How To Design Book Covers for Print with Inkscape

[Music] this is nick with logosbynic.com and in this tutorial i'll be demonstrating how you can design your own book covers using inkscape and i don't just mean a book cover for an ebook i mean an actual physical book cover that you would print and use on a book as you can see here in the mock-up before we get started though if you'd like to learn everything that there is to know about enscape be sure to check out my inkscape master class it's a collection of over 60 videos where i go over all of the tools and features in inkscape and i explained what they are and demonstrate how they work i'll have a link in the description of the video if you want to check that out okay so as you can see here i've opened up the kindle direct publishing uh this is there this is amazon's print on demand service for uh having your own books printed i'll be showing you how to use this service here because this is the one that people most commonly use when they have books printed in order to design your book cover with inkscape you first have to come here and download a template for the size of book you'd like to print so if you notice over here we have all these different sizes to choose from we have a page count to choose from and we have color options to choose from for the paper as well for this demonstration i'll be showing you how to design a six inches by nine inches book with 200 pages in it with white paper now if you go ahead and click the download cover template button you should get a zip folder and within that zip folder is a dot png file that we will be working with in inkscape okay so getting started here in inkscape the first thing i want to do is just set up the documents that we all have a similar workflow here i'm going to come up here and turn off snapping i want to change the units of measurement to pixels and then i will come up here to where it says view and make sure you have custom selected and now what i'm going to do is i'm going to import that png template onto my canvas here by just clicking and dragging it onto the canvas like that now you can't see where this is coming from because i have this folder opened up on my other monitor but if you take the dot png file and click and drag it onto your canvas like that you should get this little this little menu that pops up and from these defaults here we want to make sure we have embed from image dpi default import resolution and for image rendering mode none and once you have those presets as they are click ok and it should import your image as you can see here now let me zoom out a little bit so i can see that a little better you hold ctrl roll down the mouse wheel a couple of times okay so there's our template a couple of things about this template this image right here represents the size that our document needs to be so what i'm going to do is i want to resize the document so that it fits this image right here now if you notice this is the document size right here as it stands so in order to change that what i'm going to do is i'm going to select the image and i'm going to press ctrl shift and r on the keyboard and that's going to change the document size to match the size of the selection there as you can see there a couple of more things uh worth noting about this template over here you'll notice this dotted line going around the edge of the image here this dotted line represents the bleed cutoff once this document is printed everything outside of this dotted line will be trimmed off and then this pink area right here represents the safe area meaning all of your contents of your design need to be away from this pink area if you have any elements like text or imagery that touch this pink area or start to bleed out into that area uh amazon will reject your book cover design so that's something important to keep in mind as we're going through and creating this design you want to make sure you keep everything in this white space in here now as you can see over here on the right we have the cover of the book the front cover over here on the left we have the back cover and this right here is the spine of the book now the way this works is this will be printed out as one entire document and then just wrapped around the book as a single a single piece of paper and then over here we have the barcode now when we're designing we want to make sure we do not put anything over here we do not need to put the barcode on the design ourselves amazon will handle that themselves all we have to do is make sure that we leave this space right here free so let me zoom out a little bit let me open up the layers menu which is located over here you can also press shift control l as a keyboard shortcut and what i want to do is i want to rename this layer to template and i want to create a new layer by clicking the plus button over here and i want to name this contents all of the contents the design is going to be on this layer i want to put this below current and click add so we have the contents layer where the design is going to be and then we have the template layer up here which we're going to use for a reference as we're creating our design now instead of using this template right here i'm just going to create some simple guides to make sure that i'm staying within these boundaries here so the first thing i want to do is let me grab the rectangles tool and i'm going to create a rectangle going over the white space right here of the back cover and i want to give that an outline um or a stroke i'm going to hold shift and click on the color green to give that an outline let me remove the fill color let me grab the select tool i'm going to be moving through these steps a little quicker than normal this is going to be more of like an intermediate tutorial because there's a lot for me to go over in this lesson so i'm not going to be explaining every single click like i normally do so that's something to keep in mind let me zoom in over here i want to make sure i have this option up here disabled where it says when scaling objects scale the stroke width by the same proportion have that turned off and i just want to make sure that the edge of this green stroke is resting on the edge of this white safe space right here there we go looking pretty good and again to zoom in and out holding control rolling up and down the mouse wheel to move the page around pressing down the mouse wheel and moving the mouse i want to create another one going over this barcode right here there we go i'm going to grab the select tool duplicate