Some ideas and tips for homemade book covers:
- Design a front cover with your own artwork or photography and a personalized title such as "Sara Kettle's Personal Copy of Paddington at the Beach"
- Style your own cover after the original for the book but replace photos of people on the cover with photos of you or the recipient. You could but your friend's head on the body of the heroine of a romance novel, for example. Have a picture of yourself on the cover sitting and reading the book you're giving as a gift. Superimpose the recipient into a famous painting and put it on the cover of a related travel book or art history tome.
- Use the inside flaps to tell the recipient why you chose this particular book. If you've read the book yourself, include a mini-review and point out specific chapters or pages that were special to you.
- Put your picture on the inside back flap or back cover as the gift-giver, where the author's picture is often found. Include a personal bio that's actually a mini-story about the relationship between you and the gift recipient.
- If the book comes with a dust jacket already, remove it and measure it to use as a guide for setting up your own book jacket in your software. Otherwise, measure the front, back, and spine of the book and add a few inches for the flaps to fold in at front and back.
- Combine your printed book jacket with more traditional arts & crafts techniques including adding stickers, rubber stamping, or coloring in a black & white graphic using paint or colored pens.
You can use any desktop publishing software or illustration software (such as Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW or Inkscape) to design your book jacket. If you don't already have software, consider one of these desktop publishing software programs. To save money, especially if you don't see yourself doing a lot of desktop publishing projects, try free software for Windows or Mac.
Browse this collection of Book Cover/Book Jacket Tutorials.
