Transcripts
1. Welcome!: Hey there and welcome to my course where I'm going to teach you how to make covers for your paper back journals using Canva. My name is Rebecca. I am a writer, a designer, and a book coach to multiple bestselling authors. I'm also a collector of journals and I love filling them in just as much as I loved making them. Self-publishing journals is a really fun side, hustle or just a hobby. And it's made really easy things to Amazon's kVp Kindle Direct Publishing service. However, not everybody has a design background and figuring out how to make the cover file specifically with all their technical specifications can be a little bit of a challenge. In this course, we're going to be looking at several different styles of covers and examples. We're going to make some together. And I'm going to show you the tools that you can use to make them yourself. I teach other courses about making journals that include how to come up with an idea for your book. But if you have one already and you're ready to make your cover, then this is the course for you. This course also includes a PDF resource guide that includes all the tools and links that I'm going to show you in this course, as well as other helpful things for self publishers. So if you've a cool concept in mind and are ready to make your journal cover. Let's get started and do it together.
2. Cover Types: Hey there, Welcome to lesson one about understanding cover types. So if you're just getting started in the world of self-publishing journals or any type of book, really, you'll know that creating a cover that sells is a completely different challenge and creating interior content because that's a lined notebook that you're creating for a journal, a series of worksheets, or an actual written book. Your book cover is your billboard and it's an important part of selling your product. But there isn't big difference between a cover for a novel in a nonfiction book versus a cover for a journal. So we're going to look at some examples of those first. Now here's an example is the covers for actual books. These are all covers that I've designed that I sell like pre-made covers. These are samples of that and these at all. That's why they all have placeholder names and things like that. From a glance, you can tell that these are not journal covers, right? For fiction books like these, the cover is an important part of conveying the tone and the content of the book to your reader. You want to give an evocative impression of what's inside the story. So the intention is critical for these covers as you don't want it to be misleading. You wouldn't put like Dragon and the sword on the cover of a romance novel set in a small town in the modern world. Not IV what, but generally wouldn't the genre of these books in the examples here are pretty clear just from a glance. On the other hand, though, these are some journal covers. So when it comes to journals, the cover isn't just about conveying what's inside. Here you can see four different journal covers that I've designed and actually I publish all of these books over the years. Journals are more in the category of stationary than a novel. And people often by the them, the journals based on the style or how well they match their aesthetic. So journals are often given as gifts as well, more so than, than a regular book. And so covers that reflects somebody's hobby or their passion can be useful. If I see a journal Bill as a password keeper, maybe I'm not thinking like, oh, this person really needs a password keeper, but if it has penguins on the cover, and I think, well, my mom loves penguins, then suddenly it's a perfect gift for her. So creating and cover that appeals to a cross-section of interests or uses can be a really good strategy. The first journal here, you can see the orange phone with the, with the oranges on it. This one was designed for food bloggers and therefore put a food motif on the cover. The other three are a little bit more generic in that they don't have a strong connection between the visuals on the cover, on the subject matter inside. However, they are visually appealing. And for journals that can be a really big part of its value. I tend to think of journals in two different categories, general and hobby based. So an example of a general journal could be anything I have listed here. So it could be a day planner to do lists, blank pages and guestbook, anything like that. So these are the types of journals can have a lot of different kinds of covers that not one specific cover that goes with it. So they can be humorous, but floral designs on them. They could have animals, photos, patterns, you name it, that can be on the cover of one of these journals. So here you can see a bunch of ideas for general journals. You don't have to necessarily write these down if you're taking notes in the course. Since this course is just about making book covers rather than brainstorming Nietzsche's. But if you're not totally sure what your journal will be about yet, this might give you some ideas. On the other hand, these are some examples of journals that do relate to people's interests or hobbies and hobby based journals contain more specific information or activities that should have a cover that correlates to them. So one example for this I've put on the slide is called the tarot card journal. This is when I designed myself. This is a custom illustration on the cover and it really resonates with what's inside the book, the concept of the journalists that there's a section for each card of the Tarot deck and you would fill it out yourself. So a generic floral pattern or a picture of a penguin might be really cute, but it wouldn't necessarily draw in the right kind of user to make journal. Now obviously this is a really complex cover, the one that I designed here. I was not created in Canva. I illustrated this covering in an iPad app called Procreate. But this could be similar to a collage style cover for a very specific hobby or interest that you could create with a collection of graphics that you would find in Canvas. Now, as I mentioned, as we go through this course, I'm going to be assuming that you have a concept in mind for your journal or a book interior that you're already working with. As I mentioned in the introduction, I offer another course on journal creation that goes through the whole process of creating and journal interior from concept to publishing. And I also sell templates for journal interiors through a platform called self pub magic. If you aren't sure where to start with your page layout, sometimes people just want to make covers, didn't want to fuss about with the interior. That's something I can help us, just letting you know. Now if you don't know what kinda generally you want to make at all, I do recommend starting with something simple, either a hobby based journal for something that you're already passionate about. One of his hobbies I have listed the side, maybe we're just something that you know about so you don't have to do a lot of research to create it or just make a basic day planner. I always say don't worry too much about your first journal. The first one is important to learn the design process and all the steps that go into it. And after that, you can start to get more creative and more targeted with your work. Now with all that being said, let's take a look at some popular styles and trends that I see within journal covers to give you some inspiration.
