Transcripts
1. Introduction: hello and welcome to this course on using camera to create book cover designs. In this course, we're going to go over the tools inside of camera to create your book cover designs. This software is free. It's free to set up, and it has a lot of images that you can use free inside of the program itself. And this course we will learn how to research book cover designs, what you need to know when using images within your book covers and how to actually use the templates and different tools within this software to begin creating your own book cover designs. Now this course is really for beginners who have never experienced this before and who don't have a big understanding of how they would go about creating their book cover designs . So if that sounds like you than this course is definitely going to help you out now, we won't go real depth into the graphic design theory of the way we do the things we dio. But I do want to show you the basics of where to get started when creating your own book cover design. These book cover designs can be used in any platform, such as the Kindle store, the iBook store or even with physical book products. But there are some things that you need to be aware of before you begin to create and as you are into the creating process, so definitely check out this course. I hope you enjoy it and let's move on into the first lecture.
2. What You Need from this Course for Your Success: So before we begin, I would like to show you how to take this course so that it's easier for you, especially if you're new to the you know, me platform. So you're going to see some things a little differently because I'm looking at it from my instructor end. So you, from the student, will see this course a little different than what I do here. But a lot of it's pretty much the same. So this is where you will take the course and to take any lecture. You will just click one time on these and we'll go Or that in just a moment. Now, something that I would like for you to do is to go ahead and introduce yourself into the discussion area, and you do that by clicking the add discussion. But in here so you can add a discussion and you can title it, and I want you to go ahead and just introduce yourself what you're working on. If your book writer tell us about your book or what you expect to get from this course and just give us a little bit beef brief description and post it here and I'll respond. And that was we can all just stay engaged as a class together. Now, when we're done and you're finished designing your book cover, there is an insert image button here that you can go ahead and put your image into a new discussion that ways we can give you feedback as a class on what looks good, what's working and what isn't working. And it's always good to get opinions from others to help make yourself as a better student . Now, some other things about this dashboard that you'll see as there's an announcements area throughout the course of time through the year, I will actually be providing announcements here. These will be educational announcements that will help further your education, give tips, tricks, feedback and other things that I think about throughout the year. So check back there. Often You will also see in the top right hand corner a review system so you are able to leave a review. If you find this course helpful, please do that. It both helps me understand what students like or don't like about the course, and it helps other students who are joining the course know what this course is about. And if it's something they should take or should take now, Like I said, there are some other things here that won't pertain to you or that you probably won't even see. But those were some of the key points that I want you to focus on when you take this course . You can also share the course with your friends and family by clicking this button up here so you can gift this course. You can do a bulk purchase if you are needing this for a group of people. And you can also share this on Facebook Twitter or email it to a friend. And I would be ever so grateful if you did something like that for me. Now, let's go ahead and take a look at how you take this course. So we just click on a lecture here, and when we do that, it's going to bring up the course itself. And as you can see, we have all those lectures on the right hand side and I'm just gonna pause this video. Um, it's ah, pick something else to look at here. Eso Ah, you'll see the lecture here. And of course, we have our typical playing pause buttons. We can rewind or fast forward 15 seconds here, we can actually speed up and slow down the lectures. So, um, I personally and I know a lot of people like to speed up courses. If it's, um, you know, some general information. Now, when I'm going through some of the more complex things, you probably wanna have it at the normal speed. But even me as an instructor, when I watch courses, I like to speed them up. Either 1.25 or 1.5 times. It just Ah, it just helps out. Go through the course a little quicker and get the information. You can mute the sound over here, and then there's a quality playback. Sometimes this will get set to a lower resolution, so always check to make sure if something looks blurry or doesn't look right. Go ahead and click on this and make sure that you have a higher resolution. You can also make it full screen. If you would like to watch this course in full screen, Um, if this is information you've already seen or already know, you can just market as completed and then move on with this button here and you can skip to the next lecture or the previous lecture, and then you can go back to your course dashboard at the top, left on the right hand side, we have a list of all of our lectures. Um, there's a button up here that had some information about what each lecture is about. Some lecture descriptions. There is a discussion for each lecture. So this is just like posting a general discussion in your course dashboard. You can do a new discussion within certain lecture. So if you have a specific question on a specific lecture, that's how you would leave a discussion for that here and then Finally, there is a notes taking area. So if you want to take notes while you're taking this course, this is a great place to do that. So that is just some general information on how to take this course again. The biggest strong point that I can recommend is leaving a discussion for me and for other students. If you have any questions, definitely leave those in the discussion area. I would really be grateful if you would go ahead and introduce yourself so I can get to know the students a little better. And then at the end, anytime you design any book covers, go ahead and create a new discussion and upload that image so that we can take a look at what you're working on.
3. Write Down Your Book Ideas: So before we begin, I have a small project that I want you to do. The first thing you need to do is grab a sheet of paper or open up a text document on your computer, and what I want you to do is I want you to brainstorm what this book is about, that you're designing the Cover four and who this is going to be. Four. If you don't have a book idea already or a book created, just come up with something in your head that you would like to design a book cover for. But you need to get into the mind of the readers and the people who would be buying this book. The book cover is the first thing that anyone sees when they're going to purchase a book. So it's very important that you kind of get inside the head of those people and try to figure out what would please them and what they would look for. Now you may think that you want your book to stand out above the crowd when you are publishing on platforms such as Kindle. What research has shown that specific book feels and looks that they have about them are geared toward readers. And when readers see these books, they automatically know what the's books are about. So a horror or thriller book has a certain look and feel that is commonly used within those books to kind of let people know when they see that type of book cover that that is what that book is going to be on. So the first thing I want you to do is I want you right to write down the title of the book , the subtitle of the book, The category or genre that's going to be in. So is it going to be fiction or nonfiction? Is it a financial book? Is it a program development book? Is it a horror book or romance novel? Write those things down, then write down some things that you would like to see on the cover. When you think about this book title and the type of book it is, what are some images that come to mind? What is some colors that you think about? What is the style of font or texts that you would use in this book? Covered? You want something clean or elegant, Or do you want something grungy or something that looks like blood? Even so, you want to have these kinds of ideas in your mind before you begin. This is just a brainstorming process for you to start getting an idea in your head about the types of things that you're looking for. Now it is imperative to know that if you take a little bit graphic design theory on things such as composition, typography and color theory, it will actually help you out a lot. So I strongly suggest that you go and research some of that types of things. But it's good to know, you know, if you're creating ah, horror book color such as, you know, bright pinks and yellows might not be the type of thing that you want. So you want to start thinking about these things. What colors do you want to portray that's going to give the feel that you're going for? If you're creating a nonfiction book about leadership, then you might want to use colors such as blue, because those colors represent loyalty and respect and trustworthiness. So you might want to use those kinds of colors versus something like red that might be a little more irritable or angry or mad or love. So it's good to know things like color theory. The fonts and typography that you're going to use is also very important, because if you're writing a romance novel, but you have these very kid friendly looking fun, it might not really mesh really well. And definitely the images and images are big import, important part of your book. So you want that image to reflect the kind of book that you're going for Now. I'm gonna show you how to do some research and look at some book covers online. It's pretty self explanatory, but you should definitely do that in the next process. When we begin researching to look at these book covers and try to figure out what fonts are they using, what colors are they using? How is the composition? Is there a lot of stuff on the book cover or not that much? So my project to you is to get out of sheet of paper, write down some basics about this book. What is this book about? What's the title? The subtitle. What's the category? What's the genre? What are some colors that come to mind. What are some fonts that come to mind? What are some images come to mind and just doing this little brainstorming activity will start getting your head in the right mind of the reader and what you're trying to portray to them.
