I recently finished designing an album cover for a rap artist (visit my portfolio page to see it), and during the process I realized there are a few things that if forgotten can cause you some problems and can greatly affect the quality of your work once printed. I made this list to help me remember these steps.
- Make sure to contact the printing company to check what size their prints are so that there are no mistakes once the covers are printed. Print companies usually provide templates for album covers and business cards so make sure to ask for one.
- The average size for the front cover is 4.75 x 4.75 inches but you need to add an extra 1/8 of an inch all around for the bleed area which will be cut off once printed. For the front cover make sure to set the width to 5 inches and the height to 5 inches. The back cover is wider than the front because of the spine. The size of the back cover is 5.906 x 4.625 inches but because of the bleed it should be set to 6.162 x 4.875 inches.
- Be sure to use guides to mark the bleed area around the document and for the spine area.
- For print design always make sure to set the color mode to CMYK.
- For the best quality prints make sure to set the resolution to 300 pixels/inch and use a vector based program such as illustrator, indesign, or quark express. If your using a raster based program such as photoshop remember you can create the art in photoshop and then use illustrator or in-design to add the text parts, that way the text will be easier to manage and will look sharper once printed.
I hope this was helpful, feel free to add something I missed by leaving a comment below. You can download the album cover template I use here
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