Standing out from the crowd can be difficult as a seller on marketplaces and one of the easiest ways of doing that is to make a beautiful cover image. But, I’m not a graphic designer, you might say! Don’t worry, neither are we, but with a product like Canva, you don’t have to be. All of our cover images, social media posts and so on are designed using Canva. In this post, we’re going to show you how to make beautiful cover images for your store.
Step 1 – Foundations
Before you do anything, we’d suggest you choose a colour scheme and a specific set of fonts for all your cover images. This will make sure all your covers have a theme and it will be much quicker for you to design new covers quickly. We generally just have to edit a previous product image rather than starting from scratch.
Colour schemes can be found in lots of different places. If you sign up to the Pro version of Canva, this comes as part of the package but you can find colour schemes by simply Googling. We’d suggest one main colour and possibly 2-4 minor colours. We found this colour scheme generator, coolors.co which automatically generates colour schemes.
The numbers above are hexadecimal codes for colours. Don’t worry too much about this for the moment – we’ll get to that! I like that yellow colour for my main colour so I’m going to use that where I can.
The next job is to find a font I like. To be honest, this is as simple as looking down through the list of fonts that Canva has and sticking with one. I’m going to use Caveat for the purposes of this demo, which has a handwritten effect.
Step 2 – Your Background Image
Open up Canva and choose a square template. Instagram posts are generally a square image so that’s probably the easiest one to go with. You’ll find a white blank canvas to work with so the first thing to do is search for a photograph that sums up your product. For the purposes of this tutorial, let’s pretend I’m making a resource for World Book Day so I might try a bookshelf full of books for my background.
On searching for photos, I like the look of the 4th image so this is going to be my background. I simply click on the image and it appears on my Canvas. It won’t fill the square so I’m going to drag the corners of the image until it covers the entire square. Once it does that, Canva automatically realises it’s a background image.
As you can see the image is looking good so far but it is lacking a little something. You might have a logo for your store. If you do you might want to upload this and stick it on the bottom corner. However, the next step is the add the name of the product on the image. This is easy to do and it’s where we’ll come back to the hexadecimal numbers again. Remember I liked that yellow colour? Its number was F6F740 which is the code for that yellow. On Canva, select text and choose the Add a Heading option. You can type in the name of the product.
On the left hand side, you’ll need to click the swatch with the + sign in the middle. A box will pop up with colours to choose from. You’ll be interested in the #000000 which stands for Black. Change this to #F7F640 (or whatever colour you chose) and it will appear as one of the option. Make sure you have selected this colour and the text will turn into this colour.
As you can see, the text is a little difficult to read. It might be a good idea to put a rectangle in another colour behind the text so it can be seen. This is easily done by going to elements and searching for Rectangle. Select a rectangle and stretch it to suit your title. It’s a good idea to select a colour from your scheme for consistency. Your next step is to add some sort of graphic to pop out.
As World Book Day is all about children reading, it might be a good idea to find a graphic or photo of children reading. Canva has a really great tool that will allow you to remove the background from any photo so I’m going to use this. This will really help make my resource stand out more with this extra layer of colour. Ultimately, that’s it! Some purists may find this approach a little busy and might prefer a plainer background.
You might also be a fan of curved squares so instead of a photo background, you might choose a curved square and use that as your background. As you can see, this has a different vibe to the previous image by simply changing the background to one of your 5 colours. Having these 5 colours will be really useful to you for all of your products and you can mix and match them in future designs. You can add other little flourishes if you want but we think, the simpler the better.
We hope this mini tutorial is of some use to you. We’d be lost without Canva. It’s so easy to use and has so many features that it’s hard to make an ugly cover image!