How to make a cover art for a podcast

Hi! This time I'll tell you about the cover for your podcast. This tiny square image can make a big difference in the amount of listeners of your show, so it's worth paying attention to.

Ready?

The cover is what helps listeners choose a podcast at a glance. For example, imagine you search for “Business in Dubai” and 20 options come up. Which one would you choose?

I'm sure you won't go through these podcasts one by one in alphabetical order, but you'll open the one whose cover intrigues you most. And if it turns out to be great, you'll get hooked on it and won't pay attention to the others. So a tiny picture catches you on a hook while the others won't even have a chance.

Cover art doesn't just affect the first impression: listeners see it on podcast platforms, on your website, and on social media. Soon the illustration becomes firmly associated with your show and becomes the main visual component of your brand.

And for all its importance, a cover is not too expensive. Professional illustrators do it for 100-300 euros with all the resizes. And it's a one-time expense, it's spread over all the episodes of the podcast.

So we decided that the cover is not something you can save a lot on and definitely not something you should skimp on. That’s why we always hire illustrators.

These principles will help you put together a cover brief for an illustrator, or for yourself - if you're doing the artwork yourself.

Consistent. The illustration should match the concept and mood of your podcast and jingle so that they work together to create a cohesive experience. That's why in the brief for the podcast “Crossing the Desert” we wrote that:

If you're briefing an illustrator, try to tell them as much as possible about the concept, mood, and purpose of your podcast. This will help him or her make the illustration consistent.

Competitive but appropriate. It has to win the battle for attention, but at the same time not look too foreign and fit into a cultural and professional context. That's why we specified in the brief:

“We're tackling a contradictory challenge: we want to immediately stand out from other podcasts, but at the same time we don't want to look like something foreign. We see two approaches to the color palette in Dubai: the whole city is painted in two colors: beige and blue. We see how often this color combination is used in advertising and interior design. At the same time, in art galleries, on the contrary, we see very colorful, acid-coloured artworks. Now we are inclined to think that using the beige and blue color scheme will better solve our task, but we can be persuaded”.

To test how competitive and appropriate your cover is, put it in the midst of the covers of other podcasts of the same topic in your area. If you find your image the most appealing, you've done it right. If not, you might want to change it.

Recognizable. The cover should be recognizable even at a very small size like this:

To test how recognizable your cover is, reduce it to a tiny size. Is it still recognizable? If so, you've done the right thing.

Branded. This is a little thing that is often forgotten: the cover must have room for your logo (or even two - yours and your partner's), and the colors of the logos and the cover must not conflict. If you forget about this in the beginning, then you'll have to slap your logo on top of the finished picture, and they may not match.

This is the illustration we managed to create based on our brief:

You can create a brief for your illustrator along the same lines: tell your illustrator as much as possible about the concept and mood of the podcast, the principle of competition (but at the same time appropriateness), recognizability even in a small size, and branding. This will be enough to make up most of the brief

If you order a cover from an illustrator, it's not you who has to think about the rest, it's them. After all, you've already written the brief, so now the ball is in his court, right? But in reality, there are usually 3-10 more iterations of edits between the brief and the ideal result. For example, here's what 3 variants of the cover of the book “Everything Personal” looked like:

The third option is much more expressive, right? And to go from point 1 to point 3, the illustrator and I had to discuss a few principles:

• crop. A cover for a podcast is a tiny picture, and to make it legible and expressive, a bold crop is most often used.
• contrast. For a cover to be eye-catching, there must be contrast in it: small and large, empty space and an object, dark and light, or just a contrast of colors. Or all of these together.
• dynamics. Another way to attract attention is to make the cover dynamic. Dynamics can be achieved by using unusual points of view, guiding line arrangements, fonts, or moving figures.

Too abstract so far? Let's look at some examples:

Bold crop accomplishes two things at once:

• making the picture larger, and therefore more distinguishable in a tiny size;
• and more intriguing. For example, a drawing of people riding a tandem looks much more tense and conflicted if the illustration is cropped at the shoulders.

On these covers, we see different kinds of contact:

• between a tiny figure and a large title,
• between the figure and the empty space,
• orange and green,
• the sharp shape of the leaves and the soft lines of the typeface.

Contrast creates conflict and makes the illustration more expressive.

Dynamics can be created in many ways:

• through the movement of figures or lettering,
• the direction of the character's gaze,
• through the composition itself,
• the guiding lines,
• the font.

On the cover of “Ap at night” the hero's gaze is also directed against the movement of the guiding lines — and this creates not only dynamics but also conflict.

These three techniques can break your team's deadlock if you're looking at another draft of an illustration and it seems to fit, but something about it doesn't feel right. Often in this situation it is enough to enlarge objects, make a bold cropping, amplify the contrast and dynamics. This is exactly what helped us to finalize the illustration for “Everything Personal”:

So if you work with an illustrator, show them these examples and discuss cropping, contrast, and dynamics - this should help them make the cover look more appealing and competitive.

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But, of course, all of the illustrator's tools are not reducible to these three techniques. Sometimes a cover catches the eye because of a striking image, scene, situation, texture, and who knows what else. Here, for example, are a few of my favorite covers that don't catch your eye because of cropping or dynamics. You just can't take your eyes off a girl with an apple pie for a head, flirting with an alien, or a witch's campfire.

It would be annoying if you get a cover from an illustrator and then find out that its format is not suitable for any of the platforms. So keep this list:

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That's it for now. Trust your gut, experiment, and email me about your findings.