by Philip Johnston
Diary Design 101: Cover Image Checklist
Ok, so you’ve got an image you love…but is it suitable as a cover for your diary? There’s a couple of quick things to check for before you upload it.
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Make sure it’s high resolution
To fill the page, your original cover image needs to be at least 2475 pixels wide by 1800 pixels tall—any smaller than that, and I’d have to enlarge it, which will leave the image looking muddy (not good! See the image on the right below).[/av_textblock] [/av_one_full]
If your pixel count is too low, instead of looking crisp like this…
…your printouts will look like this instead. (I won’t let that happen to you, but it saves time if you get it right first up)
Your diary is landscape. Your image should be too.
That way your picture can fill the whole page. If you have your heart set on something that’s portrait or square, I can still make it work, but will have to either crop it, or add an extra blank area next to it (see below).[/av_textblock] [/av_one_full] [av_hr class=’invisible’ height=’15’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’] [av_one_half first] [av_textblock ]
A portrait image won’t fill the page; here I’ve sampled the color from her shirt to create the gap-filling rectangle …it’s not horrible, but it’s not ideal.
This image is landscape, just like the diary itself. A perfect fit. (Well, it probably needs to be a violin rather than a trumpet, but you get the idea)
Look for images with space to accommodate text
Many commercial stock photography images deliberately have large areas that are essentially blank, for just this reason. That’s normally where your book title and subtitle will go (see image on the left below)
If you find an image that is perfect otherwise, but doesn’t have a blank area, don’t worry—I can drop in a background behind the text to make it easier to read (see image on the right below). But it’s better if the text is not trying to compete with the image, and nothing does this quite as well as a big expanse of, well, nothing.[/av_textblock] [/av_one_full] [av_hr class=’invisible’ height=’15’ shadow=’no-shadow’ position=’center’] [av_one_half first] [av_textblock ]
Lots of clear space makes it easy here to accommodate the title.
No clear blank spaces on this shot; dropping in a background behind the text helps, but it’s still very busy.
No image? No problem.
Read this. You’ll be able to find a brilliant image in no time. (It’s also possible to have a text-only cover with no image at all)[/av_textblock] [/av_one_full]