that by pressing ctrl d i'm going to move this over here like that and then i'll create another one for the spine control d to duplicate it move this one over here there we go and i'll just resize that to fit the uh i want to make sure it fits the spine right there okay looking pretty good okay let me just zoom out okay looking pretty good here we've got uh green strokes for all of the important areas what i want to do is i want to select this image the template and i want to right click it and go to copy and then i want to turn off the visibility of the templates layer i want to come down here to the contents layer and i want to create another rectangle so just create a rectangle like that give this a fill color i'm going to make this as you can see in the thumbnail design i made this book cover yellow with some white going through here so i'm going to make this yellow the cover out the color i want the book cover to be i'll make that yellow let me get rid of that stroke by holding shift and clicking the x and i want to make this the same size as the template that we just copied so to do that let me go to edit paste size paste size and it'll paste the width and height of that image like that and then i just want to align this on the artboard here or the canvas so let me open up the alignment menu over here ctrl shift a is the keyboard shortcut and i'm going to align this relative to the page i'm going to put that on the vertical and horizontal axis like that okay now we'll come back over here to the layers menu now that we have that in place we can select the template layer turn the visibility of that back on and what i want to do is take this template and we don't need this anymore you could just press delete on your keyboard and get rid of that and as you can see we have the book cover design which is the yellow rectangle with these guides in place to let us know where the important content should go and where we should not be putting any content so let me lock this layer so that i don't accidentally move any of these guides as i'm designing and there we go now i'm going to click on the contents layer and now we are ready to start designing so as you can see here this book cover is yellow and i have some white in there so i'm going to go ahead and create that aspect of it real quick let me take this image right here and duplicate that by pressing ctrl d and i'm going to make this white and i'm just going to scale this down like this kind of like that now i'm going to grab my text tool and i'm going to put some text in here i'm going to write how to create a now let me change the font i'm going to go to text text and font and the font i'm looking for is montserrat obviously you can use whatever font you'd like i'm just showing you how i created this specific design i'm going to apply that font like that let me scale that up i'm holding ctrl while i scale to lock the proportions place this right about there and i'm going to duplicate that control d bring that down there and i'm going to change this to with inkscape and the text in the middle here is going to be a different font let me just make sure i have this centered up first i'm going to select both of these come back over here to the align distribute menu and set this to last selected and just make sure i have that centered up like that now if you notice here i have a book cover design in the middle here with a different font so i'm going to go ahead and create that next let me grab my text tool again i'm going to write book cover design there we go let me change the font of that to sirona make sure i have that centered and i'm just going to scale that up as well i'm actually going to move this out of the way i want to make this i want this title to take up the whole width of this of this uh of this cover right here just like that let me center that up on there and let me just change this white stripe right here to accommodate the change in the size of the text like that let me move this up move this up now if you notice over here i also have these little white stripes on the top and bottom of each of them so what i'm going to do is i'm going to duplicate that ctrl d move this over here like this and just bring down the height of that and i'll just duplicate that and bring that up there and i want to make sure that all three of these white stripes are spaced out apart evenly so i'm going to hold shift and click on each of them come over here to align and distribute and click on where it says make vertical gaps between objects equal there we go and now i just want to align my text again to make sure that it's aligned after that change right there and i'm just trying to make sure that this is centered like that i'm going to take this text and this text select them both and then center it up with this text just to make sure that everything is aligned in the center like that let me move that up there we go okay so what i'm going to do next is down here all of the secrets of book cover design revealed and then by author name let me add that text in there real quick and i'm going to give this text a little bit of a shear by clicking on it again and getting these shearing handles just to make it look like it's italics because there's no italics version of this font let me just do that there we go and i want to make sure i have that centered right there there we go and then down here finally i have by author name this is where you put your author right here so let me i'm just going to use this text item right here i'm going to duplicate that by author name and i'll make this one smaller because this one is less less prominent there we go put that down there towards the bottom center that up i want to make sure i have everything centered up here so i'm going to click on click and drag over all of that make sure it's all centered up like that and i want to make sure it's all centered relative to the page there and what i might want to do is just space things out vertically a little better so let me move this down let me move this down i'm going to group all of this right here together i'm going to just press ctrl g to group that together like that move this down like this now if you can see here i have the um the inkscape logo up top there so let me import that in here and place that real quick okay so there we go there's the inkscape logo and now i'm just going to select all of these objects or actually you know what let me make sure i have this centered first there we go i'm going to select all of these objects and i just want to space them all apart