Canva Book Cover Design Tutorial - Book Cover Design on a Budget

Let's design a book cover using Canva only. I have professionally designed hundreds of book covers in the past but typically I would use Photoshop. Now I no longer work as a freelance cover designer instead I have a book cover design course that you can take but if you're also into the DIY route and you don't want to touch Photoshop but you do like Canva that is exactly what this tutorial is going to be all about. So if you want to learn how to design this book cover make sure to stick around because I'll be designing it step by step with you. So today's tutorial is just going to be a dip into the book cover design world because like I said I typically use Photoshop to design book covers. I find it's more versatile has a lot more options but you can definitely get by with designing a book cover in Canva especially if you're someone who's on a budget. So that's what we're going to be focusing on today. However if you want to learn more about book cover design and want more options when you're designing your book cover I highly recommend using Photoshop. You can take my courses. I have three different courses. There's Photoshop basics for authors. This just teaches you the basics of Photoshop. There's typography and book cover design. This is a tutorial on just adding the typography to your book cover. So if you hire an illustrator to illustrate your book cover and then you need to add in the typography that's the course for you. And then the third and final course is designing book covers in Photoshop. This is a more advanced course where we take everything from the previous courses and we put it all together to design a book cover from scratch using stock photos. Now today we're doing everything in Canva. So it's a lot of the same principles but the way we do it is going to be different because it is of course in Canva rather than Photoshop. Canva does have some limitations but as you will see as we start designing it's a pretty good software especially if you don't want to invest in Photoshop. Now I today will be using Canva Pro which is the paid version of Canva. So keep that in mind. A lot of things I am doing today in the design process you have to have Canva Pro. If you have the free version of Canva a lot of the things I talk about today will not be options. And one of the perks of Canva Pro besides just being able to edit things in a fancier way is that it gives you access to a lot of the Canva stock photos. But if you don't have Canva Pro you can use any stock photo website. Just of course buy the rights to the stock photos if you plan on using them on your book cover. Alright with that said let's go ahead and hop into Canva right now. Alright so here we are in Canva. You can see all my projects that I've worked on. Today what I'm gonna do is I'm only gonna be designing the ebook cover. I'm not designing the full book cover wrap. I have a separate tutorial on Canva on how to do that so I will link that down below if you want to check it out. I also have a tutorial on how to design a book cover wrap in Photoshop. Also on YouTube so you can check that out as well. It's pretty simple but today I just want to focus on designing the ebook cover. So in that case I'm just gonna do the custom size and I'm gonna do as you can see I recently was in here playing around with things. I'm gonna do a five by eight book cover but you can set it to whatever book cover size you want. So first things first let's go over here to the elements tab and you can see there's a ton of different things. I will say today I am not touching the AI image generator. You guys are welcome to check that out if you want. I personally am not a fan of AI when it comes to graphic design especially if it's something where you are supposed to own the commercial rights to because frankly it's just a really great area. Because of the way AI is generated there's no way to like completely own the rights to an AI image. It's one of those legal great areas right now and I would recommend if I were you to not use AI to generate your book covers because it could lead to some messy issues down the line. So I recommend just staying away from it if you can. So what I'm just gonna do is I'm gonna start off by finding the background of my cover and then kind of work from there. And the last thing we'll do is add in text. So I want to design a fantasy book cover. I want it to be kind of like a very basic generic fantasy book cover for the sake of giving you guys an example. But of course when you're designing your own you're gonna want to get a little creative with things. But I'm just gonna see what I can find for like a fun fantasy forest and go from there. I actually really like this image right here and I'm gonna make it bigger. So I think this will be our background. I think the castle is cool. All that is cool. And one of the odd things I find with Canva is that when you click on the image you can see this color green and we can actually change this color to whatever we want and it changes basically the tint of the entire photo. And you can see that happening right there. And I actually kind of like the bluish tint that it has. So I'm just gonna play around until I find one that I really like. I think I kind of like the more purpley tint. Anyways this is gonna be our background and we can always change things later on but that'll be good for now. Now let's find I guess a princess. I don't know how good of photo options we have in here. This photo might be okay. I wonder if we can... That's probably a little too bright and that looks more like a wedding dress anyways. My one gripe is that these photos are so small. Like I feel like I can't quite see a lot of these photos until I click on them. So sometimes that's just what you're gonna have to do is you're gonna have to click on stuff to see it enlarged and go from there. And I also put in a super generic search term. So sometimes half the battle with designing a cover is just finding the right stock photos which is basically what I'm struggling with right now. All right so here is a stock photo that I like. This is super super generic but I do think it'll fit. What I'm gonna do right now is making sure that this image is selected. I'm gonna hit the background remover button and we can see right there that it just removed our background. It's not perfect. Like the lines are a little too harsh in my opinion. But for canva this is gonna have to do the job. And we can see this blue is more like the background color that we ended up removing. But this more tan color is kind of her dress. So I'm gonna see if I can mess with that and make it more of this like bluey purple tint that the rest of the image has going on. Just to make it match a little bit better. And I like