Essential Tips for Choosing The Right Cover Art Designer

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How to choose the right cover designer

Selecting a cover art designer for your information product can be very intimidating, especially if you haven’t dealt with a designer before. You may not recognize the necessary questions or information that you need to provide or get from the cover designer.

Here are a few tips to get you on the right track, so that you can get the kind of order pulling cover art you want for your product, whilst maintaining a positive relationship with your designer. It will also help you in picking out the best designer for the specific kind of cover art you want , because designers each have a strong design area, either by virtue of working in the subject matter a number of times , or simply by natural talent

Outward appearance and first impressions: Visiting the designer’s website is like having a peep through the designers office. If the designer’s website gives you a good feeling, then chances are that you will like the design style of the designer. If the first impression you get from their website is not favorable, then chances are that you might not like the kind of work they do. That being said, there are many designers who are brilliant at what they do but are not very good at marketing themselves, which makes the next tip very important.

Portfolio: This is by far a very important aspect of choosing the right designer for youe ebook cover or cover art job. A sampling of the designers previous work will show you the kind of work that the designer is capable of doing. By checking the designers portfolio, you will be able to see how skilled the designer is, how striking their use of fonts, colour and images are, as well as the kind of niches they’ve designed for in the past.

Training and qualifications: learning how to use a software and knowing the fundamentals of design are two separate things. Graphic design is a field with established laws and guidelines. Any design that makes the prospect sit up and take notice has achieved what the designer set out to do. Formal design training has an advantage though there are many designers that are self taught who design better than the formally trained ones. The most important thing to remember is to choose a designer that can accurately capture the essence of your brand.

A good designer should be able to research or find out more about your product or service, so that they can create covers that will zero in on what your information product is all about. The final cover should be able to inform the prospect on what the product is all about. The cover also has a few second to catch and hold the attention of the customer.

The Design format: You need to find out from the designer what format that the designs will come in. You will need both high and low resolution versions of your design so that you can market your product both online and offline. Just bear in mind that the normal print resolution is 300 dpi ( dots per inch) and the resolution for web images is 72 dpi. The Dpi is just a measure of how big the graphics are. Using fuzzy graphics detracts from the effects of the cover and also looks very professional.

Copyright for images: You need to ask designers for the source of images used. You can be sued for breach of copyright if the designer uses images that they do not have the rights to use. Moreover, you are the one that the owner of the image will contact, because the cover is being used by you to market your product.

Since you will be working very closely with the designer, you will need to see a minimum of two design drafts to choose from. I have found that giving clients more than 3 drafts at atime confused them and also waters down the effort put into the cover design.

Price: The price charged by a designer does not necessarily mean that the designer’s work is good or bad. By comparing the going rates for other designers, you will be able to have an idea what the average prices are for the design of cover art. You also need to ask the designer how they accept payment and other payment terms.

Time : The designer also need to give you a rough estimate of the time it will take to design the cover i.e the lead time. If the designer’s workload is full, they will give you an idea of when you can expect the drafts and completion of the cover graphics.

Mode of delivery: Because of the internet, it is now very easy to conduct business with a designer without seeing them face to face. You can receive the drafts and the completed graphics by either email or by direct download from a specified web page.

Knowing the questions to ask your graphic designer will go a long way to making sure that your cover is designed successfully and that both parties are happy with the end result.