3. Cover Inspiration: Let's take a look now at some examples of common journal covers styles. I've created all of these examples journals that we're going to see for this course. So they're not real covers and want to infringe copyright. I showing the things that weren't mind in order to show you these ideas. So these are just some things I threw together convey these different stylistic ideas. So the first one is florals. As you might imagine, florals are super popular for journal designs because they are infinitely variable, can come in any color and have a lot of style options. Generally, floral covers are going to have a feminine feel. These three examples I created here are all for basic journals. So you can see they've, I'll just save journal or diary on them. But pay attention some of the actual details in there and consider how the font that I chose works within the style of the floor. So let's look at the first one. The one with the peach color. The flowers and this one are in watercolor style and the color palette is pink and peach. So this is a very super feminine and delicate look and that pairs really well with this handwriting font. The second cover, for example, has what's called a ditsy floral designs and it got really busy, small pattern. This has more of a fun and playful fields, so there's bouncy font is a good pairing. The third cover has more of a vintage feel. The repeating floral pattern is kind of a traditional Floral. The blue and yellow color combo has kind of an old, I don't know, apron, fabric feel and the subtle dark background and hopefully you can see it's yellow with a lighter yellow polka dot background. Again, it kind of has this wallpaper look, maybe an old apron or old textile. So the font that appeared at this is very clean and simple. I or type face. Sometimes, especially when you're designing something that is vintage inspired. You don't want to be too heavy handed with making things look old. So if I use a distressed font here, it might have looked more vintage technically, but it wouldn't have matched that kind of retro feel exactly right. Next, let's look at some covers that use frames. And by frames I'm just mean any sort of box or section around the text on the page. As you can see, a lot of these themes that we're covering overlap with each other thematically. There's no end to variation you can create with frames. I find they're very useful. They make a great cover and easily incorporated into these other styles we're talking about. Sometimes it's simple, it's just blocks of color below your texts can be enough as a frame, just him to offset from the background. But I like mixing up frames around the words with another frame further into cover. So you can see that these examples here, and the pink one, I've used a sort of rounded label style frame, almost like a recipe cards style or something you'd see on an actual notebook. A notebook. And then I've used this similarly curvy corner accent in the middle examples on the gold, I've added a rectangular border around the very edge of the cover that kind of frames out the middle section. Now, what I've done here is actually a tricky technique to do if you're not very versed in margins and bleed on function. That basically just means the I'm edge of a graphic when it gets printed, often the edges cut off a little bit. So you want to give a little bit of bleed, kind of run runoff and to give the graphics some room to get cut off. So when you're printing books, especially through Amazon, they have very specific numbers for that and you wanna make sure that your graphic is not too far into the bleed or else it'll get cutoff. So doing a frame like this, it would be more of an advanced technique for covers because you'd have to do quite a lot of their precise figuring. In the third example here it's a guest book. I framed out the center circle with eucalyptus branches. So even though the graphics around the outside there aren't a literal frame, like a rectangle or something. They are acting in place of one by filling the space around the central text in a sort of organic sheep. Now here are some examples of journals with quotes on the front of them. And totally these are cheesy. I get it. Maybe you have a little cringy, but there's no denying that quote, journals are really, really popular. You can go into any stationary store, bookstore, and I guarantee you're going to see plenty of them. They're just really common and probably always will be. Creating word art is definitely a skill that requires a bit of practice. It's difficult to find the right balance of text and the font choice and whitespace. Now, I want to try something a little bit different with these examples I've put on, on this screen here. I put these examples together quickly and like most desires and very critical of my own work. So let's actually talk about how these three could be improved. So for the first one, hustled never sleeps, I think a different font would actually suit the aesthetic of the cover better. So the serif font here, and serif means the letters have like little tabs on the corner. So it's kind of a little accent on the font design. And start font doesn't really make sense here because everything else with this design is really sharp and modern. And a serif font is kind of an old-fashioned looking or more traditional looking. So everything here is really sharp. A sharp font would also mimic the fine lines at the background. I think that would probably look better. We see unicorn cover. I like what's going on here. It looks like a journal for a child may be, but the pink areas on the two diagonals are very boring. Lincoln's kinda just blank space, which can be fine. There's nothing technically wrong with it. Like from my design perspective, I don't see anything necessarily wrong with it, but I think it is a little boring. So if you remember that subtle polka dots that I had on that yellow vintage cover in the floral example. That can be really good here I think a very subtle polka dot that was in the same pink families, maybe a little lighter, kinda makes that blank space interesting without making it too busy. So that would be my mind chained on that one. But the third example, this sort of Girl Boss journal, I think the combination of the yellow glitter graphic and the radon inspired font is definitely something that would sell. There's clearly targeted demographic kind of product. But I don't like the dark feeling of it for that kind of niche. So I think it doesn't really fit with the aesthetic. So inverting the black and the white by making the background white and the texts black. I think that would change the whole tone of this journal and make it probably more commercially appealing. Now these are some funny journal covers and a lot of people really like humorous covers. And admittedly, this is not a nice at ICER particularly, but these are just some examples that came up with. These types of journals really appeal as gifts. So people aren't generally buying these for themselves. Maybe some are, but for the most part, these are gifts. Think of it like stocking stuffers at Christmas, add-ons to birthday gifts, funny gag gifts, really coworkers, your friends. It doesn't really any occasion can, it can basically cater to a humorous journal. How lucky for us, right? So there's plenty of occasions for these, if you are uninspired and can't come up with these quirky little freezes. There are tons of them on Pinterest. That is where I got inspiration for all of these. Just searching on Pinterest for funny quotes. And there's going to be a million ideas. Just make sure you aren't using a copyrighted or trademarked freeze for your journal cover, you want to avoid anything trademarked. For these products. The focus really is on the colony of it or the gag. And I get that these are not necessarily funny to everyone, but they are using enough and they are popular on Amazon. Now these are journals with patterns as the main background