4. How Can Graphic Design Theory Help You: having a small understanding of graphic design theory can go a long way, even if you're not an artist. Most people who create book covers on their own or even outsource them to others don't understand these basic principles. So learning a little bit about this can help you create design or even choose the best fit for your book. So let's go ahead and take a look at some of the basic graphic design theory principles. Just so you understand a little bit about this now, I have other courses that go a lot more in depth if you're interested in this topic. But right now I just want to touch on some basic principles for you to understand and look out for whether you are designing your own cover or if you decide to have someone else design it for you. The first thing that we're going to look at is what's called the elements of design, and this is going to be the basic building blocks of your design. Things such as objects, lines, typography and color shaped direction, size, scale, texture, value in space. These are the things that make up what you're actually seeing. So they are the basic building blocks that your design is going to be created with. Next. We have principles of design, and what that does is it combines all of those elements of design cohesively to relay a certain message. So it's using things such as contrast, emphasis, proportion, rhythm, harmony, movement and balance to shape your design. So we'll take the things such as the objects and lines and color, and use those in unique ways to help get your message across. The third thing we like to talk about is color theory, and this adds feelings, emotions and moved to a design element or image. And it's good to know that different colors have different color meanings, and these could be based on different things, such as culture, religion and political views. When we talk about color, we tend to talk about its you or the name of the color, its value, which is the brightness or darkness of a color in its saturation or intensity. But there's more to colors. You can have warm and cool colors, which talks about its temperature, and you can rearrange these colors and meaningful ways. We also talk about color schemes whether something is monochromatic or the same color, with varying values in saturation or analogous, such as adjacent colors on the color wheel or even complimentary split, complementary or triad colors, which is an arrangement of colors on the color wills that are pleasing to the eye. Then we talk about typography, and this is the way that Texas shown in a visual media. It's not necessarily just the words that are written, but how those words are represented. This can be talked about with its font type or font size. It's classifications how it looks, whether it's Sarah for San Serif or script. We can talk about letter spacing and line height, which is basically the negative space between words or letters. And then we can talk about its mood. Is a classical serious, grungy, rigid or elegant. We also have your basics, such as weight, which could be bold, thickness thin or medium if it's italicized its justification for its case. Finally, the last graphic design theory fundamental is composition, and this is the layout of elements in a scene to provide the look or feel that you are trying to portray. So composition is a way that we arrange these things to give that certain feel that you're going for. When we talk about composition, we talk about hierarchy, guiding lines, focal points, framing elements and alignment. We can also talk about similarities, closure and the different types away that these visuals are laid out, whether it's single visual or were using the rule of thirds or divine proportion. Now that's a lot to cover. And again, we're not going to get real deep into this because this isn't a graphic design theory course. But I want you to try to learn about these things on your own time and try to really grass at least a couple of these, because if you understand some of these things, you will be way ahead of the game. So let's go ahead and just take a look at some examples that Camba provides based on their templates. And I'll talk about a couple things that they're using and you'll start to pick these things up. You'll see him every day and marketing and advertising and on book covers and CDs and billboards, and you can start using these within your own designs. And like I said, even if at some point later on, you need to hire a designer to create your book cover. You'll still have this knowledge for you to select the best book cover available. So this 1st 1 says, illustrating monsters. And as you can see, they're using a couple different things here, such as proximity and similarity. There are also using colors that are very different but have the same types of saturation and values. So they have this cohesiveness about them. They're equally distance apart from each other in this kind of three by three grid, which is very easy on the eyes, doesn't really make any one particular monster stand out above the rest. So we get this nice variety. Put your eyes infighting to just look at one. You kind of get to warned around and look at all the different types. They're also using a very bright yellow color scheme to kind of grab your attention. And I can definitely say if you saw this in a book store or online bookstore, it would definitely jump out at you because of its very bright colors. If we go down, you can see the next one is this clean green guide for gardeners. Now again, these air just templates that canvas sets up. But they do use some graphic design theory principles in these designs. So, of course, clean green. So they're using the colors green, and you can see that they are using these kind of grass and leafy kind of image with the shoes. Now this is a very busy image, and they have a very nice clean font that is white. And because of its contrast ing values, it pops against his background so you can make out the text very easily. Now, of course, we have the watermark grid's going cross, which you normally wouldn't see, but other than that, it is a very clean type of font being used, and it's using a high contrast ing value to pop against that background. It's also interesting that they have the shoes here, which can be a couple of different things. Maybe they're targeting a certain demographic, or maybe they fit along the same type of color scheme that they're looking for. Next we have this suddenly serious cover, and as you can see, we have a little bit of hierarchy going on here. So you see, suddenly first because it's the biggest, boldest and most emphasised text on the cover. And then you can kind of, of course, naturally move down to serious, since it's in close proximity. Then you might jump down and see the name next, because it's the next thing in line based on its font size. Or you might go up and see heartbreakingly adorable because it's closer to the main subject here. Now they're using negative space by using kind of this outline of this couple, and they have totally taking out all color of this book cover. So it's a very de saturated type of book cover, so it works very well, and taking out the color gives it that kind of serious tone of the title that they're going for here. Next we have the subway, and again we have a little bit more hierarchy going on here. We also have a lot of movement with this train moving in the background and the blurred kind of vision. You get this sense of movement and rhythm going on within the scene. There's also these cool kind of guiding lines, and if you know anything about composition and guiding lines, basically these lines air kind of drawing you to the center of the cover, but they end up hitting this pillar, and this is very interesting because the pillar goes to the top, but it stops at the ceiling and then it goes down, but it keeps extending to the bottom of this page. Now, what that does is it runs into these words, and that actually helps move your eye along this document. So basically, you look at this train and you're I might move to the center and you won't look up because of this wall. There's nothing there to see. Your eyes naturally tend to go down, and then you read this text. It's a very cool trick to get your eye to keep reading this title over and over again and make it stand out in the image again. They D C saturated this image and taken away a lot of the color, which kind of goes toward the type of mood or feeling that they're going for. Next. We have this a story of marriage and war, and you might see marriage and more first. But because we typically read top to bottom, you might read this as a story of because it's close proximity. They've used a lot of color in this, but this image is also very chaotic, so that kind of war theme is portrayed here because of the chaos going on in the background . Now they've also made this text stand out not just by the color contrast of the white versus the color, but they've also blurred out the back on image a little bit. So this is making this text pop. It's very sharp versus the very blurred out and chaotic background. So you have a very nice clean text that's very sharp and highly valued with the white versus the blurred out, very chaotic, colorful background. So it helps make this text pop on this cover design. This next one is one of my personal favorites. I think this is really cool, called a ballerina's tale, and the only color that they tried to use in here is in the word tail. So they just kind of make that pop a little bit. But it's not very saturated, so it's not very intense. It's just a little bit to give it a little extra possess. They also use these very thin type of font here, which works really good. When you think of ballerinas, you think of elegance and long postures and long legs and arms and things of that nature. And this kind of goes along with that. Now we also have some guiding lines and some rhythm and movement going on. Of course, we have this hair here that has a circular kind of pattern going on, and then she has her hair when the straight lines that kind of point to that. So we already start getting this kind of circular pattern rotating around the center of the image. But then we also have her hands doing the same thing, and that is very mesmerising because it is just this constant spiraling circle of her hands going back to the center of this cover. So if you had this against some other book covers that were kind of plain disproportionate , no rhythm or valuer movement, you're I would be drawn to this because they're so much movement going on. Within this image, there are also using some framing elements. You can see there's a vignette here in a vignette is basically they've darkened the edges. The corners. You can see there a little darker down here and at the tops. That also frames this whole image and makes it give that spiraling kind of appearance to the whole image. It's a very powerful book cover there, and then the final one that I chose here is another one that has, ah, use of negative space. You can see that the color is not the image, but the negative space is the two people that are back to back now they're facing away from each other. And I do want to note here before we move on that any time that you put a person and