How to Design a Book Cover in Your Browser (Free, No Upload)

---

A cover is the only part of your book most people will ever see. It appears at about the size of a postage stamp in a store listing, next to forty others, and it has roughly one second to say this is a thriller, it's professionally made, it's for you. Get it wrong and the blurb never gets read.

The problem is that cover design sits behind a wall. A designer costs $300–800. Photoshop is a subscription and a learning curve. The free browser editors are built for social posts, so they hand you birthday-invitation fonts and no idea what a 1.6 ratio is.

So we built Cover Designer — a free tool that does one job properly: put professional typography on your image and export a cover at the exact size Amazon wants. It runs entirely in your browser. Your image is never uploaded, there's no account, and nothing is stored on a server.

Here's the whole process.

Step 1: Pick the size before you pick anything else

Start here, because every other decision is proportional to the canvas. The tool ships with the sizes that actually matter:

Preset	Pixels	Use it for
Kindle eBook	1600 × 2560	The KDP standard. A 1.6 ratio, which is what Amazon asks for
Kindle HQ	2500 × 4000	Same ratio, more detail. Better if your art can carry it
Print 6 × 9	1800 × 2700	The default paperback trim, at 300 dpi
Print 5 × 8	1500 × 2400	The smaller trade paperback
Audiobook	3000 × 3000	ACX and Audible require a 3000px square
Wattpad	512 × 800	Web serials and reader platforms

If none of those fit, type your own dimensions, or hit Match the image size to take the trim from your photograph.

A word on the ratio: KDP wants 1.6 (height ÷ width). A cover at 4:3 or square will be letterboxed or rejected. If you only ever remember one number, remember 1600 × 2560.

Step 2: Bring in your image

Three ways in: click the upload panel, drag a file onto the canvas, or just paste from your clipboard with Ctrl/Cmd+V. That last one is the fast path if you've come straight from a stock site.

The tool warns you if your image is smaller than the cover, because that's the single most common reason a self-published cover looks amateur. Scaling a 900px photo up to 1600px doesn't add detail — it invents blurry pixels, and the blur is very visible in the thumbnail next to a professionally made cover. Start with an image at least as large as your trim.

Once it's in, the framing controls do the rest:

• Fill / Fit / Stretch — Fill crops to cover the whole canvas and is what you want nine times out of ten
• Zoom and Move X/Y — push the subject where you need it, usually down and to one side so the title has clear air
• Brightness, Contrast, Saturation — pull the photo back so it supports the type instead of fighting it
• Blur — a genuinely useful trick. A slightly blurred background reads as depth of field, and it makes text dramatically easier to read

Step 3: Add the legibility wash

This is the step amateurs skip and professionals never do.

Text on a photograph is unreadable wherever the photo happens to be the same brightness as the text. You can't control that with colour alone, because the photo changes underneath every letter. What professionals do is put a layer between the picture and the type — a scrim.

Six options, under Legibility Wash:

• Even — darkens the whole image uniformly. Safe, slightly flat
• Bottom — a gradient rising from the foot of the cover. The workhorse: title at the top, byline sitting in the dark at the bottom
• Top — the same, inverted
• Both — dark at both ends, image breathing in the middle. This is the commercial thriller look
• Vignette — darkens the corners and pulls the eye to the centre
• None — only if your image already has a genuinely empty, even area

Set the strength to the lowest value where your title stays crisp. If you're unsure, go stronger. A slightly too-dark cover sells; an unreadable one doesn't.

Step 4: Write the text

The tool starts with four layers, and they're roles rather than just text boxes:

• Series — "A NOVEL", "BOOK TWO", "AN INSPECTOR HALE MYSTERY"
• Title
• Subtitle — a strapline, a tagline, or a blurb quote
• Author

Roles matter because the style presets treat each one differently — a preset knows an author line wants tracked-out caps at 4% of the cover width, and a title doesn't. Add, duplicate, hide, reorder or delete layers freely; a new layer copies the treatment of the existing layer with the same role, so it lands already matching your design.

To position anything, just drag it on the canvas. It snaps to the horizontal and vertical centres with a guide line, and arrow keys nudge the selected layer (hold Shift for bigger steps).

Step 5: Apply a cover style

This is the heart of the tool. There are 28 presets, and each one sets the entire type system at once — typeface, weight, tracking, letter case, colour, effects and vertical rhythm across all four roles. A cover looks professionally designed when the relationships between the lines are right, and that's what a preset gives you. Your image and horizontal composition are left alone.