focus. And they're probably the most common type of journal that you will find in physical stores that when you go to a stationary store somewhere like a bookstore, these kinds of journals are pretty neutral and I think that's why they're so popular. They appeal to just about everybody. And while they might not be remarkable in their design and that's kind of boring maybe, but they are really easy impulse buy. As a result, if the pattern is going to be the star of the show, you may want to use a smaller font or more minimalist font. When it comes to the words on this kind of journal, the design itself, or the color of the aesthetic of the journal is going to be probably more important to the consumer then, then words on it. They're not going to care about how you phrase journal versus diary for whatever else that it's more about the look. So the patterns themselves can either be a repeating image. In the middle cover here we have a actual photograph based repeating image. These are photographs of plants that are repeated over and over. The last one, the green one is a drawing of a monstera leaf that's been repeated. So any kind of repeating design and works great for RAM, for a pattern. Or you can use a photo that's actually it's more of a graphic for the first one, it's a gradient image with just an interesting texture. There are tons of variations within this particular style. I cannot cover all the types of patterns you could use the course. And as I said, they are pretty universal and pretty easy to make if you have some good graphic resources to work with. These are journals that feature a character or an image. So often this will be an animal or magical creatures, especially in journals designed for kids. Now there's a lot going on at each of these covers, but there are a few things to consider if you're going to work with a character on your journal cover. So my first tip is to consider how the texts will wrap around your character. Now in example 1 and 2, the unicorn with the puppy here, I used the curve text tool in Canva to wrap the text around the critters heads. This helps make the design look more intentional and all the elements are working together. If you can just imagine if all that text was in straight lines, it would kind of look, it just looks less, less designed, if you know what I mean. And one of the upsides of Canada, of course, is that it's very accessible. But sometimes you can kinda spot something that's made in Canada. And I think when they added that wraparound texture, that arcane text feature in the past couple months that was really big in terms of upscaling a couple of designs. So that was my first tip is to change the width of the text fits around your graphic. Another tip is to create consider accent graphics and how you can incorporate them. So for the unicorn, I picked a banner with a heart in the middle. You can see it mirrors the hormones chest and the colors near the colors on the unicorn with the name and the heart. For the puppy, I picked a post-print background to fill in the blank space around the critter. And for the superhero, I picked the city skyline and some clouds in the background. They're very subtle human ability of the clouds, but if they are printed, it would be higher contrast. I made sure that these city's skyline that is along the bottom of that book, is in the same colors as the character and they work really well together. And then I change each letter of the text that the title of the book, secret missions, one of those four primary colors. So this makes all the aspects of the cover looks really intentional. So even if the art style is different, you can see these are three different art styles and this one cover the different colors together, make it look harmonious and very intentional and thematic. However, if you are using a character, you want to make sure that you're not creating something that might be mistaken for a picture book. So book 1 and 2 here, the covered 12 example here, those don't really look like picture books. The titles are very clear. They, they don't look like picture books, but the third one kind of does look like a picture book. It could be, it could be easily mistaken for that and that's kinda thing you want to avoid. So I really like this cover. I think it's really cute. But you can almost imagine an author name along the bottom, and that will be a book. So some ways that I could fix this would be to either add the word journal in somewhere or you can change the title to make it clear that it's a journal likes. So change it to from secret missions to secret journal or a super journal or mission notebook or something like that, just to make it really clear to the buyer what they're getting. Because sometimes people just don't read and they just assume based off of the photograph. Now our last style we're going to study here are covers that use photos in the background. So using royalty-free or public domain photographs can be a nice way to get a really authentic journal cover. Photos can be a quick journal cover because often you don't have to bring in as many elements as you can see in these examples. I think the most important thing to keep in mind, and this is like my big design tips for working with photos and Congress in general, is to pay attention to contrast with the text. So look at example 1 and 2 here. They both have both these photographs that I chose that a forest and the flower on a white background have whitespace in the photograph. That makes it, makes it really easy as a designer to know where to place the text. Because you can put a dark font or a dark, dark text onto that light background. It's instantly legible, it looks intentional. It looks like your photo is very well plan for a book cover. Taking photos with a high-contrast area like that makes it look really intentional. So see in the first example here, the song writing journal. I made the corner decoration on the top black, but I made the bottom one a beige color. If I'd made them both black or make them both being one of them would have basically disappeared against the background. And that's kind of, I, I do see a little bit more amateur actually see sometimes people don't adjust things based on the color of the background. By using high contrast colors, the visual appeal is much higher and it's also much easier to see when you're browsing through. I'm an online store like Amazon for example. You could read it very clearly. You won't be able to see what the book is, even a tiny thumbnail. The third example here we have the meditation's journal is a lot busier, so we have a vibrant sense that with busy Mandela on top and the handwriting font. So these elements seem like a lot independently, but altogether they do work. And consider that we actually have two color palettes working here. So there's the vibrant colors and then there's black and white. Black and white are almost always save colors against bright colors because they are extremely neutral. So the word meditation is legible on this cover because there's no other black on the design and it stands out really well. So those are just some examples of journal covers styles for you to consider as you start planning yours. In addition to these examples, you'll want to take a look at other journals that are selling well currently in your niche. I don't endorse copying anybody. Of course you shouldn't copy anyone style. But you can observe trends. And trends will generally appear in a nation. It's going to be pretty obvious once you start to look at it with a designer's eye. So trends that you can look for it could be design styles like styles we talked about in this lesson. It could be popular colors or motifs or types of quotes or sayings, things like that. So that's what you need to look out for when you're doing your research. Now in the next lesson, we're going to go over the tools and the resources that you need to prepare before starting on your actual cover design.
