CD Cover Design

The quality of CD cover is almost as important as the music itself. It can draw in new fan bases that would have never have bought your if it were not for your attention grabbing design. A few questions to ask yourself when critiquing a CD cover:

• Is the name of the artists clear and visible?
• Can you distinguish the artists name from the title of the CD?
• Does your cover image portray the style of the music or the band?

The inside of the CD booklet is less important for attention grabbing factors because if someone is viewing the inside cover it means its out of the shrink wrap and you have most likely already made the sale. The booklet inside is important in developing a fan base though,. You may want to include information on where to find more of your products, like a web site URL, and/or advertise for work that is soon to be released.

The spine of the CD is a good place to include information such as a catalogue number, label name and its good to repeat the artists name and CD title here as well. Do not use a super large font on the spine, this is only a guide line but in my opinion when the font is too large it gives a cheaper look to the CD, making your CD look professional is the key.

Technical Info When Designing a CD Cover

Lets start off with the standard size of a CD cover which is 12cm x 12cm (front cover), and 11.75cm x 15.1cm (back cover), as shown in the illustration below.

By choosing B&W over colour will save you money in production costs, I only recommend doing this if you are on a tight budget, unless you are using B&W as an artistic design element.

When you are designing your cover art be sure that you are using the right file format to produce your image files, jpeg's are the best if you only have images, but if there is text incorporated be sure that you are using a vector based image program. The ideal format for printing is .eps this is the industry standard for printing, but its draw back is the large file sizes that you will have to deal with.

CD Resources