More Canva Book Cover Tips

There's a lot of trial and error involved in designing a book cover. Whereas at one time I was quite easy to please (what did I know?), now it seems I'm never satisfied. I tweak and tweak until finally I grow tired of making things worse instead of better, and I either start over or pronounce the cover "done". And sometimes I think it's done, but when I look at it the next day, I ask myself what I was thinking. 

What penniless authors like me hope to achieve is some semblance of a "professional" cover, but man, it takes a lot of work! One of my biggest beefs with Canva has been its font selection. Unless one goes the route of finding a cover template with the desired font and switching out the image, a blank template forces us to choose a font from a list, and really, there aren't any good ones; not for covers.

I've been using Canva for a long time, but it has options I never noticed before. That's probably because if I'm focused on a project, I already think I know what I need, and I don't go searching in Canva's nooks and crannies. Only yesterday did I discover font combinations. Now, granted, most of them don't work well for covers, but one factor that distinguishes professional covers from amateur ones is the use of mixed fonts. The accepted design model is, no more than two or three fonts on a cover, so with Canva's font combinations, one can still use her own font (the third font) for the author name. I tried out a few combos, with mixed results, but I'm still experimenting.

Fun Fact: Did you know that font style also conveys a mood? Think about presenting a business document written in Comic Sans. The recipient won't know if he's expected to laugh, even though the words themselves read as dryly serious.  

With my current project, for a reason I can't pinpoint, I designed two test covers with the title in all lower case letters. Normally, I view this style choice with scorn. I've seen current song titles/artists listed that way, and it's kind of freakish. Ultimately, I may not go with either of these covers, but their typeface somehow signals the mood I'm going for. 

If you're searching for an option you can't find/don't know if Canva offers, click the question mark icon at the bottom of the screen and ask. It's AI-powered, so one need not worry that a clueless person won't understand what you're asking. I was looking for a paintbrush effect for a particular background (that would resemble painted walls), and while AI informed me that didn't exist, it did offer a couple of workarounds I could try. Ultimately, I abandoned the idea, but the number of enhancements Canva offers is amazing.  

Reluctantly, I determined that the Pixabay image I loved so much just won't work for this book. I'm hoping that maybe I'll be able to use it to redesign a cover for one of my other works. Composing the novel's blurb in my head (not yet on paper!), I think I finally grasped the story's theme--family--which led my cover ideas in a completely different direction. (Yes, I've mostly settled on the new title, too, but I'm not ready to reveal it.)

With my two new tentative cover designs, I'd love to get feedback on which is better, but no one ever comments on my posts (or they rarely do), so I guess I'll just need to give myself feedback. I'll let them marinate for a bit and return to them later. It's quite possible I may end up hating them both.

Regardless of how good or bad my cover design turns out, I feel good knowing that it'll be better than most of those cut-rate outfits out there, whose "designs" are awful. Plus, I can always swap the ebook cover out if it starts to repel me, but unfortunately, with a paperback it can get pretty expensive ordering a new copy every time I change the cover. 

For someone like me who loves the visual medium, I can get lost in experimenting with design. I have to pull myself away to get back to the mundane things like editing (not that editing is mundane; just distasteful) and blurb writing.

Still shooting for a 2026 publish date. No way is it happening in what's left of 2025.