especially a face within a book cover, it's going to make it stand out. People are naturally drawn towards faces and images of people that could be a very good thing or a very bad thing if used wrongly. So typically, if you're going to use a face, it might be better to do something like this negative space or the one before where she was turned around and you didn't actually see her face. You just kind of saw her body or silhouette. That is something you might want to think about and consider because having an actual face can distract or draw your way from the title and for what you're going for now, one thing that I think is really cool about this one is they have the title together alone . So you have the togetherness of them. But of course, they're facing away from each other. And you get that alone kind of feeling like they're not together at all. Now they have put a border around the word alone. So this is a framing elements and a shape that they've used around the word alone. And doing that has made the word alone kind of feel alone by itself. They have blocked that off. So just by doing that also gives an extra emphasis of being alone just with the way that they framed that word. So this is also another very powerful way of using typography within the book cover. So, like I said, this is a lot to take in. And I have you know, a lot more information on this and my other courses. If you'd like to learn more about this later, but just start thinking about these little kinds of things what kind of colors you're using ? What what do those colors in those moods portray? If you're using something read, that might mean something. It could be love, but it could also be hatred. Or it could be war. You need to kind of think about these types of things. What kind of fonts are using? Are you using a very nice ledge, Herbal clean, fought to get across the style of your book? Or are you doing maybe a memoir? And you want more of a cursive or scripted type of fonts and learning about composition, even though it's mostly used in video, movies and photography can also be applied to book covers. It can really be a very powerful thing to help guide people's eyes towards what you want them to see within the image. So any time that you can learn about a little more graphic design theory when creating these book covers or selecting a book cover, I strongly recommend it
5. Researching Book Covers Online: whenever I begin a new graphic design or art project. The first thing that I like to do is research. Researching will give you an idea of what is out there, what people are buying and kind of give you some ideas for things that you can use for your book covers. So the three places that I would check first would be Google, the Amazon Kindle store and then within Camba templates itself. Since that's a program we're going to be using to create this Now, I am going to give a little disclaimer here. Whenever we begin searching for things, I would like to say that sometimes there may be things that, um, people might not find suitable for Children. Ah, within the search results, Sometimes those types of things just pop up. And I just want to give you a heads up. Ah, in case you have any, uh, Children or anyone under the age of 18 watching just in case some of these things come up as we're doing some searches. I just wanted to give a low disclaimer there so I would go to Google, and the first thing I would do is I would type in something like book cover or e book cover , so we'll just start with book cover and see what comes up. And as you can see, it gives us our basic Google results. But I'm going to go up and click images. So now I can see a bunch of different types of book covers, and you can also sort these at the top. So we've got classic book covers or Children book covers and depending on what you type in , you can see different types of book covers and counting Gore's pop up here at the top. So, depending on what type of book you're creating, you might find some ideas within this search here. And you can see some really nice ones here like this Costa Rica one. It's got a cool little back cover and shows you just within the image that it's about some type of tropical island without having to see the title. And that's, you know, very important. And part of the graphic design process is you want to catch people's eyes, especially on the Internet and Web and on Kindle books and platforms. Such is that because usually these thumbnails are really small. So you want to make sure that your book is relaying a good message from, ah standpoint of a small thumbnail. And it's usually best to either create a small thumbnail of your book or zoom out in some way so that you can look at it from a smaller size and see if that message is getting across. If you have too many things on your book cover, um, or it just isn't working right. And you zoom out to a small thumbnail and it's just cluttered and you can't make out what the images, and you need to go back and redo that. So a lot of these better book covers, you could definitely zoom out and still see what they're talking about. So, um, this fish here, you could see what that's about. Um, this one by guy Kawasaki. You might not know what this book is about, but you could definitely see that butterfly image that he has on their Um, I like this one is common New erred techie kind of look to it, but I like how they've done the front and back covers of this book. Um, you know, this one here with the tree and the black and white colors kind of gives you a certain kind of feel about this type of books. So this is definitely one way that you can go about doing This is, um, searching in Google and finding book covers, and you can try all kinds of different things so you could do e book covers If you're creating that, and that will give you a whole different type of examples that you can see here. You could dio um, something like horror horror book cover and then that will give you if this is like the type of genre that you're going for, you could see a bunch of different types of your book covers, and you could do that with any type. So even if it's nonfiction, um, maybe we could type in, say, financial book cover, and you could see how financial book covers looking. You could either pool ideas or you can find out things that you could do better. So Google would be the first place that I would start, and I would even go as far as to save out these images into its own little folder or Google drive for reference when I begin creating my book cover so that I know kind of what to look for. As I'm designing now, the next logical place would be to go to Amazon into the Kindle store and look at the book covers that they have here. And, of course, you're going to see um, just some basic book covers when you pop it up, you could do by featured and you know, you can assume that if books are selling well, one of the things that is going to be the first thing people see is the book cover. So if people are buying that book, you can assume that it generally has a good book cover because that is what the first thing people see and then they buy the book. That's not always the case because there are plenty of good books out there that don't have good book covers. But you could pretty much guess that if it's selling really well and has a lot of good stars, people had to see that book cover first. You want to buy it before they ever made the purchase. So you go through and check out these different book covers. If you click on Kindle E books at the top here, you could then begin searching and sorting by, um, there select their editor's picks, and then if you go down a little further, you can do by category. So again we could do like mystery, thriller and suspense. We can click on that and see some of the book covers that they have in here, and this again will give you some ideas. And you can see things that you like or maybe wouldn't want to put inside of your own book cover and definitely gives you ideas on things such as titles, um, author names, How to do that and subtitles and and things of that nature again. These air smaller images than your actual book cover, and you want to make sure that they stand out really well and you can tell what that book is about and visually see what that book is about before anyone ever buys it. So make sure that you you create a good book cover that is read well from a um, from a zoomed out kind of position or from a small thumbnail. I can't stress that enough. So then finally, the last place that I would look would be within Camba itself. If you go to their documents, um, and you go down to blogging any books, you can see two things that we could use here. One is a e book. E books are kind of general e books, so they don't always have the name author or subtitles within them because they could just be a basic e book about 10 steps to do something. If you go to the Kindle covers, they generally four Kendall books and have the names in the subtitles. So let's go ahead and look at that. I'll just click on that here and give it a second to go ahead and load up. Okay, so now we have all these templates on the left hand side that Campbell offers. And the great thing about this is you could find one that might work for your book and then change out the title or the images, and we can go over here and scroll down and see the different ones. So you might like this one with the tree. So we click on that, and this is gives you an idea, some inspiration and is definitely a good starting point now, because this cost a dollar, they do have these watermark lines on them. Of course, once you buy and download this template for the dollar, that'll go away. But this is already set up very nicely. You know, if you didn't like the image, you could trade that out for your own image of trees. Of course, you have to be careful with things such as copyright, but anything use within camera and pay for should be protected. Always checked the licenses on this things, but it already has the author name a little quote at the top. If you wanted to have something of that nature and ah, already set up for you nice and neatly. And the cool thing about doing this within camera is that you could actually go in here and zoom these in and out if you wanted to. Um, which is another great thing for you to be able to do this so I can click on this minus button, and you could zoom these out and see what that look book looks like from a distance so you could click on a couple of these. And as you can see, they've read really well, even at a smaller thumbnail. So that's something that you definitely want to keep in mind. Go ahead, zoom back in a little bit and you could go in and get some inspiration from these templates that they've already created. There's a lot of them in here and, as you can see, is a scroll down more from pop up and, um, definitely use these for your own book covers. And like I said, it's very easy to come in and swap out things such as images and text and titles and things of that nature and then course at the bottom. They just have some pre made layouts. But whenever you begin, I shortly suggest that you do some research. It's not too copy someone per se, but it definitely helps in giving you some inspiration and to help you see what you like and don't like about certain book covers.
