How to Start a Podcast

Podcast artwork: how to create your artwork

• Buzzsprout • Season 1 • Episode 7

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In Episode 07 of How to Start a Podcast, you'll learn how to create stunning podcast artwork that stands out in Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Next Steps:


Artwork Design Tools:

  • Pexels (Royalty-Free Images)
  • TinyPNG
  • Canva
  • 99designs
Alban:

So many podcasts have images of microphones and headphones, and the RSS feed per logo recently attacked, show them what you are really about. Don't use up that valuable real estate to remind people. Hey, you know this is a podcast right?

Gilon:

Hey guys, Welcome to the How To Start A Podcast podcast. My name is Gilon.

Alban:

And I'm Alban and today we are talking about how to create your podcast artwork.

Gilon:

Hopefully you haven't done this already. We told you not to if you've been following along, yeah,

Alban:

episode one, we said don't create your podcast artwork, because a lot changes between Episode One and Episode Seven where we are here. So we wanted to make sure that you wait until you locked in for sure. Your title, everything about your podcast, the style, the niche, the vibe, the aesthetic. And now that you've got it all, you're going to be able to knock it all out. Bring it all together with some beautiful podcast artwork.

Gilon:

Why is podcast artwork important? So glad you asked. So glad, basically your album cover, right? This is your moment you are putting yourself out into the world. You're putting your podcast out there and you need really great artwork, because it's kind of like a book cover. Nobody ever reads maybe someday we'll do. I don't read books that have like really drab looking book covers, and I definitely don't really listen albums.

Alban:

So I gave a talk at Podcast Movement. And somebody at one point said like, Will don't judge a book by its cover. I was like, All right. So that phrase came from like, the 1800s. And it was I think don't judge a book by its binding. But it was because all books were bound the same way. And it was first used when someone said like, oh, I read this book because that beautiful binding even though it was like turned out wildly inappropriate book. I'm giving a little too much info here. But knickers. Okay, so the reason why you shouldn't judge a book by its cover that phrase, I agree with the sentiment. But it came from a time when book covers all look the same. There are still things you can learn from a book cover. And you can also learn from podcast artwork, you can tell that something is professional, you can tell that it's going to sound good, just by seeing the artwork, it indicates quality.

Gilon:

It's kind of like that statement, you only get one shot at a first impression. And your podcast cover art is your first impression. There's really no way to like test out a podcast without listening to it right. And so a lot of times people will just scroll through and look at cover art. And that will be a yes or no moment for them like, Well, this looks like some somebody just threw together. Maybe they're not quite who I want to be listening to, like people are judging based off of covers. Yeah,

Alban:

I mean, it's the first thing potential listeners are going to see in Apple podcasts. So they're going to be scrolling through and they're trying to find a new show in this category, and they see your podcast, you want to make sure that it looks really good. And it is going to signify how good of quality is this podcast, I put something out to the world said hey, you know how many of you actually pay attention to the artwork. 62% of listeners said, I actually judge podcast based on the artwork, I'm much more likely to click on stuff that I like the artwork. That makes total sense to me.

Gilon:

Yeah. And I think in the time of, you know, shopping for albums, you definitely kind of would check out the vibe of the cover of something to know if it was an artist or even music that you would be interested in. And so podcast cover art is really no different. So Apple, like in most things leads the way in what the requirements are for the size, style and all of that of podcast artwork. So what are those specs

Alban:

in podcasting, there is the RSS spec. This is the open standards. And then there's some apple specific stuff. And Apple 16 years ago now started allowing podcast to come into iTunes. And they set a lot of parameters and said, like, Hey, here's how big artwork should be. Here's what we want to be like. And then everyone has followed their lead. Apple, still the largest Podcast Directory with Apple podcasts. But everybody else follows us. So if you follow these Apple guidelines, you're going to be good and Spotify and Google podcasts and Amazon music etc.

Gilon:

Yeah, so one of the things that Apple requires are dimensions right, your dimensions need to be 3000 by 3000 pixels. You can do smaller or larger or mismatch that's not going to work we need 3000 by 3000 perfect square of pixels for your artwork.

Alban:

To be clear 2999 by 3000 is not a perfect square that will not work. This is very particular if you use the Buzzsprout Canva integration. You won't have to stress this because we will enforce all these guidelines. But if you're going to do this on your own, or you're going to work with somebody in Fiverr or somewhere else, make sure 3000 by 3000 a few other things. Resolution of 72 dots per inch. You want to save your file as a JPEG or a ping as PNG or JPG. And the last thing is you want to end the RGB color space. So red, blue and green pixels are making up these colors. Those are all pretty standard. But that 3000 by 3000 is the one that really hangs up a lot of podcasters. Because they're slightly off, or they think they want a different shaped image. That's not going to work. Is there anything else you run into Jalon, when you're working with people in support,

Gilon:

yeah, so file size. Another thing, sometimes people's actual artwork, file size is too big, it needs to be less than 300 KB, some people have a 1.5 megabytes, it's too big. And it's going to actually hang up your listing and Apple podcasts. And people's podcasts get taken down because their file size of their artwork is too large, which is kind of wild. And people are like what's happening, I was listed what's going on, we check out your file size to see if that needs to be smaller. Yeah, and

Alban:

we've looked at this quite a bit. And I don't think there's a hard and fast requirement around it. But in years and years of answering these emails, that one comes up. So compress your images be nicer to the internet, we don't need to send tons of information around the web that doesn't need to be around, there's a nice website called Tiny ping, tiny PNG. And once you've finalized your artwork, upload it there, it will compress it. So your image looks exactly the same. But it's going to easily fit under that 300 kilobyte ratio.