Literary and quiet Literary Classic (wide-tracked serif caps between hairlines) · Poetry (light lowercase, open leading) · Memoir (quiet Baskerville with air around it) · Historical (old-style Garamond, framed by rules) · Book Club (italic display serif over an airy sans)

Commercial fiction Thriller (condensed gothic caps, tight, shadowed) · Suspense Block (poster caps on a solid band) · Young Adult (oversized tight-set sans) · Red Alert (four lines of scarlet caps, packed edge to edge) · Domestic Suspense (stacked caps tracked until each line fills the width)

Author-brand layouts — the name above the title, the way the bestseller shelf does it Author Brand · Mass Market · True Crime · British Crime

Genre Epic Fantasy (inscriptional gold caps with a dark outline) · Sci-Fi Signal (monospaced caps at extreme tracking) · Neon Tech (techno caps carrying their own cyan glow) · Horror (impact caps, hard outline, distressed support type) · Cozy Mystery · Romance Script · Vintage Pulp · Retro Deco

Illustrated Graphic Novel (title turned a quarter-turn down the edge) · Storybook (brush script with a keyline) · Middle Grade (fat rounded caps) · Comic Book (tilted lettering, hard outline, colour drop)

Nonfiction Authority (heavy geometric caps, coloured rule) · Modern Minimal (hairline sans, nothing decorative)

Click through a few. It takes two seconds each, and seeing your own title in six different systems teaches you more about what your book looks like than any amount of theory.

Step 6: Tune the typography

Every preset is a starting point. The controls under a selected layer:

• Typeface — 27 book-cover faces, grouped by what they're for: serif, display, vector, sans, script and typewriter. Each one carries a note telling you the genre it belongs to
• Weight and case — most cover titles are set in caps, and most benefit from a heavier weight than you'd first choose
• Size — a percentage of the cover width, so it survives a change of trim size
• Tracking — the single most powerful control here. Letter-spacing at 0.2–0.3em is what makes a small line of caps look designed rather than typed. Display type at large sizes usually wants less tracking, small caps want more
• Line height — big titles want tight leading, often below 1.0. Loose leading on a stacked title reads as an accident
• Text box width — controls where lines wrap. Narrower often looks better: a title in two strong lines beats one thin line
• Rotation — anywhere from −90° to +90°, for spine-style vertical titles and tilted comic lettering

Step 7: Effects, and when to actually use them

• Drop shadow — the reliable way to lift white type off a mid-tone photograph. Keep the blur high and the offset near zero for something invisible-but-effective
• Outline — for fantasy, horror and comics. A dark keyline on light type holds its shape against any background
• Background band — a solid rectangle behind the text. It's the guaranteed option: no matter what the photo is doing, the type is readable. The Suspense Block preset uses it
• Hairline rules — thin lines above or below a line of text. Purely literary, and the fastest way to make a title look considered

The rule with all four: pick one. A title with a shadow and an outline and a band is a title nobody trusts.

Step 8: Export

Choose PNG or JPG in the header and hit Export.

• PNG is lossless. Use it for flat colour, hard-edged type, and anything you'll edit again
• JPG is smaller and is what most stores prefer for photographic covers. The quality slider is there; 92% is a sensible default and the difference above that is invisible

The file comes out at the full trim size — 1600 × 2560, 3000 × 3000, whatever you chose — named from your title. What downloads is exactly what you saw, because the preview and the export are drawn by the same renderer.

Your work is saved

The design autosaves in your browser as you go, image included, and comes back when you reload. There's a Reset to default button in the header when you want a clean canvas. Nothing is ever sent anywhere — the draft is stored inside your own browser, which is also why clearing your browsing data clears it, and why the design won't follow you to another device. Export anything you care about.

Five rules that matter more than the tool

1. Do the thumbnail test. Shrink your cover to 100px wide and look at it. If you can't read the title, nothing else you did matters. This is how readers will actually see it
2. Two typefaces, maximum. Almost every cover in this article's presets uses one or two. Three is where covers start looking homemade
3. The title doesn't have to be the biggest thing — but it must be the clearest. On author-brand covers the name is larger. That's a deliberate choice, not an accident
4. Match your genre, then differ slightly. Readers browse by pattern recognition. A romance that looks like a horror novel doesn't read as original, it reads as a mistake
5. Leave room. The most common amateur error is type running edge to edge. Professional covers have generous, deliberate margins

Questions

Is it really free? Yes. No account, no watermark, no export limit.

Does my image get uploaded? No. Everything — the image, the rendering, the export — happens in your browser. Nothing is transmitted to a server at any point, including when you export.

Can I use the covers commercially? The tool puts no restriction on what you make. Two things you're responsible for: the licence on your image (buy the stock licence or use a photo you own), and, if you use them beyond the tool, the licences of the typefaces — they're open-source fonts, almost all under the SIL Open Font License, which permits commercial use.

What size does Amazon KDP want? 1600 × 2560 pixels minimum for the ebook, at a 1.6 ratio. Use the Kindle eBook preset and you're compliant.

Can I design a full print wrap with a spine? Not yet — this is a front-cover tool. For a paperback wrap you'd need the spine width calculated from your page count, which KDP's own template generator does well.

Does it work on a phone? It works, and the layout adapts, but a cover is a precision job. Use the biggest screen you have.

---

Open Cover Designer →

---