6. Book Cover Specifications: Whenever you design a book, the first thing that you're going to need to know is the specifications of the platform that you're designing this book cover four. So whether it is an e book that you're hosting on your own website or you're publishing on the Kindle store, or if you're even creating a physical book cover, you will need to know the file dimensions, the file, tight resolution and so on that you can use. Now you'll have to look these up for each specific platform, but I can go ahead and give you, Ah, little bit of tips for thanks to look out for and watch for when designing your cover. So let's go ahead and look at the Kindle platform. So I'm going to type and kindle book cover specifications. And here you can see at the top cover image. Amazon Kindle direct publishing. I'm going to go ahead and click on that, and this brings up their page on what they look for whenever you're creating a cover image for Kindle. So they give you some notes here at the beginning, and as we scroll down, you can see the certain specifications that they want so the file types that they accept R J P, E G and T I F f now Camba when working in it will actually allow you to export and J P e g . You can also exporting camera a PNG file, which is non compressed, and then you could convert that in another program, such as Adobe Photo Shop. Then we have the dimensions. So this says that the requirements for the size of your cover art must be in a height with ratio of at least 8 to 5 or 1.6. And they say that's a minimum of 625 pixels on the shortest side and 1000 on the longest side. But for best quality, your image should be 2500 pixels on the longest side. So what does that mean? Well, you can have different aspect ratios for different books, and this is basically the width and height of your book. So some books are kind of thin and narrow, and some books are a little wider. Well, let's figure out how we can look at those different types of aspect ratios, and there are three main ones that I've seen used in book covers. There's 1.33 which is a four by three. This is sort of like your old television sets, the kind of more square look to them. There's a 1.5, which is three by two, and then there's a 1.6, which is eight by five. Or it's also referred to a 16 by 10. Now, your HD TVs and computer monitors are typically in 16 by nine. Well, this is 16 by 10 so it's kind of very close to that more longer and narrower format. So let's go ahead and take a look at this real quick if I pull out my calculator. Basically, what this is saying is eight by five, so that would be 800 pixels by 500 pixels. So let's go into camera and just pull that up and see what that looks like real quick. So I'm going to go over to my camera designs here, and I'm going to click on use custom dimensions so the width is going to be 500 my height is going to be 800 and I'll click design. Okay, here you can see the template that it provides, and it is a basic, long, narrow style format. Go ahead and zoom into 100 here, and just so we can see this a little better, just give it a blue background so you can see that this this is the type of format. It's sort of long and narrow, and this would be considered eight by five or 16 by 10 and it's also a 1.6 aspect ratio. So let's go back and we're gonna look at the next one down. So I'm going to use custom dimensions and we'll just use the basic. So let's say we use a three by two, which is a 1.5, so that would be 200 by 300. Okay, of course, it's a little small, but you can see that this style is actually zoom in one more time here. This style is actually a little bit wider than the one that we looked at before, so it's actually a little wider here. If you go back and look at this one, you can see it's kind of long and narrow. This one is still long, but a little wider on its end. Okay, let's look at the last one, which is a four by three or 1.33 This one's sort of common pretty common, So use custom dimensions. So we're just going to say 300 by 400. Now, you can see here that this one is getting a little more square, so it's getting, ah lot longer on its with and maintaining that same height. So if we click through these, you can kind of see we have the very long and narrow one in that kind of midsize one here and then the four by three here, which is a little wider. This is typically what you see in physical print form. So whenever you're looking at physical print forms, this is the one that you would look at. But if we look at Amazon kindle publishing, they don't want that for by three they want the eight by five, the long and narrow one. So you would need to design if you're designing a Kindle cover in that aspect ratio. Now, you could use programs to design a book cover and all three of these, and with camera, you're gonna have to redesign this from scratch unless you'd use their software, um, paid subscription, which is canvas for work. So I've got the link pulled up here and basically can before work does a lot of really cool things that helps you out with branding and multiple things. And you can see that you can pay here either monthly or annually. But one of the main things that it would do to help you is this right here resized designs for every occasion. So this allows you to create a template or a book cover and then automatically resize those two different dimensions. They do offer a 30 day trial so you could try that out and mess around with it and see if it's something that you're interested in. But I would say you should pick the format or platform that you're designing for, and then design in that aspect ratio from the beginning. And if you need to resize that, you could do it in another program such as photo Shop, or you could use something like this camera for work, where it will magically recites for you. But with the freeze came a software it does not allow you to do that. So you would need to create each three of those from scratch. Let's go back for a minute and look at what they said here. So we did 800 by 500 but say we wanted to do a higher resolution. Well, they suggest a minimum of 6 25 by 1000. Now, this is still in the same 1.6 aspect ratio. And how do we know that? Well, I can show you how to do this on a calculator so that you can figure out every aspect ratio that you need to know. And it's simple division, um, meth problem. So let's say we want the longest side of 1000. So I take 1000 and I divide that by the aspect ratio 1.6. So I have 1000 divided by 1.6. That gives me 625. So this is their minimum requirements, and this is what you could design in 1000 by 625. So we go to camera, use custom dimensions with 625 height, 1000 design, and it'll pop up now I'm going to go ahead through this background on here again, and I'm gonna move this tab over to the 1st 1 that we did. These 2 500 by 806 25 by 1000 are in the same aspect ratio. They look the same, but this is just a higher resolution, which means it's not gonna look so blurry and pixelated as this lower resolution would. So the higher the resolution you you can use the better, But you still maintain that same aspect ratio. So let's go to our calculator, and we're gonna type in 800 divided by 1.6, and we get 500 so we can see we're in the same aspect ratio. So if we wanted to design an even higher resolution, cover weaken, go back to Kendall and they say, for best quality, your image to be 2500 pixels, but they don't tell you what the shorter side should be. Well, we can figure that out with the same math problem. So we just say, 2500 divided by 1.6 his 1562.50. So if you wanted to do the best quality image for Kindle, it would be 2500 by 1562.5, and it would maintain that same 88 by five or 1.6 aspect ratio. And you can do this with the other aspect ratios. So, for instance, say we wanted to use that same 2500 pixels what we wanted to do. The four by three aspect ratio. Well, that is divided by 1.33 That's four by three. So I hit in her, and that would be 1879 0.70 point seven or 70.69 However you want it to round that or 1880 if you wanted to round that up and the way that we find that is the same way just by dividing. So if if we didn't know what the number was to divide by, we would just say we want a four by three aspect ratio we do. Four divided by three is 1.33 so we know what the aspect ratio. It's 1.33 so I can do that with any number. Now I can say 1000 divided by 1.33 is 752 roughly. So if I wanted a four by three with 1000 pixels on its longest side, it shorter side would be 752. I hope that makes sense. It's very basic, easy math, and you can find these calculators online if this if math isn't your strong suit. But all you have to remember is whatever aspect ratio you want, you can divide it by and find the number to divide that by So say we wanted a three by two aspect ratio. This is another common one. So we say three Divide by two. This is a three by two aspect ratio is 1.5. Now weaken. Divide that number into any resolution that we want. So if we had 1000 on our longest side, divided by 1.5, it would be 667 on a shorter side, and that would give you a three by two aspect ratio. So our 1st 1 that we did is eight by five. So eight divided by five is a 1.6 and as we know before 1000 divided by 1.6 is 625. And that's the minimum that Amazon Kindle requires you to have. So that is the aspect ratio. Again, there are some other things that you need to be aware of, and the Kindle publishing platforms, such as your image, should be less than 50 megabytes. This is why they suggested J P E G because it's compressed and will keep that file size down. So you would want to use a high resolution like this 2500 pixels, but then used J. P. G to compress it, which is gonna give a little bit of degradation and quality. But keep that file size really, really low. And, um, make sure you save your file 72 dots per inch, which I believe is standard. If you're using camera and they have some other notes and RGB, you don't have to worry about this too much. But if you ever have any problems, you can definitely message me and asked me and I can help you out with that. So, um, you will need to look at these for each one of the platforms that you do. You design for and depending on whatever platform you want to publish on whether it be a physical book, Amazon kindle Apple's iBooks. Um, if you're doing an e book on your own website, you need Teoh. Understand this a little bit, but it's not so important because there's no requirements for your own E book. You could just stick with one of the standard aspect ratios and keep the resolution a little high and be good. But if you're designing for a specific platforms such as Amazon Kindle, you should definitely find its page. Where has this information and look that up So you make sure that you're designing it right from the beginning and don't have to go back and fix it later on.
