Using Custom Art on Your Cover

Student drawings as cover art

If your yearbook will feature student art created with traditional media (paint, pencil, markers, crayons, etc.), follow the recommendations below for best results.

• Use standard 8.5×11 letter-sized paper for a feature front cover artwork.
• Ask your artist to keep all important content — the school name, the year, other text, feature illustration components — at least a thumb’s width from the edge of the page. This will make cropping and positioning the image on the cover easier.
• Background color should go right to the edge of the page, if applicable.
• Keep the art as clean as possible, removing sketch lines, erasure marks and smudges.

Processing your artwork into a digital image

When the cover design has been selected, it is time to digitize the artwork.

• Ensure the artwork is as flat as possible, free of smudges and creases.
• Proof-read all text elements, ensuring that the school name is spelled correctly. (Eg. “elementary” is often misspelled by younger artists!)
• Use a flatbed scanner to scan the artwork at 300 dpi and save it as a jpg.
• Do not photograph the art, as it is nearly impossible to get a perfectly straight angle with no glare spots, shadows or wrinkles.
• Upload the file to your yearbook software into a candid image folder.

Placing the artwork on your yearbook cover

Most artwork works best when inset with the safe margins of your front and back covers, keeping it away from your spine guidelines (0.5″ for hard cover, 0.25″ for soft cover). Optionally, add a border around the artwork to set it off nicely on the background, like a matted work of art.

Additional drawings or other design elements (photos, logos, text) may be added to the back cover, also placing these elements within the safe margins and away from the spine.

Pay attention to the cropping of the image, ensuring that important text or feature image content is not clipped, and that there are no black or white scanner bed lines visible at the frame’s edge.

To complete the cover design, add a complementary background color/texture that extends to the outer edges of your canvas.

If the artwork includes a lot of extra background and all feature content fits within the safe margins, then it may be placed to the canvas edges – keeping in mind that at least 1/8″ of the art will be trimmed off on a soft cover, and 3/4″ folded over the back of a hard cover.

Be careful not to align the artwork to the spine guideline — either add a shape to extend well over the spine between front and back cover like bookbinding tape, or extend the artwork onto the back cover well over the spine area to ensure a smooth transition over this area. 

Digital Cover Artwork

If your cover is created digitally in an editing software (eg. Photoshop, Procreate, InDesign, etc.), it is critical that the project be set up with correct dimensions and guidelines prior to the start of the design to avoid low-resolution unprintable artwork.  Note that if you are designing a cover to upload to your yearbook software that the cover image file should be saved as a JPG format. This will enable the image to cover your entire cover canvas in your yearbook software most effectively.

When the digital artwork is complete, save it as a 300 dpi jpg file, then upload it to your yearbook software into a candid image folder (if applicable) then add to your canvas. Be sure to review the Cover Design article to place elements on your canvas for best results.