4. Tools and Resources: Let's go over the tools and resources that you need to get started with your cover creation. First, you're going to need a Canva account. This whole course is based around designing in Canva. You can join Canva for free and they provide a ton of graphic assets for you to use with your projects. You can grab the resource document for this course down below, and that will have links if you just want to go through and click on the links without having to take from it. You don't have to have a canvas subscription to do anything in this course. You can use the free one and it works just fine. If you decide to abridge you a pro on or you already have a Pro account that will simply provide you with a bigger library of graphics to use those a few of the features, but nothing. I think critically, you could absolutely achieve really good results with just the free stuff. The second thing you're going to need is to know the page count of your interior file. The reason that this is important is because the number of pages inside your journal determine how wide the spine of your book is. If you look at any book, the thickness of the book is based on how many pages it is. And that is going to be the space on the graphic for the spine. And the width of the spine is going to be factored into the entire cover design. Because when you design a journal cover your building one long rectangular graphic that actually includes three sections and includes the cover, the spine, and the back cover. So you'll need to know the number of pages to get the measurements right for adding that spine. Now related to this, you're going to need to generate a template for your book. Now most of what I'm teaching in this course is, is assuming that you are publishing your journal on Amazon then is typically the case. If you are getting it printed somewhere else, but simply want to find out the necessary covered dimensions for that platform. But for Amazon, they have a very simple webpage where you can go and input your page count and your paper choice. That webpage will generate a zip file that contains a PDF and a PNG template. And there's two to the 5 thousand there. And we're going to work with those files in the next step. Again, the link for that specific page in the Amazon Help section is in the resources PDF. The next thing that you're going to need is a plan for the text that is going to be on your journal cover. This is just to save you time. I think it's a good idea to plan this ahead of time. It can vary a lot. Some journals don't have any texted all in the cover. Generally wasn't Amazon do because of the way that they prefer to process files. And others have tons of texts on the cover and couldn't be completely text-based design. If your journal has a specific subject matter though like my terracotta journal that I showed you. You might want to put that on the cover just to make it super clear what the book is about, especially this hobby based ones. You can put a name on the cover like an author name or publisher, or a series name that is up to you completely. I would generally say that unless there is some aspect of the book that is written like an introduction or inspirational passages that guide people through whatever journaling process it is or small sections. If you've written something, then I then go ahead and put a name on the cover. If not, I would say maybe don't do it because it doesn't really make sense. You can definitely put a publisher's name them back though that is generally my preference is to put a little logo or the name of whatever you're publishing imprint is that you are using or just whatever pen name you're using the published under on Amazon. And you put them on the back cover. And you can put that around the barcode and make sure it fits well. So I'll show you how to do that when we do in a live demonstration. You can also come up with some texts for this spine of your book. But this is a little bit trickier. You can only put text on the spine of a book that is 79 pages or more. So if you're doing a short journal, you can't put texts in the spine. And I will show you how to position this again in the demonstration. Now, depending on what kind of design you want to create, you may want to prepare some graphics or images. As I mentioned, canvas does provide you with free graphics that you can use. It's important that you are always reading the license of the graphics that you're using. Make sure that you can use them for commercial purposes. And selling a product like selling a journal is a commercial purpose. So cannabis license specifically state now this quote on the screen here I took right from their website. So make sure it's up-to-date, but this is what their site says. All free photos, music and video files on Canvas can be used for free for commercial and non-commercial purposes. And again, that's what the free account. So you wanna make sure I will show you in the demo how to make sure that the photos you're picking or the graphics picking from Canada are marked as free. And for the demonstration I'm going to do, I'll just be using straight-up camera graphics for them. However, you do have other options. You don't have to use that in Canada, you're not restricted at all. You can create your own illustrations, of course, if you're creative and you want to do that. But you can also purchase commercial licenses for graphics from websites like Creative Market or XY. These are two marketplaces that I use all the time for buying graphic assets. This will give you the right to use someone else's hard for commercial purpose. Like you're buying a license. And if you are planning on selling your journals, again, that counts as commercial use. You can import any graphics that you have right into Canva and work with them there. So now that you have all the components that you need to make your journal cover, Let's get started setting up the file.
5. Setting Up Your Canva File: The first thing that we need to do to get started is to know exactly what size we need to create our cover image. So this requires some math and can be confusing. So I'm going to explain it in detail to make sure that you get it right. This the right size the first time. So this is an example right here of a template graphic that I downloaded from Amazon using the link I already talked about. I prefer to make all of my journals six by nine inches. I just find it really handy to the writing. So most of my books have the same dimensions. You can see that there's a lot of information contained within this template. So I'm going to explain the different parts and then show you the formula that I use to calculate the size that we need for our candidate file. If you've ever opened up a book, literally any book and just looked at the front of that cover at the same time. That's basically what we're looking at. The rectangle on the left is the back cover. You can see it that little rectangle, the yellow rectangle in the bottom corner that represents where Amazon will automatically put a barcode. You don't want to put any important information in that spot because it will be covered. In the center of the book is the spine. This is the variable part of the template that will change based on how many or how few pages your journal has inside of it. On the right is the front cover. And this panel also includes all the important numbers that we need for our calculations. Here I just got him locked up in a different way. You'll see a bunch of orange lines in this template. There's a pinky orange, red. And this is what's called the bleed area of your design. So this is an area where you want to have design and color, but where you don't want to have anything important, that is, it's at risk of being cut off. If there was no bleed on the edge of designs, there'll be a risk that a slightly too small graphic would result in whitespace around the edges of your book. This wouldn't be very good. It wouldn't look nice. So you want to think of the bleed area as almost the drop-off rate before the edge. Now, the bleed lines in the center of the book along the spine indicate where the folds are going to be like were the front and back cover fold to make the book. We don't have to do anything special with those lines. All you have to do is be aware of them and make sure that there's no text crossing over in them when we get to the design portion because the texts would be cut off. However, we do care about the four sides of the big rectangle I met landed here in the graphic with sort of a darker red just to show you which one's. The bleed area is three millimeters wide all across the book. So all of those lines for three millimeters wide, to properly calculate the size of the cover, we need to add on that bleed measurement to the size of the book. We need to calculate the height and width of the design because we're making the book cover as one big rectangle that when applied to the book template on Amazon side of it, they're going to, you know, section it correctly. The height and