Tutorial on making Covers

Tutorial on making covers for LibriVox.

Is there a particular project on LibriVox, you want to make a cover for? Just do it! If you’d like to make a cover, but you don’t know for what book, you can visit this page. Here you’ll find all projects that currently are coverless. You can choose whatever project you want. No need to tell us; just do it.

In this tutorial I’m not going to tell you how to make the design. There are too many different ways to do it, depending on the software you have. Finding material for the cover is a bit tricky. We will release your cover in the Public Domain. This means that everything you use should be in the Public Domain too. No restrictions are allowed. Even if the source of the material only asks to be acknowledged, we cannot use it. You’ll find a list of possible sources for cover art on our wiki. Sometimes the original e-book (link on the catalog page) already has nice pictures. And of course you can google for pictures. Don’t forget to check the PDness!

For this tutorial I decided to make a cover for The Woodpeckers, by Fanny Hardy Eckstorm and so I started with making this:

The size in this case is 600 by 600 pixels. You’ll need it in a size like this later on, so keep it somewhere safe. There are a few things to point out here:

• We like to see the LibriVox logo on the front of the cover. It’s available for download from the wiki in 6 different file formats;
• The size should always be taken in pixels and not in dpi (dots per inch), inches, millimetres, picas or points, feet, yard, miles, centimetres, meters, kilometres or whatever. (In my drawing program I can choose all these and even four more!) The dpi-thing is something completely different and can safely be ignored.