Udemy – The Ultimate Guide to Creating Your Book Cover Design

The Ultimate Guide to Creating Your Book Cover Design – video сourse by Udemy

Design Free Book Covers, Create Mockups & Learn PowerPoint Picture & Text Effects (2016, 2013)

What Will I Learn?

You will learn the graphical design principles and color theory to avoid amateurish mistakes
You will be able to use images, colors and pair typefaces so that they look good together and communicate your book genre
You will understand what graphical design techniques professional designers use to make book covers "pop out" and attract readers.
You will learn how to create your book cover design, 3D book mockups, as well as computer, smartphone and tablet mockups free of charge.
You will be able to create professionally looking book advertisements for social media and your other promotional materials.
You will know the best free and low-cost resources to get images and fonts for your book covers and other visuals without infringing upon someone else's copyright.
You will understand what elements a book cover must have and their hierarchy.
You will learn the best practices of fiction and non-fiction book cover design.
You will be able to set the proper orientation and dimensions for your book cover
You will learn PowerPoint features and techniques that can be used for creating stunning picture effects and customizing fonts.
You will be able to work with picture layers, create 3D pop-out images, integrate text with pictures, create text masks, import pictures in objects, create photo collages and use many other PowerPoint techniques.
You will even learn how to edit EPS vector files and create your own illustrations and cartoons.

Requirements

You should be able to use PowerPoint at a basic beginner level
Access to PowerPoint 2016 or 2013
You can use also Microsoft Office 365 30-day FREE trial version (includes PowerPoint 2016)

Description

What if I told you that it easy to create professionally looking book covers in PowerPoint? Even if you are struggling with creating your book cover design, after watching this course, you will be able to create professionally looking book cover designs that sell and you will be proud of.

Maybe you assume that PowerPoint works only for creating presentation slides, which is actually not true. You can be really creative in PowerPoint. You can create visuals in different sizes and formats, create your own templates, make your own designs by creating new shapes, editing eps vector files, customizing fonts and using many other effects. Moreover, you can create mockups and promotional visuals for your books and other digital products.

Of course, I understand that it’s possible to do more advanced things with PhotoShop or Illustrator, or any other professional program. However, in the same time it’s possible also to create bad looking visuals with these tools. The fact that you used PhotoShop doesn’t guaranty that the visuals will look great. Both PhotoShop and PowerPoint are just tools. And you can use these tools to create both: poor or amazing book covers. Because it depends only on your knowledge and skills. There are people out there who can create better visuals with PowerPoint than others with PhotoShop. Everything depends only on your skills. I believe that everybody can use PowerPoint to create beautiful book cover designs and other visuals. You don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars to buy professional graphic design programmes only to discover that you don’t know how to use them and need to invest another hundred dollars to get some training. I think it’s not worth it. Especially if you are just starting out and want to create covers only for your first self-published ebooks, business reports, lead magnets or other visuals.

If you are a self-publishing author and are starting out on a very small budget, a homemade, DIY book cover is a practical solution. However, the worst thing you can do is consider your cover design like a blank canvas and add all elements randomly without deeper understanding what role they are playing. So, in this course you are going to learn how to use colors, fonts, pictures and graphical design principles to communicate your genre and create a book cover that attracts your readers’ attention. Moreover, you will learn practical know-hows and advanced techniques to create your own and original book cover design in PowerPoint 2016 (If you don't have PowerPoint 2016 you can apply the same techniques also in PowerPoint 2013).
The additional benefit is that the same principles and techniques that you use for your book cover design you will be able to use also for creating other visuals – for social media and web. Therefore, you will never need to consider paying for additional image editing softwares or tools, because PowerPoint can offer everything you need. You will be surprised how multi-functional it is. This course is full of techniques you can use for creating different kind of visuals for almost every purpose.