7. Using Images For Your Book Cover: one of the main things that you will use for your book cover is going to be an image. So it's important that you kind of brush up on your knowledge as faras copyrights go when using images for your book cover. One of the best places to find this information is the Creative Commons website, where you can find information on licensing and royalty free type of artwork. So if you go to creative commons dot org's, it will bring this main page up for you, where you can do a lot of extensive research. Now. I am not a lawyer, and I do not provide any type of lawyer feedback or any type of, ah, legal information. But I do just want to show you where you can find some information and kind of what to look for. But I do suggest that when doing any type of design, whether it be book covers, graphic design or anything that you plan on using for sale, you should definitely study on the laws and regulations of each individual country and especially things such as trademarks and copyrights. You don't want to go through the whole process of getting a book sent out to a publishing platform to later find out that you are not allowed to use that artwork. So if you go to this website creative commons dot org's and you go to the top, there's a licenses button that you can click on, and we can click on about the licenses when I select that it's going to bring up the licenses page, and it's going to give you some basic information. What we want to look at for right now is down here at the bottom these air symbols that are used within different websites to show you what you can do with different types of copyright licenses. So this is a good resource toe have handy and to look at often, so the 1st 1 is what's called attribution. So you see the CC symbol and then the slow picture of a guy it says attribution. This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak and build upon your work even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offer. So basically this is the one that we're really going to want to look for, cause what it is saying is that you can use these images in commercial work and you can tweak and edit them, which is what you're going to be doing a lot of changing the colors, cutting things out, moving it around. So this is really the one that you want to pay attention to. The next one is attribution Share like and this is basically saying that the license lets others remix, tweak and build upon your work, even for commercial purposes, as long as it they credit you and license their new creations under identical terms. So this is saying that you can, you can tweak and uses for commercial purposes. But whenever you redistribute the image, you have to make sure that you are allowing to use the same type of licence for other people. So it's basically saying if if someone uses your work, they are allowed to also add it and tweak that information based on the share like attribution. Then we have the attribution, no derivatives, and this says this license allows for redistribution commercial and non commercial, as long as it's passed along unchanged in whole with credit to you. So this is not really going to be beneficial to us because we're going to be editing our images. And this is basically saying you cannot do that because you're not allowed to change the image. And then we have noncommercial licenses, which we definitely won't be able to use because we are most likely going to be using these books for print and for selling and for commercial purposes. So we have the noncommercial licenses here, So this is a good place to read up on these. Have this handy if you are looking around at images and and so on. And this is a good Web site. Like I said to check out this information. Okay, so where do we find images? There are a lot of websites where you can find images, and one thing that you can do is you can go to Google and type in royalty free images, and these were going to be images that you are going to be allowed to use whether you pay for them or their free, and you have to give attribution to them. So this is one way that you can search and there are hundreds and thousands of different types of websites that offer royalty free images. I'll show you some of the common ones that I use. The 1st 1 is the Wikipedia Commons website, so if we go here or we type in commons dot wickham media dot org's, it'll bring up the Wikimedia Commons website That has a lot of role to free images that you can use and they always have a picture of the day and you can also do some searching. So let's just say that we were doing maybe a thriller and we wanted to maybe have a picture of an axe on our cover so I would type in acts and it will bring up different images within the Wikimedia Commons Free Media repository that we can actually use. So let's just say we like this splitting axe here shows you the image and we have more details and down here the bottom. I'm going to click on that and it's going to give me all the information about this Father has been uploaded, so it shows our resolution. So you do want to pick a high resolution image even if you have to crop it or cut it down. You generally want to pick the highest resolution so that it looks the best and not pixelated or compressed. I'm going to go down and you can see the license information. So here we have the description when it was uploaded and the author if you're giving attribution. These is the author name that you would want to use may be in the front or back of your cover of your book. You would, you know, like to say I found images. Um and these are the authors. Typically, this information is in the back of a book, but here is the actual copyright information. So as you can see, this is an basic attribution license. So you're free to share and to remix this work as long as you attribute the work and the manner specified by the author and you do a share light. So if you're redistributing and edited, you also have to get the same type of licenses so other people can edit it also. But basically it gives their information, um and and the author down here at the bottom so you could give them the attribution in your book for the image that you used and this is if you use other images in your book also . So the Wikimedia Commons is a very great website because most of the stuff in here it's free to use and a lot of them you don't even have to give attribution to they just allow you to just use it. Um most of them, though, will allow you to use them as long as you are giving attribution to the original author. Another great site for using images is flicker. So let's just search for, um Se Dragon Here we have, ah, some different pictures of some dragons that we might want to use again. I apologize. The Finney images pop up that are not suitable for Children within these search results. But I must say we pick something like this little emblem here. Okay? And here is a picture of the image, and if you scroll down, I'll show you the information how it was taken, what kind of camera, And then you can see the different types of copyright symbols that are being used. So this is attribution. But it is non commercial, so we would not be able to use this image. It's type in tree here. And then you can also search by different licenses within flick or so you can come over here and you can click on any license and we can you click on commercial use and modifications allowed. So when we click on that, it's on Lee going to give us images that we are actually allowed to modify and use commercially. So that is one setting that you're going to want to keep on. So go ahead and click on this image here and when we scroll down and you look at the information, there are no types of attribution or any type of licenses for this photo, so you can definitely use this now. It all is always good practice if it doesn't say specifically to still give the original author credit because, you know, they took the time to take this picture and put it up for free. So I would suggest you, um, giving credit where credit is due. Some other sites that you can look at his picks obey picks. Obey is great. It has a lot of free images. Um, they also have some sponsorship through shutter stock. So when you do a search, you might see some images at the top. That's a shutter stock that you need to pay for. It will redirect you to their site so you can see these at the top here. Um, but then there are some free images that you can use down below so we can click on one of these and you can see the license here. Free for commercial use, no attribution required. You can download this image and multiple resolutions. Then there's the shutter stock website, and here is an actual paid for site where you can buy images and then you can actually have the means to edit them and do whatever you would like with, Um, and you can see the different pricing plans here. You can do it by image or any type of recurring monthly fees. There's Istock. Photo is another great website Photo Dune, which is through the in Vado Market, allows you to also by images. Some of them are dollar. And then, of course, you can buy images within Camba $4 to use. So if we dio um, elements and we click on photos, you can see that some of them images in here are free for you to use, and then some of them do cost a dollar for you to buy and use within your covers. So here's a free image. I can click on that and pops it in there for me. And if I scroll down a little bit and get past these free ones, you can see some of the ones they'll say $1 us. So I click on that and it's got the copyright, um, watermarks on them until you actually down the your cover design, and they'll ask you to pay for that. So camera has an extensive resource of images that you can also use within their database. So that is how you can add some images to your designs. Make sure that you learn about copyrights and you're doing everything legally. Like I said, the worst thing that you can do is have that book go out to print or be published on a platform, and then later find out that you are in some serious trouble for using artwork, graphics or images that are copyrighted