the width of this book cover each have two sides with bleed on it, right. Because there's signs that they're going horizontal, the top and bottom that applies to the width of the design and the sides, the lines on the left and right, far left and right applied to the height of the design. So that means that we're adding the bleed twice to each measurement. So that's six millimeters. I'm either side and we have to remember that, but I'm going to show you the formula. This is the actual formula for calculating either side of the design. I'm using millimeters here because they are very, very small and therefore the most accurate for getting the dimensions correct. So let's look at the height first. This is a six by nine book. The height is nine inches. The template helpful informs us of the measurement. You can see in gray right below versus six by nine inch book. It's got the measurement in millimeters. So we know that nine inches is 228.6 millimeters. All we have to do for the height is add the bleed to that number, which is sex because we have bleed on the top and bottom, which is in each of them is three. So that's a straightforward for the height. The width is a little more complicated because even though this is a six inch wide book, we have to add the front, the back, and the spine together. So the frontal and back cover both six inches, that converts to 152.4 millimeters. So two times that number by two. Then we have to add on the spine, which we see it's listed sort of in the middle of the cover page. The spine of this one is 6.864 millimeters. So we're going to add that next, and then we're going to add two bleeds, which is six. So you can see the formula right there. And that totals out to our final numbers right here, which the height for my particular example is 234.6 millimeters and the width is 317.664 millimeters. And I need to read that entry you so much Good. That's just my numbers and they came up with, and that is the formula. You may want to jot this down because save this part of the video. I don't know because this is a bit of a tricky part, but once you get it done, once you can kind of figure it out from there. So I'm going to just write down these numbers real quick because I'm going to need them for the example I'm going to show you momentarily. So before I move into Canvas, there is one more job to do. When you get your zip file from Amazon with those templates, the one we were just looking at, they give you a PDF and a PNG file type. Normally PNG is great. We can import that the kanban, no problem. But the reuse for some reason, the ones that they give us from Amazon is massive. It's like a really big file. It's too big to upload to Canvas. So this is an annoying step. The thing to do is either to convert the PNG template to a JPEG with Jake pigs are pretty small. Or to compress the PNG file into a smaller file. Usually I just convert it to a JPEG because it is easier if you're tech-savvy, this should be an easy task. I don't really need to go through it with you if you are not. And this is a very confusing step. Unfortunately, I can't really break it down step by step because the instructions will depend on your computer. But I will say that you can simply Google P&G to JPEG converter and you will find a website that could do this for you. So with that file properly size, it is time to get into Canvas. And I'm just going to switch into a live stream video to walk you through the next steps. So this is what my Canvas dashboard looks like once I'm logged in. So I'm just going to show you how to set up the document to make your cover. So first there's gonna go up to create a design up in the top right corner. When I click on that, it suggests a bunch of styles, but none of them is what you want. You want to go to Custom Size. And then here we're going to change it to millimeters because that's what we've been working in. And that's we're going to create a take those two numbers from the math that we did for the height and width of the file. So the width was 3.66417 and the height was 2.634 through to create that new design. And here is the file to use to design our cover. So it's going to just have the one page here when you start. If you're not familiar with Canvas, this is basically how it works, is you have just this screen here to work on. I'm going to just rename this as a book cover. And then you need to import the template that we got from Amazon. So that should be a J peg already and I've uploaded already to upload your scope to the upload section here on the left. It's full of my personal file, so I'll just do that really quick. Okay, so here's the template in the middle of the page. This is what I just imported and a little JPA graphics. So the way that I like to set up these files is that I add a second page. And you can actually see if you move this to the corner, it snaps in automatically and you can drag it to be the size and it's exactly that size because we did our math correctly. And what I like to do is actually I had to work in this top document and I put the template down on his bottom line just to hold it. And I just keep it there until I need it for whatever purpose. But when I do, I actually turn the opacity of it down to like halfway. And I just leave that there and we can use it later and drag it up to use as a reference for we're actually designing the cover. So that's basically how you set up your document. Once you have this part ready, you are ready to start designing. I'm going to show you some examples of some covers and they're going to make them together. She could understand the process a little bit better.
6. Example Covers: We have our file ready to go and start designing our cover. Let's take a look at how the design process kind of works in Canada for me, can't cover. So first of all, this is the Canvas or I'm going to be creating the cover for our book. I think I'm just going to start with a very simple floral journal just to give you an example of how this works. So first thing, I'm just gonna pick a background color by clicking on it. And I'll grab a color up here because we're just someone's eye. He's commonly think I'll probably choose a pink. And because that's a little too bright, I'll click up here. And we can reduce the brightness to make it more of a pastel pink. Well, so that will be the background for this book. Next, I'm going to add in a title. It's going to tap t that some texts. So we'll just write journal. It's quite smalls and you can make it a bit bigger. And I'm going to pick a handwriting font that looks kind of fancy and nice. I like the underline it gave it. So this side is going to be the cover of the front cover. The spine is in the middle and the back cover is on the left, which we can line that up in a moment. So don't worry too much about that. Just for an example, I'm going to pretend that I want to do some spine texts for this journal, even though obviously just a regular generally wouldn't have it. So let's just do your title here. And I'm going to highlight it and make this act that Roboto font because it's very clear. I like to make my side spine titles, all caps, which is an option right in here. And then we'll make it a bit smaller. And I'll figure out how small we need it momentarily. But for now I'm just going to rotate it with that little arrow tool 90 degrees. We're just going to put it in the middle of the page and you see Canada has a lot of guides and snap to different parts of the page. And this is just going to go in the center. We'll figure out the right size leader Next. For the back cover, I don't have an example of a logo, but let's find an element here and just call it as a logo. Let's just get a star. And you can see when you're looking at these elements right here, this says Pro. So this is because I'm a camera process grab that I can use them. They will still show up if you are a free user. So you have to filter through them just to make sure you're not grabbing sneak can't use in order to filter it. You just want to go to the search bar here and click on these little filter tools and just select free. And this will make sure that anything you are seeing is just free. Now, I don't want to use animations obviously because this is a book cover. So I'm just going to click on graphics is to rule those out and there. So let's just find something to use as a placeholder for a logo. Let's just use this nice little star here. I'm going to reduce it down and I'm just gonna put it on the back approximately for the back cover is. So these are the three elements that I'm kind of using, front title, spine, and the logo mark. So let's look at how we can use this second page. But that went away as a placeholder template to guide us. So I'm going to grab it from the second page. It's just living down here on page two and drag it into the first document again, as you can see, because I set it to part opacity, you can kinda see through it. So I'm just going to align it so it's perfectly centered on this document. And I'm going to use the Position Tool and send