that. So let's go with that. So the next thing I want to see if I can add in like a little bit of magical effects. In photoshop I personally would use like a special photoshop brush. But in here I'm just going to continue searching under the elements tab. And I don't know exactly what the best search terms will be. I actually kind of like these clouds. These clouds are really cool. I don't like the tint of them. And I think they need to be a different opacity as well. But let's just see if I can play around with this to make it work. Actually that worked really well just by changing the color. And let's change the transparency a tiny bit. I think that might be okay. Let's go back to elements and see what else we can find though. So you'll find in canvas sometimes you just have to get a little creative with things. Like you can make it work, you just have to be creative with your execution. So I really like this sort of magical mist that we have going on. But I want to put it behind our main character here. So I'm going to hit this three dot button. And then go to layer. And then just send backward. Now it may not look like we moved our layers around at all. But that's because if you you'll see it better if we pull up our layer panel. Which to pull that up you just hit alt one. And you'll see this pop up here. So before this is where our little sparkle layer was. But then we can move it individually like so. And now we can put it behind our character here. And we can see that happen here as well. So I'm just gonna go ahead and change the transparency just a little bit. And I want to see if I can edit just this girl. I'm not liking her coloring. Like I feel like she pops too much in the photo right now. So I'm gonna hit the edit button while making sure I'm selected to her. And then we're gonna go to adjust. And I'm just gonna manually play around with things until I feel like she kind of blends in a tiny bit better. Okay so I'm kind of liking how this is looking now. I feel like she doesn't pop quite as much as she normally does. Now my one gripe with canva that I don't think we can do here. We can draw in canva. But it's not quite the same as when you're drawing in photoshop. In photoshop you have endless brushes especially if you purchase photoshop brushes. Here in canva we have just these like a marker or different types of markers and eraser and that sort of thing. Basically what I would normally do in photoshop at this point is I would use my brush tool and draw an outline around our main character here. Which obviously here in canva it looks awful. And then I would blur this line and put it as like a back glow. I feel like that's always really nice to give main characters on a book cover a back glow. It makes them pop especially when it's fantasy. It just adds to that fantasy feel. But again we're a little more limited here. But I did want to point out that in canva under the tools tab you do have these other options of drawing. You can you know change the weight of it and the transparency. Unfortunately you can't change the hardness of it. Which is you know when I say this this is a hard line. Which means it doesn't have any fade to it. It's just a harsh hard line. Whereas in photoshop you can make the line blurred at the edges. We don't have that option in canva at least as far as I'm aware. But we do have these other cool things. Like we can add in shapes. We can add in lines. We can add in text. Which is actually the next thing I'm going to do anyways. So let's label this as I'm actually going to skip the first word and go straight to the second word in the book title. Which is going to be lost. I'm going to go with a very generic title. The Lost Kingdom. So I'm going to make sure I have my text highlighted. And now I'm going to see if I can find a fun fantasy font. Now canva does have a ton of really cool fonts. You can also upload your own fonts as well. So you're going to have a lot of options when you're in here. Okay I actually really like this font right here. And I'm going to see what color might look okay with it. I kind of like, I don't, I don't want it to be perfectly white. But I don't want it to be just plain white either. Let me try this. So I really like this color for the font. But obviously it blends in with the background way too much. I'm going to see if I add an effect to it. If that can make it look better. The one bummer here is I feel like especially for fantasy fonts or fantasy book covers. The fonts are really cool on book covers when they look like metal or they have like this 3d effect. Unfortunately that's just non-option in canva right now. I'm actually surprised they haven't added it as a text effect. Because you can see here we actually have quite a few options for adding a little extra something. But I think because of the limited options we do have. I think I'm gonna have to change the color of our font here. And I'm just gonna change it to this darker color. Which is a little bit of a bummer but it'll it'll get the job done. Now I really recommend against doing an outline around your text like this. I personally find it just makes it look really amateur. I feel like the best thing is just to add a little bit of a drop shadow. Which is this text style called lift. I feel like that's the best thing is that it just makes it pop. It's a little more subtle and it still looks professional. So I'm just gonna copy and paste this now. And change the second word. And make it a little smaller. And move it around. This is where things get tricky. Where I want to start moving things around more and layering things a little more. But I feel like where canva really kind of lacks is when it comes to text. I feel like in photoshop you have a lot more options. And I know you guys hate when I talk about photoshop in canva tutorials. But as someone who designs primarily in photoshop this is this is a big deal. Like sometimes it is text that makes or breaks your book covers. So it's important to have really strong and powerful text. Right now I'm just trying to figure out how to align everything and make it look good. I'm also not really loving the color of my text anymore. So I think I'm gonna have to change it. It's not popping the way I want it to. I think I might just have to go with a solid black. Which I feel like is so boring. I really do truly believe that what makes a book cover look professional is how you design the text on the book cover. And I feel like canva just really makes it nearly impossible to design really professional looking text on your book cover. And I'll put on screen right now the different types of effects that I'm talking about. I'll just show examples of book covers that I've designed that have you know effects applied to the book covers. Because truly I don't think I've ever designed a book