Over the last few months, I’ve put together an ebook, as well as designed a cover for my Kindle book, using Canva. I had wondered about hiring a designer from platforms such as Etsy or People-Per-Hour, but this year hasn’t been financially stable, so I looked into alternatives based on my budget. I tried Photoshop, but it’s an investment because of the technical aspects, and as I’m not a professional designer, I like to rely on a tool with a bit more ease.
If you are not aware of Canva, it is a graphic design platform, founded in Australia. You can use it to create anything from flyers to wedding invites to logos, postcards, resumes, and social media assets. They also have the option to create book covers. So if you’re someone like me — a (digital) author wanting to become design-savvy in 2020 and beyond, Canva might be a great tool to DIY.
Canva offers a lot of design templates, elements, and fonts to play with. If you feel overwhelmed with Canva’s range of design options, just type in ‘book cover’ and it’ll offer suggestions, with sizes; which you can re-size (resizing is only available on Canva Pro), on what you’d like to design.
You’ll be presented with hundreds of ready-made designs, which you can use and edit. It’s much easier for a beginner to tweak these templates. However, you can create a book cover from a blank page if you prefer.
Please note: Canva has thousands of free stock images that you are able to use for commercial and non-commercial projects. However, there are certain photographs which require licensing if you intend to sell many copies of one image. You can find their terms and conditions here.
To forgo all the legalities, you are able to upload your own images too.
From the given templates, I’ve selected and edited a few to show you how you can begin to create covers for your own book/s.