8. A Quick Overview Of Canva: before we begin designing, let me go ahead and show you an overview of canvas. So you kind of can get an idea of where everything is when we log into camera and you will need to create an account. And again, it is for free. You will see the main dashboard area here. Now I've got the bottom blurred out. This is where your projects are shown. And I do have this blurred out now because I'm working on some private projects and, you know, don't don't want to ah, break any legal contracts that I have going on. But this is where you would see all of your projects down here. Um, you have created design button at the top left, so you can begin creating designs instantly. You can see designs a, um you have and that your are also being shared with you on the bottom left. You can upgrade to camp. If work has a lot of cool features. I suggest checking out. You don't need to use it, but it does have one feature in there you might find useful, and that's the ability to resize your design. So if you're creating multiple size book covers, you can resize those to the different formats that you need at the top. You can see some pre made templates that camera offers, and this is a great program for using a lot of different things, such as making blah, graphics, Facebook posts, posters, presentations and so on. Now, if we click the more button, you're going to see all of their templates. So here we have, um, everything from presentations to e book covers, infographic, social media posts, um, documents. There's a whole gamut of stuff that you can choose from here. So if we go up, you can see this section here, blogging and e books, and these are the two that we will most likely be using. There's the E book. And then there's the Kendall cover. Now the e book are going to be generally books, so they might not contain things such a subtitles or author names because they could just be a basic e book that you have for your website. Kendall covers are usually for the Kendall platform. Therefore, they're going to have things such as author names on them so we can click on any of these templates and as you can see when I have her over them. It shows that the dimensions of those, um, of those templates, So for you know, this block title shows that dimension. If I go to a presentation, you can see that dimension now. Camba is really good about updating these dimensions is one. The strong points of this platform is that they stay current with these dimensions, so you are able to come in here, and if anyone makes a change on their dimensions or minimum requirements, Campbell will update them. We can also go to the top and click on use custom dimensions, and when we click on that, you can type in the width and height. If you have a specific dimension that you would like to use, so exit that we'll go ahead and open up the Kindle cover templates. So I'll just click on that one time and given a minute now when it loads up here, you can see that it has all of these pre made layouts on the left hand side, and there's a bunch of them in here so you can scroll through and click on any one of these and you automatically pop the layout in there for you, and you can edit that how you would, like, change out the images, change out the text and just begin designing right away. You can also search, So if you're looking for a particular image or ah, clip art a graphic, you can do that up here. A lot of their stuff is for free. If you do have to pay for anything, it is only $1 so that's very nice. You can click on elements on the left hand side, and you can see there are different categories for different types of design elements, such as shapes, lines, photos, charts and illustrations. If you click on text, this is where you can drop in text and they have different text layouts, which is really nice. They have different backgrounds, so you can have just a single color background. Or you can have any of these types of textured backgrounds or image backgrounds and then the upload section in the bottom left hand side. If you would like to upload your own artwork to the design at the top, we have file so we can save this and we can make a copy. So sometimes what I'll do is all edit something. Then I'll make a copy and edit that. So if I need to revert back to the original, I can do that. There's a none do so you can undo any mistakes that you made. Ah, you can name your design up here By clicking on this. You can give it a title and call it whatever you would like. You can share this with other people in Can va you can download. So if I click on download, it gives us our options. JP, gene, PNG or PDS. And then there are some more options if I click on the options button, such as if you want crop marks and bleeding now because I used a template that's paid for and you know this by the watermarks. If I click on this, it's going to ask me if I would like to go ahead and make that purchase. So here you can see the area where I could go ahead and buy this with my credit card, and then they also have savings where if you buy multiples, you can actually save some money. If you plan on doing a lot of designing. Within Camba, you can also download ah water mark draft. So it'll let you download this for free with the watermark so you can kind of make sure it's gonna be perfect for what you need before you make any purchase is. And then you can also make this public or private if it's set to public. Other people in camera can see this. And then if it's private on Lee, you will see that I can also add pages. So if I was actually making an e book or another type of book inside of camera, I could make multiple pages and say this out of, say, a pdf. And it makes it really easy for you to rearrange these pages later on. There's also a need help button in the bottom right hand corner. If you would like Teoh, get some more help within their frequently asked questions, or they're blogged that they have. So this is a very powerful program, and we will start designing and showing you more about what it can do. But that's just a basic overview of all the things within side of camera. Now also have other courses that go more deep into the software. And I have courses on graphic design theory that will help you understand the why we do the things that we do, so definitely check out those courses also.
9. Using A Pre Made Canva Template: Let's go ahead and take a look at how we would use one of these templates to design a book cover. So I went into camera and I click on the plus sign to pull up all the different templates. And under the blogging and e book section, you can see we have E books and Kendall covers, so I'm going to go ahead and click on the Kendall cover and just give that a moment to load . And when this pops up, it's going to go ahead and give us our preset kindle dimensions that we need and some layouts on the left hand side. We can scroll through these and take a look at all the different ones and as you scroll down, more going to populate and then at the very bottom. They have these frame templates, so you could use one of these to automatically put in different sections that you would like. But we're not going to deal with that right now. We will just go back and maybe pick one that we see might be trying to cool. So I like this toddlers one. So let's just click on that and you see it pub automatically in the design area of camera. So at the top we have a kind of a subtitle or quote that they've rotated. And I kind of like the way this hooks. We have the picture of our toddler. Then we have the title and the name. And then you have this little blurb here at the bottom. Zoom in so that we can edit this a little easier. Okay, so the first thing that I would want to do is probably switch out this image here. Now I can go to the elements and I can click photos and find an image that we would like to use. No, it's probably best to pick a vertical image since we are dealing with book covers and we want to have something vertical. So, for instance, I could go ahead and click this image and drag it over here and with canvas. As you can see, since we're using this type of template the minute that I dragged this, it automatically starts to put it into that frame for me, which is very nice. Now it's also doing something else. So let me go ahead and minimize this real quick and it's using the filter that was already on there. So if I click this image and you can't see it, let me scroll down a little bit here, Okay? At the bottom. I might need a zoom out to see this better. So I got this screen cast recording going on, and it's ah, kind of messing with, um, what I'm doing here soon let me hide this task bar, okay? They were getting so that will make this a little easier to see. So now you can see these options at the bottom. Here we have. You know, you can trash this crop it use filters or whatever. Now, first of all, we weaken. Position this by double clicking on it, and you can see I can move it around now because it's already a vertical image. There's not much that we really need to move here, but if you had a horizontal image, you can move this left and right up and down and so forth. I'll just keep that. But it's using this filter. So I'm going to click on the filter button and you're going to see some filter options pop up. And they have some presets, kind of like you would have in a smart phone or a camera that I can go through and pick these different styles. And this is a really cool little feature just to come in here and mess around with these images so I can find one that I like. I can also click the advanced options and adjust these separately on my own so I could do, say, the intensity, brightness, contrast saturation. I can change the color so the tent I can make it blurry, Um, and when I blur this, you can see that that text starts to pop out. So this is one trick that will definitely allow your text to pop out on the screen if it's not doing so already. I can also make it very sharp, but I go into the far left hand side. We can give it this ex process, which is just Ah, cool little feature gives it this neat, neat look and then a vignette, which is this dark cornering. So if you look at the corners, you'll see them actually get darker as I move this around, and it kind of helps block in that image so we'll give that a little bit of that. Um, what's one? I mean, do you saturated? I kind of like this. Look, I think this is kind of neat and Okay, Okay. So now we could mess around with the image and get it exactly how we would want it to look , and then I can come in here and just easily at it. This text, however I would like so we could change the title. Um, let me just Ah, I don't know what to call this will just say we'll just call it thoughts. You know, someone's thinking. And maybe our book is called thoughts. And then we could put our name in here and, um, say I don't like that text being the same. I could actually select that and change the text. And then I might need to resize this a little bit. Maybe try something else here. It's kind of cool, you know? Okay. So, as you can see, I can go in here and just make all these changes. I can change us out if I wanted to, and then we've got this little blurb up here, okay? And, ah, I might want to center this so it looks a little better. And as you can see, that's kind of blending in the background because we have not high contrast. So maybe I want to change these colors around. I might want to pick one of those darker colors that are being used in the image. So maybe this kind of gray that weighs its ah popping against that light color of the background. And once I put a color in here, it saves it for me. So I could just pick that same great game so that ways it just blends in a little more on probably actually make this a little bigger me and maybe moving around a little bit. So all right, so it's just that simple to come in here with a pre made template and move around some things. Of course, I didn't give this a whole lot of thought. I just wanted Teoh show you real quickly how to do this. If I was designing, I would spend a little more time and have ah better thought process of ah that the funds I'm going to use the colors where I'm going to place things. Things such as composition. But as you can see, it's very easy to just come in here right away, grab a template and just move it around and get a book cover done very easily if you don't already have some knowledge of graphic design theory or aren't exactly graphic design artist. But you would like to do your own book cover, maybe to save time or money, so hopefully that helps you out. And they have a lot of images and a lot of templates. So I definitely recommend coming in here and just playing around with the software. The best way that you're going to learn is to just come in and try these out for yourself.