it to the back. That means that all the elements, the star, the text and everything are on top of it and I can move them around. This means that I can adjust everything keeping in mind all of these margins. So let's start with the star. Here's the barcode box, so we don't wanna put anything in there. But I often like to put the logo right beside the barcode. Maybe I'll make it. I'm going to zoom in here a little bit. I'm going to make it the same height as the barcode box as well so that it looks really intentional when the final product is printed. There we go. So that's probably a good place for my logo. You could also put things like in social media handles a website handle, more texts. There are links to other things you want to show that's going to cost up to see at the bottom, you can also put cover design by or anything like that. If you're looking for more inspiration for your back covers, I do. Books off your shelf and taking a look to see if it's there because back covers I find don't get a lot of press when you go searching for examples online. And you can probably find ones just round your house. So next let's look at the spine text. So you can see that this text is a little bit too big for the spine because the text is going into that red zone. While it may not necessarily be cut off, it is just a little bit too big and I don't want to risk it because it wouldn't look nice and it was partly cutoff. So I'm just going to select this box and I'm going to just make it a little bit smaller. And again, it's going to center and that looks better. So that's still very tight within the margins, but it is technically in there. And because I kind of like the look and zoom in a little bit. If your target was longer, obviously, you could add your author name if this was the kind of work book or journal that has sections in it and you're putting an awful name on it. You could also put a Maker's Mark here at the bottom, that's kind of the right, the top you'll see that see lots of big publishers have a small mark there. But this you can go up to, if you want to make it a bit bigger, it must increase the letter spacing. I then make the box big enough, but it will just increase the space between the letters. And that can be a way to fill it a little bit more space with your title on the spine if you want to, but as you can see, it is very tight. So if the book is 79 pages or less, as I mentioned, you can't put text in the spine. It's just simply too narrow. If it is bigger than that. You still can, but when needed those smaller books, a 100 pages or less, it is a very small space. So you're going to have to really put a small text on there, which I think you have to ask yourself, is that worth it is the title on the text for a journal especially going to matter. If it's just going to look like crammed, tiny text. You might want to consider the context of the spine. And then finally, we will look at these journal on the cover. Let's do this. We can see the full page. So I would think I would want this centered on the cover page. Let me get a little bit bigger. And then because the guidelines of the canvas Document that are snapping to center, they don't interact with this template that I've imported. So you're going to have to just eyeball where the center is. But that roughly looks good to me. So with those in place, I can then take the template is put it down below again and start designing up here. Or of course you can just leave the template there the whole time just to line up your designs. It depends on what you're kind of creating and what you want it to look like in relation to the page. So let's just leave it there for now just to keep in mind where the guidelines are. If I'm going to make a floral journal like this and I'm going to go into the elements section. And again, you can import your own elements, do your own illustrations, whatever you like. I'm just using what Canada has just for my example. So let's look for something floral. Because the background of this journal is pink. I think I will look for some pink flowers and maybe in a watercolor style. So let's search for that pink watercolor flowers. Okay, lots of options here. Let's just make sure. So I'm gonna go to F3. And again, just to make sure reason the free ones that did take me quite a few and we don't want animations. We just went graphics. Oh, actually it looks like graphics and animations are lumped together little stickers. So let's scroll through here and see if we can find some nice looking flowers to use. Again, there's a lot of animations, but there are some nice watercolor blobs here to choose from. And there can be interesting. A watercolor blog kinda shows up like that. So it's got sort of translucent edges. That one is not actually very nice. But I like this flower here and see when I click on it here, it gives me magic recommendations. So it actually shows other elements that are from the same collection or very similar to it. So let's see all because I like this a lot. It looks like these are all by the path collection right here. So they all are by the same artist. And there's a couple of different color variations, but actually I don't mind that for a journal. I'm just going to add these in. Now. I think I got that one. Give me this group of three, this orange one. Okay, so that's what our selection of florals. Let's put away the drawer there. And we're going to start dragging them and distributing them around the piece. Now I'm going to shrink a lot of them. So let's see, make them this or you can decide what kind of scale of pattern you want. If you want really big flowers and by all means make big flowers, few of them really small, make them really small. There's going to be put more of them to fill the space. I'm gonna do sort of a medium size for this journal. It's actually pretty good. This one's a little big. And they're so once we have some of each, I'm going to just start to arrange them slightly, leaving the page and kinda going over the edge. Now this does go into this red bleed area around the edge, but that's totally okay because this is just pattern isn't text and it will cut off somewhere between these two edges. And that'll look really great for the final product. So I'm just going to fill in the whitespace, or I guess it's pink space in this case with these flowers. And that one there, you can also rotate to make them fit better. That's a good fit. So I have my lilies. Put the root, take them so don't touch those. And then the lily down here, now you see that I'm covering the barcode box, but that's okay because the barcode is going to be superimposed right over this, The, regardless of what's on the image. So that's okay. This, this pattern just going to go behind the bar code. So that's one of all of these. Now obviously we want to do a repeating pattern, so I'm going to actually select all of them and copy. This is a little button up here for duplicate. So I'm just me the same thing. I'm just going to drag and put it over on the front and the spine a little bit. So that's fine. You also don't have to make the front and back look exactly the same. You could just make a pattern up yourself. So I'm just going to copy this orange flower a few times because we don't have any other orange balancing this out. And I'm just going to fit it in everywhere else on the design. Okay, so this looks very floral. I like how it's looking so far. I'm just going to go and grab this template very carefully. It's kind of hidden behind all these flowers, just trying to find these a blank space to grab it from. This is why it gets a little awkward to move the template. If you're doubling, it does get stuck behind like this. All I'm gonna do is just grab, I'm going to pull down the Shift key on my keyboard and click on a bunch of these just to select multiples at a time. And I'm going to position and send them to the back. Now the templates on the front. And I'll put it down here. So this is how this is all kind of looking again, I'm going to select all of these on the front cover and send that to the back so that they are behind the text that we created. Okay, so I think this looks pretty cool. I really like the colors, the design. This is nice and clear because the black against the flowers stands out really well. If you wanted, you could add something behind it like a frame. If you wanted to look for something like that, it could just search for, I think labels and Pence brings up Good frames. Tags. So let's try rectangular frame. That was something that I used recently, but there's lots of good ones here. Again, we're going to check that I'm just looking for the free ones. And this white box actually would work really well. So that could go right behind there if we wanted to add something like that and really would have to have the black border with a lot of the elements on Canva. You can change the colors right in if it doesn't show you this option right up here in this sort of left books as a black and white, if that doesn't show up. For example, for this orange