evenly vertically like this there we go and maybe move that up a little bit all right we're looking pretty good here okay so what i'm going to do now is the cover of the book is now finished i'm going to work on the spine now as you can see in the spine i have the inkscape logo i have the author name i have the title and then i have some subtext over here so let me add that in here let me put the escape logo in there i'm going to duplicate that by pressing ctrl d i have to make this small there we go put that right about there and i'm going to put some text right here that says the author name let me just duplicate this text and move it over here and just rotate that around like that so that it fits in there you may have to scale it down a bit like that there we go now i'm going to put the book title in this white space right here so i'm going to duplicate first let me ungroup that i'm going to duplicate this design right here i'm going to duplicate this text right here and i want to put this text all on one line like that oops scale that down rotate that place this in here and scale this down so that it doesn't it doesn't touch the green edges right here you want to make sure it's well within that safe area and then just center that up there we go looking pretty good now what i'm going to do is i'm going to put some subtext down here uh let me just duplicate this the secrets i'm going to i'm going to abbreviate this text so that it doesn't take up too much space down here the secrets of book cover design let's see if that works okay looking pretty good alright so now the spine is finished the final step would be to work on the back cover of the book so i'm going to put some text up there some placeholder text in the middle and then about the author uh down there at the bottom so we'll go ahead and get started on that i have up here learn how to design book covers okay so i'm going to grab this text i'm going to duplicate that put this over here i'll make this a little smaller let me uh change this learn how to did i have that on two lines or one line learn how to design book covers okay learn how to design book covers perfect i'll scale that down and now i'm going to put some placeholder text in here some lorem ipsum text you would obviously want to write like a description of the book or something this is just a tutorial so i'm going to put some lorem if some text in there i'll go to extensions render and actually no extensions text and lorem ipsum and i want to choose two paragraphs six sentences per paragraph and four for the paragraph i'm just putting random numbers in here let me close out of that and this text pretty small i got it was generated over here in the top left corner so let me let me grab that place this in here let me go to the text editor let me select the text with the text tool and i want to change this to montserrat i want to make this uh medium or semi-bold make this a little bigger maybe 28 see how that looks maybe a little bigger than that 36. looking better okay that's good enough i'll leave it at 36. i'll place this over here towards the top left again making sure it's not it's not going anywhere near that green border let me go back to the text tool and i'm just going to take this little node right here and bring that in so that it forces the text within this area right here and then i will center align that text and just to uh let me bring this down a little bit there we go just to make this look a little better i'm going to add some spacing between these lines because something about this text right here is just not visually appealing it just looks like a cluster of text so i want to space this out a little bit let me grab the text tool select that and over here uh spacing between baselines i'm just gonna increase that there we go that looks a lot better okay now down here bottom left we have about the author and some more lorem ipsum text so let's go ahead and create that and then we'll be done so let me take this text let me duplicate that and then i'll just take this text over here and just duplicate that i'll put this down here let me go back to the text tool i'm going to give this i'm going to align this to the left there we go i'll bring this in like this and i want to make this text smaller this is less prominent if you're following the rules of visual hierarchy here this here is the most prominent this is secondary and then this is uh down here the least important text let me uh shrink that down let me try 24. see how that looks okay that looks pretty good i'm gonna get rid of some of these lines of text in here so that it's not bleeding out into the uh the bleed cut off um there we go and if you want you could add like a little picture right here a picture of the author and you know whatever else you want to add in there okay so the design portion of the book cover is finished okay so how do we go from here to having an actual file that we can send to the printers and have printed what we want to do first is come over here to the layers menu and where it says template we want to just turn off the visibility of that layer we don't need that anymore and what we want to do now is export this as a jpeg image so we'll go to file and we'll go to export png image it's labeled as png image but it also allows you to export other formats such as jpg if you're working with inkscape version 1.1 or later so let's open up the export menu and i want to leave all of the defaults as they are the export area we are exporting the page and just leave all of these defaults as they are and then just go ahead and click on export as and when you click on that it's gonna it's gonna ask you to choose a location on your hard drive to save this file to and it's also going to ask you to it's also going to ask you to choose a file format now for this probably a good idea to choose jpeg so um yeah whenever you're printing something jpeg is always better than png and once you save that file you should be done you should be able to take that file that jpeg file that you've exported and upload it to kindle direct publishing to have your book cover printed so i think that should do it for this tutorial that's how you can go about designing your own book covers using inkscape if you have any questions just leave a comment below and as always thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Logos By Nick

Views: 20,980

Keywords: inkscape book cover, logos by nick, logosbynick, nick saporito

Id: zcK_tl8mLCo

Length: 19min 48sec (1188 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 22 2021