10. Designing A Book Cover: let us take a look now at how we would design our own book cover from scratch. So the first thing we need to do is go ahead and get our template set up and I'm going to click on Use custom dimensions in Canberra on the top right hand side, and we're going to use Amazon kindles minimum requirements. So that's going to be 625 pixels by 1000. And I'll hit design. You know, go ahead and bring up the design dashboard where we can begin our artwork. Now when it pulls up, we have our blank canvas and you see some layouts on the left hand side that we can use, and I'll just quickly show you what these layouts will allow us to do. And there is a lot of, um, but basically, um, let's choose an interesting one here. Let's just say we picked this this layup so we have three boxes here, and we can click on any of these and we can click the little picture and give it a solid color. So it it acts as a template or a grid for us to, um, change out colors and images, and it works really good with images. So if I goto elements and I click on photos, I can take an image and drag it over. And as I get near, it will automatically try to drop it within that that grid section. And this works really, really well, this is a really cool feature of canvas, so I can drop it in there and say, I want to move it, Aiken, just double click. And now I can move this left and right forward and backwards and then hit the check mark when I get it to where I want. So this is one way to design by allowing us to have these different types of layouts where we can, um, put the information in, however we see fit. Now, when using something like this, you may want to consider doing a little pre design at the beginning, maybe on a sheet of paper, to try to get a rough idea of what you would like for it to look like. Um, I find that helps out a lot more, but you could just click one of these and then just start dropping in images in seeing how they work together. So if you had, you know ah, book on some different types of maybe nature. You could put these here. You could do another image at the top, or you could just do a solid color and then type in your book title and everything here and that just gives us a nice, neat format. Now, another way of designing is selecting this single image block. And what that allows us to do is the same thing that allows us to take an image and drop it in there, and it automatically sets it up force. And then again, this is a horizontal image. Of course, we can move this around to wherever we would like. So if I want that part of the image, I can say that typically what happens I'm going to hit the delete key and delete this out is if I'd click on an image or drag it over. As you can see, it's dragging the actual dimensions of the image, and then I would need to come in here and kind of scale and move this around how I see fit . And in some instances I may want that. But typically for these covers. It's easiest if you just pick the single layout here and then grab your image and drop it in there because they'll just do that automatically for you so we can go through and we can maybe try to find something that we like. So, um, maybe, let's see, kind of like this one's pretty neat looking, and then we're going to want to add our text in here. So go in and I'll try to find some Texas I like. Now I can hit the T key on the keyboard, or I can select any of these at the top. So if I select the top one, it's going to give us our biggest heading. And you can see the font that it's using so I can call this book, say, The Milky Way, and then now I can change the colors and because we're using sort of this darker background , we may want to use a lighter color for a text, and if I get in the light area, it gets a little more blended in. But if I come appear to the top where it's nice and dark, we have plenty of contrast to be able to see that text. And I can drag these out so that it fills the whole page. However, I like that. Let's pick a different fonts. So you know, you need Teoh Kind of consider what types of looks you're going for. What types of fonts, Um, you know, like creep stories kind. That crying to this creepy looking front. And, ah, that actually looks a little milky but would probably be best suited for a thriller type thing. Um, you also have these kind of scripted looking fonts. It might be better for a romance novel or something of that nature. So we want to come in here and we want to think about these things. Such as colors are fonts are images and the different things that were using that actually go along with our actual book that we're writing about. So on this is called hitch cut, which I'm guessing might be, So that's kind of cool. This is kind of a, um, neat little font that looks a little maybe futuristic in a way, it could give off kind of ah, more of a childless type theme. But I kind of like the way that looks, um I might want to get this bigger so I may do something, like, move it down this way and make it bigger. Or I could actually put in two separate blocks if I wanted to. I could do, actually. Let me copy that one. I can make a copy, then just move this. Take this out. That was it. Keeps the same font that we're using, and then I'll take this out, this down. And as I move around camera, you can see these markings that appear these air to help a line and center things. So if I get close to this edge, it'll try to start centering them up for me. If I get in the middle, it will try to center this those up. Same thing with the horizontal. It'll try to center it. So that's the dead center of this graphic. So I'll put that here, remove this one up above it and make this a lot bigger. This ways, I can have two different sizes, so kind of give a different type of look here. And, you know, I could rotate this if I wanted to Maybe give it that kind of rotated feel something like this is looking a little cartoonish, but as you can see, it's easy to just come in here and move this these things around and kind of play around with. Um um, I'm just kind of going fast through this right now. Like I said before, I do have some other courses on graphic design theory Teoh to talk more about these types of things and and the reason why you do certain things within designing, you might want to check those out. But right now I'm just kind of playing around and moving stuff around. Um, you could also come in here and pick some of these pre made font images that might or might not work, depending on what you're going for. So something like that might be kind of cool. They have these that have these automatic line breaks put in them so we could have something like that going on, and then they have these colored ones, which are also pretty neat. So if you know, you had something where this might be useful, you could put that in there, and then you could change the color, tow, whatever you'd want that to be so they have a lot of different options that work really good with this type of stuff. This is kind of cool when you change the one color and it will actually change all of them . So this is kind of neat because it gives this kind of worldly appearance. Um, let's get rid of this not liking that too much, cause it looks kind of cartoony. Let's make this bigger. So that's kind of cool the way that the stars and the colors of the sphere work together. And then I Congar Oh, in and change this. I guess it's trying to keep it within this automatic image that they have, so I can't really do much changing with the sizes here. But I can't change the font. If I wanted to do a different phone, what was that one again? Shadows into the light come down here. So that's kind of cool. And actually, having this font smaller actually kind of works because it's it's kind of a play, You know, we're talking about the big Milky way in these big stars in this big image and little tiny words. Sometimes you can do a play on words like that toe add contrast. Now, one thing you always want to be sure that you're doing is whenever you're designing, you want to zoom out and see how it looks from a distance. So if this was on ah, Amazon and was a book cover, are people going to be able to make this out? Are they going to be able to read what it says? Um, can they see the image? Does the image portray the type of book that you're going for? Um, those things were the types of things that you really want to pay attention to see. I can't really pick a good color. Me we do. I'll probably just stick with white there, but I'm not digging the font size here. I would actually like to make this bigger personally, and it doesn't appear like I can change it within this graphic, but that's OK. Just take this out and just do No, no, something like that. Or I could take that out completely and then drop in my own text. Something hit the Tiki, and now I have the ability to overlay this over that image so I can keep that cool image that I like. But now I can get a bigger text size that I'm looking for something , something like that might be cool. And then I could come down here and type a little blur, but the bottom or talk about it. So, um, journey into the great and vast on, you know, maybe put that down here at the bottom. It was like a little little blurb or something of that nature. Um, I can come in here and make this all uppercase. I think that would probably look better. And then I need to have my author name. Maybe I just put it in that green block right there. You know, something like that. So basically, you're just gonna want to use graphic design principles such as contrast shapes, um, and different things of that nature I talk about this morning. There's other courses, so I don't want to go too far into the graphic design theory of everything right now. But just know that if you learn a bit a little bit of graphic design theory and the way things are, then it's definitely going to help you out. When you're designing these book covers. And the other thing is like what we talked about earlier, doing plenty of research. I might actually pull up 45 images that are similar to the type of book that I'm designing for and have those over off on the side here. And as I'm designing, I can kind of references. And now this. I was just kind of doing off the top of my head and messing around, but sometimes that works. But most of the time doing that doesn't really turn out to well, you need to have maybe a good plan of how you want this to look coming into it. What you're designing for what the audience is, have some reference images that you can fall back on and see why they did things, the way they did them and how they look and then have a little bit of graphic design theory knowledge that will allow you to just get a head start over the rest of the people who are designing these book covers and it this program camera just does a lot. There's so much in here that you can do and utilizing this tool with some reference images and a little bit of theory will definitely go a long way
