How to make your own album cover
Your album cover is an integral part of your music. Making yours doesn’t need to be hard, especially with these tips.
Making a striking cover art can be a huge part of your music release. You want it to look unique whilst also representing you or your music in some way. It doesn’t have to be difficult either!
Here are some simple steps to make your album art shine.
Find the right image
Your album cover is going to be an image; whether you go for an all black background or an explosion of colours and illustrations, it is in itself an image.
You need to decide what you want first. You can use a photo or multiple photos or you can draw/paint/design your very own original image. Whatever you decide on think about how you want to represent your release.
Be sure to remember; Whatever you use, you must have the full rights to use commercially. If it’s your own photograph or creation then you’re set! If it’s someone else’s, you must have legal permission to use it.
Design it
It’s not always just as simple as having an image you like. It may be that you have a square photo or image that you’re set on as is, but often you’ll want to give it some design to really shine.
Something as simple as giving your image a colourful border around the outside can make a world of difference. You could even edit multiple images together to create a montage of imagery that all give more life to your art.
Lets look at an example of how we could spruce up a plain image with something as simple as some coloured edges.
Take this generic looking, copyright-free image. It looks kind of cool but it doesn’t really stand out, there’s certainly nothing making it unique from hundreds of other images of oceans.
Now look at how immediately it becomes more stylised and given it’s own personality, simply by adding a border.
It’s nothing special, but suddenly there is something that is noticeable that you can associate with yourself that sets it apart from the original image. How about if we doubled the border up now?
The colours and thickness of the borders and entire design is of course up to your own personal taste – but you can see how it suddenly becomes your own.
Now a little bit of text to add context; let’s say your artist name is Jon Bovi and your album is called Surfing on the Sun.
This is just a simple example and you can create yours in any way you like and probably much better! You can see though, that just a few additions take your album cover a long way to becoming yours.
Distribute it!
Now you have a great album cover to go with your music, it’s time to release it to the world.
You can upload your releases for free distribution to the world’s biggest digital music services like Spotify, Amazon, Apple Music, and many more with us at RouteNote. Simply create a free account and upload your release today.
Our handy video below explains some extra tips you’ll need to be aware of when uploading your artwork to stores.