For my recently published book, Story Secrets from Scripture, I designed my own cover. In yesterday’s post I shared about the evolution of the cover design.

Story Secrets from Scripture is about how to develop and deliver children’s stories for worship, vacation Bible school, and Bible study. The book covers how to find personal stories, assign teaching points, and tell these stories live.

The cover basically has three layers

• Background color

• Icons

• Image and text

Procreate

Several software programs and applications are available to graphic design. My favorite is Procreate, designed specifically for the iPad. Artists have done some amazing and detailed work using Procreate. Most of my designs require just a few layers, sufficient for book cover design and sketchnotes.

The Layers

Procreate includes a feature to set the opacity of layers which gives a washed-out or faded look to the layer. For the Story Secrets from Scripture cover, the yellow layer has an opacity of 77% and the icons have an opacity of 15%. The icons are actually black. The white blocks for the back cover are set at an opacity of 73%.

For the back cover, I reversed the block of icons. Amazon automatically adds the ISBN barcode (not shown in the sequence above).

Design Tutorials

Derek Murphy is a graphic designer and artist. Somehow I came across his Youtube channel, where Derek shares several videos on book cover design. He has a channel specifically for cover design.

Canva is a simple graphic design app (available on iOS and online). Canva has several design options to quickly design covers for ebooks. However, print book covers require spine text and a back cover, so options are limited. However, I like the ability to play with different designs.

A great way to learn about covers is to visit a bookstore or browse at Amazon to study the covers of books in your genre. I searched extensively for books on storytelling, children’s stories, and similar phrases.