flower, It's because this illustration doesn't come with options. It's just this one illustration with this box comes with options. So I'm actually able to make the cream with a white border and a pink inside. That's kind of neat. So I'll leave that there for now. Now I've mentioned that one. I like to add to cover it with repeating patterns is something in the background to add a little bit of depth. So I searched for the term pattern. It gives you lots of options here. And one that I found that I liked was this. It's sort of a little dash pattern. So when I click on it, it's actually very light in the example. So I'm just going to change the color to black just to contrast with the text on it. You can see a little bit better now. And if I drag it to the corner and make it large, you can see it's sort of adds a little bit of what they look like. Little fibers are a little I don't think they had hair is exactly but they add a little something different for the background. So I'm going to use this. I'm going to just duplicate it. And then I'll drag it to meet the other side so it fills in the full graphic. Probably about there. And then I will select the two of them, these two, and then I will send them position to the back there behind the text. So that just adds a little bit of visual interests. You don't have to do a pattern behind it, but, you know, you can pick something different if you want to do like squares or checks, if you wanted to do squiggles are polka dots or even miller leaf pentamer, the kind of busy for this one. But you can have something behind the text is the point. So that's basically how to create a very basic cover. There are lots of different features within Canvas that you can use to your advantage to make interesting covers. For example, there's lots of text tools and effects that they've recently added. If you go to click on the text, negative effects, you can see you can do a straight line or a curve. Now curve doesn't look so great with handwriting fonts, especially this one with this line, believe me that, but you can use the slider to change the curve that it's on. It's going to be straight. You can click on any of these features for shadows or Lyft, I tend to use lift a lot if I'm doing text and a background that the contrast isn't super high and you want to text stand out a little more, can see the kind of the glow it gives it when you click on lift, you can make it more intense if you want to, unless I find that helps. If the contrast is a little bit off, it doesn't solve everything. And this one also does let you change the color of the lift. It is just matching whatever color the text is. But shadow, for example, is a little bit different and you can change the color of it. You can also add a blur, which does feather out a little bit. So it looks a little bit similar to lift if you wanna do white. I don't know, that doesn't really show up at all. Yeah, there you go. If you want to do that. Neon is also a fun one with black, it doesn't look very good. But if you change your thought to a color, it actually kinda looks like neon. It's not exactly perfect for this one. Maybe one of these bold colors. Now for this cover, but that is a cool feature that you could use. So now that I'm done this demo cover, let's just grab the template, pull it up just to make sure everything lines up. Here we go. Nice and centered, perfect. And everything is looking really good. This box that the text is in is really evenly spaced on both sides. That's really important to make sure it looks centered on your cover. There's nothing important behind the bar code. The logo is lined up with the barcode. Texts on the spine is not touching the margins and the text is all legible. And the pattern extends to the edges so that nothing is going to be cut off. Now I'm just going to grab this template and pull it down. I'm just going to show you another example. We can make another page in this document. I will just add a page right there. Move it up. So we're going to do the exact same thing, but I'm just going to show you how to do it with a photo. So Canvas does have a library of photos you can use. They're contained within the Elements tab. So let's just pick mountains because mountain journal could be nice. We're gonna go for photos. And like I was talking about in the examples, you want to look for photos with some whitespace that would work well for text. This is actually a pro photo, so let me use the filters and find some free ones. Lots of good options still looking really good. Actually kind of like this one here. So I'm going to click on it and put it in and it will just fill the frame with it. Yeah, I think that looks kind of nice. So if we pull up the template and look at it with the photo behind it. You can see this is kind of what it's going to look like. The front cover is going to have this much of it. The back cover will have this. Now I actually really like this sort of tree angle and I think I'm going to flip the photo just so that it's the other way around so the cover has the tree. So I'm going to click on it and then I'm going to click on Flip Horizontal. And there were no problem solved. So for this it's going to be the same thing. You just going to add your text journal. To use the same font. Contrast looks great. Dark trees can have a medium tone background and the colorful sky, this font in the black color, it looks really great here. So this is the same process. I think the idea is pretty clear. And put this to the back so we can move the journal around. And I think that's fairly good. So you could always add, if you're gonna do your publisher name, let's try a different font here. Maybe. This is an interesting little font. Could always put it down there if you are going to put it on the cover for some reason, of course, that's totally up to you. You can put it up top. You can put it on the back down here. That's a good option as well. I was going to put it down here. You can see there's a bit of a contrast issue. So let's just resolve that as an example. So you can see that text is gone, you can't see it at all. So let's click on it and let's just try making a white. First of all, well that's a lot better. And in fact, that might be most of what we need to do to make it visible. To add something else, I'm just going to click on it and go to the Effects. We're going to try to lift feature. And let's zoom in a little bit just so we can get a better idea of how that lift is affecting the text. So here it is regular. Here it is with Lyft and I'm going to crank that way up. Now it's very subtle. You can't really tell just by looking at it, but if I turn it off, you can tell it's going back on, Crank it up. So it is subtle, but it does actually help, just make a little bit higher contrast right around the edges of the text so you can see it clearer on the cover. If you wanted to decorate this further, maybe we're going to add some corner elements and just go in here and search for corner, will go for graphics. And we're still on free. So these are all sorts of corner declarations which are pretty cool and you can just add them and maybe this sort of, yeah, it's a little bit fun and outdoorsy, although we can't change the color of it and I kinda got something in black. Yeah, that one's kind of nice. A little bit more whimsical, little bit kinda fun. So let's grab that template again just to know where to position these corner pieces. Here we go, centered position to back. And then I can kind of drag and adjust these. They look like they are within the frame of the cover. Slip that the opposite side. And you see this smart guides on Canberra lining it up here. So that's actually very helpful. And I think that looks pretty nice. Just on the top. I've put that on the back is well, let's just duplicate it. Just for the sake of symmetry, we could put it on the back as well. Now I could put it on the bottom. And Russia Hilts is going to look. So let's find out. It's going to rotate it a 180 degrees and put it right down there. So let's remove that template, just see if that looks any good with it on the bottom as well. So clearly we having some contrast issues here as well. We can change these to white. However, sometimes it doesn't look great if the top and bottom are quite matching. I think there's a little bit too much of a difference with the top and bottom here too, with this all being white and this all being black, kinda looks a little weird. So personally, I would take the bottom ones off. And just like the top, I think it's actually good visual balance for this large, sort of a photo-based border down below. How you can kind of modify a photo-based cover right here in Canada. And I think these look pretty sharp. And like I said, the photos insulin, as you making sure they are free, free, free to use for commercial purposes. So now that we have our two covers design, we need to export it for Canvas. So in the next lesson we're going to look at taking these off of Canvas and getting them up onto somewhere for you to publish them.
