, for this reason I propose keeping it simple and using one major element (icon, illustration, something) on the cover. When tiny, this element would still be visible and the clear highlight. If you start adding more and more elements, more and more complex illustrations, you’re just making the cover harder to read.

Remember the “credits system”? Yeah, potential buyers have one credit to give you. If your cover asks too much of them—if it isn’t instantly legible or understandable—you’ve wasted the credit and they move on.

Designing a series

You should absolutely keep a consistent style for books in the same series. Readers love collecting the books and displaying them, as a set, on their bookshelf. It’s also simply the best thing to do from a design perspective.

What does this mean?

• Reuse the same font
• Reuse the same color scheme. (Or assign one unique color per book, so that the whole series combined creates the full color scheme.)
• Reuse the same basic template. (Font size, positioning of elements, general style of illustration.)

To prevent books looking identical, you change a few elements.

• The actual text being displayed.
• The actual image or illustration covering most of the book cover.
• Perhaps a numbering systems or unique subtitles as well.
• Perhaps a unique icon per book.

Conclusion

This was a high-level overview of how to create your own book covers. The core elements are pretty simple.

• Find fonts that fit and are legible
• Find a good color scheme and adhere to it
• Find patterns, iconography, imagery that fits your genre and book content

Give everything ample space. Choose clarity, legibility and minimalism over everything else. Then experiment and rearrange until you find something you like.

Even then, this is a skill you need to train and improve. Subsequent book covers will become easier and easier, while you’re able to do more and more “fancy stuff”.

The hardest part will be getting the illustrations, especially if you want them to be “full-page” (covering the whole cover, not just one element within it). I’ve constantly switched between different methods of creation (drawing by hand, designing on the computer, using photoshop, etcetera) and still don’t know the fastest or best way. Fortunately, as I illustrated, many covers don’t even need one.

Of course, with the arrival of generative AI (such as DALL-E or Stable Diffusion), you can simply ask the computer to generate paintings until you find one that fits. This is, however, not a silver bullet. Unless you put in the effort, you’re unlikely to find something that actually works for your cover. It’s also, at the moment, legally questionable.

You can probably guess my philosophy. I suggest putting that time and effort into actually learning graphic design and illustration. Gather this deep knowledge for yourself, instead of getting the superficial knowledge of “how to make this darn AI do what I want”.

Your opinion on this might differ. That’s fine. Just make sure you never get into legal issues with your book cover. Don’t use (stock) photos to which you don’t own the rights, nor fonts that require a license you don’t have.

And in the end, just remember the mantra.

It doesn’t need to be pretty, it just needs to be not ugly.

When you get a thought like “well it looks pretty if I add this, BUT now the text is less legible / now the design is full / I’m not sure if these two colors work together”—immediately stop yourself and don’t add the thing.