11. Naming Saving And Downloading: So once we have our designed, completed will want to save this out and also go ahead and get it ready to be uploaded. So once we haven't done, the first thing we do is give it a title. So we actually rename this from what we first typed in. So I'm just going to say that the big Milky Way Then I'll put by Jeremy Degan in case I share it with anyone. No, no, it was from me. And then I can go ahead and click that download button. Now, Since I haven't used any paid for images or templates, it won't cost me anything to download these now. Typically, what I would do is I believe, that the Kindle store wants J P. G. So I would definitely download the J P. G for the Kindle store. But I usually download the P and G also so that it is a non compressed file type, and I want to have that available in case I need to resize it, reform at it or do anything of that nature that ways. I've just got a copy for myself in case I need it for later on. So for right now, I'll just go ahead and click the J. P G button, and it'll save our design here now, since I am not having to pay for anything, it's just going to skip that whole payment screen and start the download process for me. Okay, so it has went ahead and downloaded into my downloads folder all into my computer. I can go ahead and click open on this, and it will bring up the I think it's the windows, um, photo view, and there's the picture of my image. So it is right to go. I can go ahead and start uploading that to the Kindle store or any other platform that I need to use that on. So again, camera just makes it so simple for us to come in here and be able to do these easy types of things and create these images and have him set up and ready to go
12. Resizing Your Image For Multiple Platforms: Okay, now that we have our book cover design, let's say that we wanted to use that in a different size for a different platform. I'm going to show you how you conduce that and what you need to be aware of when doing these book cover designs. Because if not done properly, you could definitely create a problem for yourself. Now, if you upgrade to Campbell for work, they make re sizing your designs. Ah, lot easier. So that might be something that you want to look into. But I'm going to go ahead and show you an easy way to do it and also the possible problems that could happen. I'm gonna pull up my calculator. And originally we did our design 1000 pixels by 625 which is the Kendall minimum standards . That is a 1.6 aspect ratio. So if I do 1000 divided by 1.6, you can see it is 625. Let's say we want to do a design that is a 1.5 aspect ratio, so we'll do 1000 divided by 1.5, and you can see our with should be about 667 pixels. So I'm gonna use custom dimensions. I'm gonna say 667 by 1000. And this will give us our 1.5 aspect ratio, which is another pretty common used aspect ratio for book covers and e book covers. Okay, once Kaveh loads, you can see that what is happening is because we're not using 6 25 but we're using 6 67 as we have a little bit wider. Book covered is aren't here. And there's two ways that we can go about placing our book design into this template. Here. I'm going to click on the upload button, and we're gonna upload our own image that we downloaded previously in this course. So here it is, a big milky way. I'm going to click on that and hit open, and it drops it into this file here for me to use. Now there's two ways to go about this. I can just click on this one time and it'll drop it into the design area for me, and then I can resize this. And as I begin re sizing, you can already see some of the problems that are occurring were cutting off the top and the bottom So I can take this design and move it up so that we can see that text that we had originally and that looks OK. It's not exact of what we had with our other book cover design, because we're actually getting a little bit of cutting off of this image that wasn't there in the 1.6 aspect ratio. But this would work. This would be somewhat okay, let me go ahead and show you the other way of doing this. I'll hit delete. I'm going to go toe layouts and I'm going to use another one of these preset grids. Then I'll go toe up loads and just like before, I can click and drag this in here, and it'll drop it in automatically for me, and this will center it typically a lot better than you would be able to scale it yourself . I can double click this, and it will allow me to move it up and then I can hit the check mark. And as you can see, I can resize this easily inside of Camp A. To that aspect ratio But of course we are getting it cut off, and that is what causes some of the problems. So my tip to you is that when you're designing these book covers, you need to be aware that if you are going to be doing different aspect ratios and dimensions for your books, that you are going to get some things cutting off. So typically, what you would do and what's Ah, common term in video is use a safe frame, and all that means is leaving a little border around everything within your design, so that if it does get cut off, it's not really doing anything damaging to the main elements, for instance, because I have this border of for this text at the bottom, on the left and right hand side, some spacing here I can cut off the left and right quite a bit and still have that text in there. Now this text was all the way, you know, bleeding to the left and right and then are resized it. It would cut off the end and a there, and that would really be damaging to our design. Same thing with the big Milky Way, because I have this centered and plenty of space on both sides. Top and bottom I'm able to resize is quite a ways before we have any problems. So that's something that you want to be mindful of now. When we do a 1.33 aspect ratio, that's even wider. That's a four by three. So we even have a wider image, and that's going to cut off a lot more. And another thing that you can do is you can. If you are planning on using, say all three of these aspect ratios, you might want to start with the 1.33 your biggest design element. Get everything centered and leave plenty of space on all your borders. And then when you start bringing them into the smaller design elements, there will be plenty of space for you to crop it and make it look good. Let's go ahead and just see how that looks when we move it from the smaller to the larger image. So I'm just gonna exit this and let's bring out our calculator again. So we're going to say 1000 divided by 1.33 is we'll just say 752. Give this a minute to load up. Okay, now you can see how much wider that this images. And if I go to my uploads and I just click one time, you can see how much white space there is compared to the original design. So there's going to be a lot more getting cropped off here than originally, so we'll delete that, and we'll do this the same way. We'll click on layouts, select our layer our grade there, and then we'll drag this over. And as you can see, it's a much bigger image because we're using Ah, wider format and more is going to get cut off. So let's go ahead and move this up and you see what happens now. What's happening is we're cutting off the top of this image to get the text on the bottom in. So this is the reason why you need to leave borders around your design elements if you plan on designing in different aspect ratios. Now, if you're only publishing for Kendall and you're only ever going to publishing Kindle, you can just design in that resolution and never have to worry about this. But if you're creating a physical book you're on Kindle and different platforms that require different dimensions, then this is something that you need to be aware of. And like I said, it would probably be better for you to design in the largest format or aspect. Ratios such as this one get everything centered up. So I might make this text a little smaller, bring these elements centered and not bleed so much on the left and right and leave plenty of space all the way around the image, so that when I go to the smaller sizes, even though it's going to cut it off, it'll still keep all of my texts and everything nice and neat inside of the design element . So that is how you resize within Campbell without upgrading, Um, but you do need to be aware if you are doing different aspect of ratios, what's going to happen as you start scaling these images, um, higher in lower
13. Share Your Book Cover Design: Okay. Now that you have your first book cover design completed, go ahead and share that with the class. So what I want you to do as I want you to go into this class and upload an image of your book cover design. This is a great way to get feedback on how your book cover design looks, things that you can approve on and things that you did good. I'm very active within my classes. So I will definitely provide feedback. And other in students who are engaged can also provide their own feedback. We all have different expertise in a multiple tude of different things. So it's great to hear feedback from multiple people on things that you could do better in the future. So go ahead, save out your image and uploaded to the class now so that we can all have a look at it.
14. Thank You For Watching This Course: I want to personally take the time to thank you for taking this course. I hope you find it really valuable. And it's my pleasure to be able to tell you about the things on how to start designing your own book covers. This can save you time and money in the future. And Canada has a lot of features inside of that software that we didn't even touch on. They can really help you out in the future when designing your own book covers. If you like this course, definitely stay active within the discussions area and definitely leaf feedback or reviews . If you find that appropriate. I definitely listen to any feedback that is given, whether positive or negative, so that I could make this course better for you, for the students and for any people in the future who want to take this course. You can also message me directly. I can be contacted very easily, So if you want to go ahead and message me through the platform, that's fine. I will. I will get back with you as soon as possible. So again, thank you for taking the time to take this course. I really appreciate it and I'll see in the future
Jeremy Deighan, Online Instructor | www.jeremydeighan.com