7. Exporting and Uploading: Once you've got your cover design, it's time to get it out of Canva and upload it to Amazon. Once you have the file, export it, which I'll show you in a moment, that it's just a matter of uploading it on the relevant screen when you are listing your book on Amazon's kVp or Kindle Direct publishing platform. I'm not going to walk you through that whole stack because it's a, it's a process. But if you're working with Amazon, that is, that is the file you want to take to that service. If you ever upload your cover and find an error with it, sometimes this happens, you can upload it and then you have to preview your book before you prove it. And sometimes the preview or says there's a, there's an error here that covers their own size or the cover looks completely wrong. And usually the preview I will tell you in a sidebar what specifically the error was. And if it's got the size was wrong. Sometimes if you know if you did the math wrong or you got a millimeter off whenever. It will tell you the correct dimensions of the cover should be for this book. Now, it would be really helpful if they provide this information upfront somehow. Unfortunately, we don't get that and you have to go through the formula that I showed you and do the math. So let's go over how to take your design out of Canva and have it ready to put up on Amazon or whatever platform you're using. So I have my design here. All you need to do next is go up, make sure that you have a title for your design that is easy to find on your desktop. And we're going to hit download. It's going to give us a lot of options here. So first of all, with Amazon specifically, we definitely want a PDF cover. Now they give you two options for PDF, Standard or print. I usually just pick print because it's a higher-quality design. You don't need crop marks and bleeds because we use that template. So we don't need to add anything extra. We don't want to mess up with the sizing. We're just going to pick the page you want right here. So instead of printing all of them, if you select multiple ones at a time and you're exploiting the PDF, it's going to bundle them as one document, which isn't helpful for uploading to Amazon or anywhere else. So if you have multiple covers in one file that you're going to have to export them one at a time. So let's just grab the pink one here, just going to check that one off and hit Done. And then download, and it's going to save it to your desktop. And then that file is what you can upload to Amazon's kVp or wherever else you're uploading your book. So getting your cover off of Canada is as simple as that. Let's move on to talk about a couple of tips and tricks that I recommend for you when you're designing covers.
8. Variations and Tips: Now that we've gone over the process of actually creating journal covers in Canvas. I just wanted to share a couple of tips and tricks that might help you as you continue creating journals. If you're going to be creating a lot of journals, maybe haven't big plan a business plan for it. You might want to save time by ensuring that all of your journals have the same interior page count, especially if it's a repeating template or line pages, something like that. If you had the same page count, that means that your spine is always going to be the same width. And therefore you can just keep using that same candidate file and not have to do the math over and over again. It just will save you a little bit of time. Of course, if there's a reason for your books to be different sizes, absolutely. It's just that as a time-saver, if you are creating a lot of them. If you have one journal interior that you want to make multiple covers, four, to make different color variations of the same design. This is especially the case if it's a pattern or something like that, or you can just change the settings to change the colors in Canada, this isn't an approach that I've taken personally with my journals, but I have seen a lot of people do it. So while I can't personally speak to the process of doing that may be something you want to look into and see how that works. If you have watched through this course and you still aren't sure about your ability to create your own cover. You certainly can't find a designer to hire to make the cover for you. However, I find when most people are struggling with designing covers for their journals, it's because they don't know where to start to train their design I. And this can be something that is really intuitive for some people, really challenging for others. I think the best way to learn these skills is by doing, doing all the exercises we talked about in this course. And specifically by giving yourself some challenges to emulate other covers. So these are practice covers, aren't ones you sell. So don't get me wrong. I'm not saying copying us covers and sell them by no means. That would be copyright infringement. What you can do though, is go and take a look at Amazon or Barnes and Noble or Pinterest or wherever you want and find journal covers that you like the look of. Then start studying that cover and then try and recreate it in Kanban to you the best of your ability. Consider the different aspects of it. You know, look at the colors of fonts, the graphics and health are all placed together. And if you're feeling intimidated, don't try and do the full front and back. Just do the rectangle of the front cover and focus on that as your practice. That's most important part because that is what people are seeing when they're buying it. Of course, the back is important for the customer experience once they actually buy it. But the front is the sales ticket. As you try replicating other people's designs, you will start to understand some of the choices that they made in creating that design. And that will help guide your decisions when you work on an original piece. So that's kinda of an activity that I recommend for most people who are trying to get into design is start by copying. Don't sell it, don't do anything with it. Just practice with it so that you can understand the process a little bit better. Another tip that I find helpful when you're creating your cover is to just take a moment and zoom out undercover like literally in Canvas, I just zoom out so that you can create a thumbnail sized version in your screen. You can even cover the back half of the graphic with your hand or paper or something. What do you want to look at here is, again, most shoppers just see the cover of a book when they're browsing on Amazon to buy a journal like yours. So you want to make sure it is the text legible, is the design appealing and very clear at the sides. You're aiming for eye-catching. And remember the different books that you saw in your niche already for sale. What made those designs? Stand out? Think about the ones that popped off the page when you're browsing through the ones trying to get this. And think about what it is specifically that makes out titles for that cover. So successful in your eyes, like any design project making journal covers requires some practice and some diligence. Don't be afraid to make some bad ones before you make the right one for your projects, Seriously make some bad covers, get that experience under your belt. Almost all of my journals like the tarot card when I showed you, especially I had a lot to cover variations before I settle on the one that I ended up using. Sometimes you just have to start and make some bad ones to figure out what you actually want it to look like. I really hope this course has been helpful for you. You might want to check out some of my other courses on books and design and tech after this one, those are kind of my areas of expertise. Also, don't forget to download the resource PDF that goes with this course that provides you with all the links to the tools that we discussed and it gives you some resources for further learning. If you have a moment to review this course, I would really appreciate it. I read all my reviews and they totally make my day. Thank you for watching and good luck with your journal covers.
Rebecca Wilson, Artist and Illustrator
