Covers
Designing a cover that sells
What makes a cover readable at thumbnail size, and what quietly ruins one.
A cover is a road sign, not a painting. It has to work at the size of a postage stamp on a phone.\n\nThat means one focal idea, high contrast, and a title you can read when the image is one inch wide. Three competing elements is two too many.\n\nGenre matters more than taste. Readers scan for familiar signals — a warm hand-lettered title for cosy fiction, stark type for thrillers, clean space for business books. Meet the expectation, then break one rule deliberately.\n\nWhen you generate cover artwork here, try several directions before you settle, and always check it shrunk down.