Designing a Book Cover and Spine in InDesign

Spend a fast-moving, fun hour design­ing your first or hun­dredth book cov­er, includ­ing a spine per­fect­ly sized for the num­ber of pages in your book.

Whether you’re an old pro with InDesign or some­one who has nev­er used InDesign before, this short, fun, and focused course will teach you how to design a great book cov­er, back cov­er, and spine for a print­ed book and ebook. You will learn not the hows and the whys involved in design­ing pro­fes­sion­al book cov­ers that look great on any shelf—at home or at the bookstore—and in the iBook and Kindle stores.

Book cov­ers are unique designs with their own unique chal­lenges. How do you cal­cu­late the cor­rect thick­ness of the spine? What size should your book cov­er be for its genre? How do you set up an InDesign doc­u­ment to cre­ate a wrap-around cov­er lay­out that adapts to spine width changes? In this course, InDesign CC Designing a Book Cover and Spine, you’ll learn how to con­struct, design, and print a book cov­er and spine. First, you’ll learn the mechan­ics of set­ting up the InDesign doc­u­ment for max­i­mum design flex­i­bil­i­ty and print­ing safe­ty. Next, you’ll dis­cov­er the secret but sim­ple for­mu­la for solv­ing that most per­plex­ing aspect of book design–how to cal­cu­late the cor­rect width or thick­ness of the book’s spine. Finally, you’ll design the book cov­er, back cov­er, and spine, learn­ing what ele­ments must be on each, could be on each, and should­n’t be on each. By the end of this course, you’ll have learned how to cre­ate a book and spine from start to fin­ish in InDesign CC.

Watch Excerpts From the Course

Course Contents

Module 1: Building Book Covers

  1. Planning the Cover Design
  2. Choosing a Cover Size
  3. Constructing the Document
  4. Setting Bleed Area and Live Area
  5. Arranging the Cover Panels
  6. Calculating the Spine Thickness
  7. Making Your Work Reusable

Module 2: Designing Book Covers

  1. Placing the Cover Photo
  2. Coloring the Background
  3. Adding Title and Author
  4. Setting Spine Objects
  5. Planning the Back Cover
  6. Obtaining an ISBN Number
  7. Generating the Barcode
  8. Placing the Barcode on the Bacover
  9. Printing and Exporting the Final Cover