CEWE PHOTOBOOK cover design tips

The beauty of creating a CEWE PHOTOBOOK is that every single element of your book is designed by you. Your album of special memories begins and ends with the cover; it’s the first impression and the last word on your work. So it’s well worth devoting some time and effort to making sure your cover is just right.

We’ve put together some design tips and advice to help you make a stunning photo book cover. Our photo book design software offers a myriad of extra design capabilities and options that aren’t available online, so you can create the perfect personalised photo album cover. We’ve got a few hints and tips to help you really get the most out of it.

Design tip: If you're on your phone, laptop or tablet, you'll always have the option to create directly on our website, which is perfect for creating small photo books online.

All of our backgrounds and clip art are organised by theme and occasion to help you find the perfect element to add to your book, so you can easily create something like a wedding album cover that impresses every time. In addition, you can download even more elements for free. Simply click “More” to view and download the full range.

Choosing Your Front Cover Image

Whether it’s sitting on a coffee table or on a shelf, you’ll see your front cover image more often than any of the other pictures in your book. So choose one you’re really proud of. Look through your photographs and choose an image with personality, which conveys the theme of your book clearly. You might find it beneficial to create a shortlist and use our software’s simple drag and drop functionality to try them all until you find your favourite.

It’s important to select an image that fits your cover shape well, so pay attention to the framing and the edges. As you can see in the image below, the top of the bubbles and one of the feet are cropped off the edge of the cover. As a full-page cover image, this picture might be better suited to a landscape photobook.

The Simple Back Cover

It’s often best to keep your back cover very simple, especially if you are choosing to add text. If you don’t have an appropriate image, our Design Software has plenty of backgrounds for you to choose from. Simply select from the “Backgrounds” tab on the left-hand side, and filter by theme.

Software Tip: If you have a hard time deciding, use the Favourites function to create an easily accessible shortlist. Right-click the background of your choice and select “Mark as favourite.” You can then filter your backgrounds by “Favourites” in the drop-down menu.

Design Tip: Try a solid colour or a simple pattern that complements your front cover, but doesn’t detract from it. In this example, we used the Favourites function to select colours and textures that we thought worked well with the cover image. In the end, we chose this textured grey colour because the neutrality of the grey works with the darkness on the left side of the cover image. We also like the subtle uneven paint effect, which reflected the informal, rustic feel of the wallpaper.

The Panoramic CEWE PHOTOBOOK Cover

If you’re a keen photographer, you might have taken some panoramic images. By dragging the image box across two pages, you can use your panoramic shots to cover the entire double page. These can make some of the most striking photo book covers.

Design Tip: Consider how your book will look from the front when it is closed, and make sure any important focal points are on this cover. In our example below, the front cover works as a standalone image that still makes sense when you can’t see the back of the book. Remember to ensure that none of the important parts of your image fall along the crease of the spine.

Software Tip: You might find that your panoramic image works better with a border across the top and bottom of the page. In our example, we’ve done this by adding a simple block coloured background. We’ve chosen a deep blue to match the colour of the gowns in the image.

Adding Your Title

If you’ve added a simple coloured border as in our previous example, choosing where to place the title on your photo book cover design is easy. A full-page image that covers the entire front can look lovely too. For this, it’s best to use an image with a lot of blank space or an out of focus background. This way you can add a title without covering any of your focal points. The picture below is a good example, but it doesn’t leave us much space to add our title.

Title Colours and Fonts

There’s a wide range of fonts to choose from, already integrated into the software. Paragraphs and long blocks of text usually require choosing a simple font that’s easy to read. But as your title is likely to only be a few words long, you can have fun experimenting with all the fun and quirky font choices.

When it comes to font colour, feel free to get creative. Choose a shade that contrasts your background to ensure your text stands out and is legible. You can use the “set text colour” tool to pick a custom colour. This is a great way to personalise your photo book cover design, right down to the tiniest detail.

Design Tip: Pick out colours that are elsewhere in your image, such as the pink of the bunny ears in the image above. By working with the other colours in the photo, you can make sure your text doesn’t clash.

Software Tip: After you select a custom colour in the Text Colour tool, you can then use the “Add to Custom Colours” function to save it for later. This is great for adding matching pieces of Clipart or adding more of the same shade throughout your CEWE PHOTOBOOK to help keep your colour scheme cohesive.

Photo Book Cover Highlights

If you're interested in created a luxury photo album or simply looking to elevate the look of your creation, we recommend adding highlights - our custom embossing effects and one of our most popular add-ons. These Highlights feature a raised effect and can be added to most of our hardback photo books, giving a tactile finish to your cover art.

They’re available in Silver, Gold and Gloss, and can be applied to both text and selected pieces of Clipart. For this photo book cover design we’d like to use the Gloss effect, and we can view which embellishments are available with Gloss Highlights by selecting the “Gloss Highlights” filter in the drop-down menu on the left. The great thing about the Gloss effect is that it’s a shiny, raised texture that can be applied over any colour.

To transform your cover text with highlights, simply select your text and use the “Select Highlights” tool as shown below.

Don’t Forget The Spine

If you’re creating a Hardcover CEWE PHOTOBOOK, you’ll also have the opportunity to customise the spine. In the CEWE Design Software, you can see where the book’s spine will be positioned. If you choose to use a double-page image, make sure that none of your main focal points fall along the edge of the spine.

Think about how your book will look sitting on your shelf from the side. A colourful book spine can look great, but if your background image is too busy, it can make your text difficult to read. Don’t worry, this can be easily rectified by adding a background colour to your text box. By selecting the text box on the spine of your book, the CEWE Design Software will automatically zoom in and rotate your view. From here, you can edit the font, text colour and background text colour.

Use the text alignment tools (located under the ellipsis above) to determine the alignment of your text. It’s always worth playing with your options here, as aligning your text left or centre might give you a result that fits around your background image.

Design Tip: Keep the aesthetic of your CEWE PHOTOBOOK consistent by using the same font and text colour on your spine as you do on your front cover.

And there you have it! A cover you can be proud of, ready to fill with pages of your favourite photos. We hope our photo book cover ideas have inspired you to get creative with your next CEWE PHOTOBOOK. Don’t forget that with our CEWE Design Software you can save your work at any time. So whether you’ve got hours on end to devote to your project, or just a few minutes here and there, you can create in a way that suits you.