cover with flat text. And flat text is really like the only option you have when it comes to canva. Which is a bit of a bummer. I'm hoping they change that eventually. But for now this is the best we've got. So I'm gonna go and bring up my layer panel again. And I'm just gonna put all of my text beneath the girl. Because I kind of like this slight layered look to it. I might move things around a little bit more. And I'm also getting annoyed because I keep accidentally grabbing our background. So I don't know if you saw what I did there. But I locked that layer. If I pull up this layer you can see. Oh I locked the girl layer. Okay so either way I kept accidentally selecting the girl. I thought it was the background I was selecting. But I locked that layer for now. So I wouldn't keep accidentally selecting it. And you can also just select your layers directly in the layer panel if you feel like it's really annoying you. Because that's definitely what I've had to do in the past. Okay so the last thing I want to do to this text is add a little bit more of a drop shadow to it. Because I feel like the one that's automatically on the text right now isn't doing enough. So let's go over to elements and go and I'm just going to do shadow. And go to graphics and hit all. And I'm just going to see if I can find one that's the general shape and size. Which is kind of sort of this one right here. You can see it's pretty subtle. And right now it's covering everything. So I'm going to hit alt one to pull up that layer panel again. And you can see our shadow here. I'm going to just drag it to go behind all of our text. And you can see that makes it pop just a little bit more the way I like it. So the last thing we have here that we need to add is our name. In this case I'm just going to put in my publishing info. Because that's the type of info I typically put in when I do pre-made book covers. Which this isn't a pre-made book cover. I'm not selling it to be totally honest. I would do a lot more tweaking to this before I would sell it as a pre-made. I'm also still like questioning this girl for the stock photo. But for today I just want to show you guys how to do some things. So I don't like this font. I don't want it to be the same as the font on the title. So I'm just going to play around until I find a different font that I like. And maybe if it's in all caps. All right so I went with a super basic font. I'm making sure it is centered. Which I don't think that is centered. There it is. And it's just gonna be simple black font. I think that should be okay. If we zoom out this looks pretty good. But yeah this is just a super basic cover we made here in Canva. You can obviously play around for a lot longer. Like this elements tab in Canva is gonna be your best friend when it comes to designing. Because there's really so many little things that you can add in. Like if we wanted to add in more magical effects we could. If we wanted to look for a different model. Because again the longer I look at her the more I'm like I'm not sure if she's the right fit. But because I'm not doing anything with this book cover I really don't care. But you can also if we pull up our layer panel again. If I could unlock this right now. Is there an option to just turn or I don't think there is. I know in Photoshop you can turn off the visibility of layers just to look at it without that layer present. I don't see that option here which is a bit of a bummer. But I feel like she's the only thing I'm not liking here right now. So I could go ahead and find a different model. Like if I just look up different words I'll probably get different results. Like this girl I kind of like how her back is to us. But it's a little too vague. I don't mind this one. Let me see if we remove the background and we change the coloring to match the coloring of the rest of the. Oh god that does not look good. Oh man okay let's not touch that. Maybe not. Maybe not her. This is why it's important to play around with things. Some things work some things don't. Okay let's try this one and let's change her dress to be more purple which that works. And maybe a different color over here. Okay so I think we're gonna leave this girl as is. And I'm gonna pull up the layer panel again and I'm just gonna move her right to where the other girl is and delete our original model because I don't like her. So now that we have this woman instead and I actually really like her tattoos as well. And I'm just gonna make her a tad smaller. I think she might work better in this instance. I think. You know we can always come back to it later and change it around but I think I'm gonna call it a day right now right here. I really like the background. I like the colors. I feel like she pops a little bit better. We can maybe change some coloring just a tiny bit. She's like a little too bright. I think that's better. And in case you missed what I did, I clicked on that layer and then hit edit and then went to adjust just so I could adjust things just for her layer. So there we have it. That is our cover we designed in Canva. Obviously when you design a cover, take your time with it. Play around with it a lot more. I feel like the best thing you can do with cover design is to go ahead and walk away from your cover and then come back to it a day or two later. See if you still like it. Show your cover to other authors or other readers in your genre. See what they think of it and really just be mindful to design the cover that will sell your book and not just design the cover that you think is the prettiest. Because sometimes those two things aren't the same. I cover this sort of stuff a lot more in my course so if you want to know more cover design tips and more advanced tips when it comes to book cover design, definitely check out the course. There's a lot of research that goes into designing book cover before you even start the design process. Today I was just showing you the more technical side of things, the more technical skills that you'll need. And honestly Canva is great because you don't need a lot of technical skills but it is very limiting in terms of what you can do in the software. If you've ever seen me design in Photoshop you'll see that I do a lot more in Photoshop to stock photos to manipulate them. Here in Canva we're a little more limited. In Photoshop I feel like the best part about Photoshop is the Photoshop brushes. That truly is just a game changer. But anyways that is going to be it for this video. If you want more videos on book cover design let me know in the comments down below. I will link my entire book cover design playlist in the comments as well. That is a mix of videos that are time lapses, tutorials, and more Canva tutorials as well. So thank you all for watching and I'll see you all in the next video.