Gilon:

Yeah. And if you don't know the size, or the pixel dimension, you can definitely click your image and there should be an option, you can right click on it, and there should be an option to get info. And that'll tell you how big your file size is, what the dimensions of the image are, and all that good stuff. So now that you know kind of what the dimensions are. And those requirements were some other design tips that we have.

Alban:

Well, one thing to remember is you want to be designing for a variety of sizes, it's easy when you're designing a 3000 by 3000 pixels to imagine it's going to be a really large image. But the way that Apple podcast displays it, it might be on an Apple Watch, it might be as a small icon in Apple podcasts. So you want to look at something that looks good when it's really big. And also when it's really small. I think the smallest is like 27 by 27 pixels. So we're talking really tiny. And so pick like a really strong color and maybe like not a ton, it can't be a super busy image. Because you want to make sure that it looks good. Even when it's smaller, you want your artwork to clearly communicate the subject of your podcast. So if your podcast is about mental health, think about what images represent mental health, maybe type mental health into Google Images, and just look to get ideas. Oh, I'm seeing images of a brain I'm seeing images of calm, relaxing environment. Those are the things that you're going to want to incorporate into your

Gilon:

artwork. And that makes sense. Because again, you don't get a second chance at a first impression. And so just being mindful to communicate, not over communicate, but to communicate enough what your podcast is about using your artwork, it's really important.

Alban:

Next tip is limit the number of words in your artwork. You don't

Gilon:

want 12,000 words. Why?

Alban:

But one is that this is going to be a small image at times people will do this. They'll say, Hey, this is the How To Start A Podcast. And then they'll go well, it's a podcast, they put the word podcast under it. And then they say with Jalon and Alban hosts, and co host. And then they write by Buzzsprout, a podcast host@buzzsprout.com. And it's like, Oh, my goodness. Now you look at this, and this is the most cluttered. Crazy, is just a bunch of words. Limit yourself. If you're finding you've got more than six words, eight words, maybe max, you need to be thinking about what is the most critical thing to come across. In this artwork. Yeah,

Gilon:

that's really important. I think you want something that communicates clearly what the podcast is about. But again, you're not trying to over communicate or stuff too much information, like they're gonna know who the hosts are, once they click into it, you know, or right underneath the artwork. So you don't necessarily need to use the real estate on your cover art for all of that information. There are other places where they'll find some of those things out.

Alban:

One of the things we've run into on YouTube as well. It's like your artwork or your thumbnail, that's what catches someone's eye. They aren't going to be paying attention to that once they are listening or watching the video or listening to the podcast. So do something this eyecatching is giving the very basics. And then you get to tell them everything else. You could tell them who you are and your background and everything that's interesting about the podcast. That will come a little bit later.

Gilon:

So what is maybe a cover art? No, no, or don't do.

Alban:

Alright, so let's talk a lot about typography. There's lots of nose here. So using the actual, you know, font types, and what are we going to put here to fonts Max, like we're not putting any Three, four fonts, let's try to not crowd the images with text like actually give them some space to breathe, let there be a little bit of negative space between elements. Make sure that this text when we put on there is actually readable at smaller sizes. So put it in there, limit the amount of words, but then shrink this down and ask somebody else to read it. So is this pretty clear what it says? And then avoid distracting fonts. So there's a lot of fonts that I think are just kind of like playful and funny. If that is matching the vibe of your podcast, that's cool. But often something like Papyrus, or Comic Sans, I don't know this one called like cowboy or something, I

Gilon:

think that you know, these off the top of your head is mind boggling. But go on.

Alban:

This is what you do. And you read like typography books, like this is the stuff that jumps out and just kind of yells, hey, I designed this in Microsoft Paint,

Gilon:

and Microsoft Paint.

Alban:

So this is what I would recommend avoiding, like, try to find professional looking font choices. And so limit yourself to some that just look normal, maybe or not distracting. And if they have a personality, make sure that personality matches the personality of the brand.

Gilon:

Now, um, as we're talking about distracting, what about like explicit language? Imagery? How do we feel about that?

Alban:

I personally am not a fan, I can tell you, Apple appears to be on the same page as me. So Apple has always been like pretty family friendly. And so explicit content in the title or on the artwork isn't going to fly. Now the exact borders of where that is. I'm not 100% sure exactly where it is, like you can't have nudity. But I can't give exact on like how close you can get, you know, I'm not sure exactly which, you know, dirty words are allowed and which need to be somewhat censored. But one thing you can do is go and search for things. If you're on the cusp, and you're like, does this word have to be edited? If it's in the title, go search it in Apple podcasts. And you can actually see, I did have after a talk at Podcast Movement about artwork, had a woman come up and say, Hey, I'm trying to understand if you think this artwork is good to work for a plastic surgery company, and the artwork that they had was I think like a woman stomach. And she's like, do you think this is appropriate? And I said, I'm confident that's going to be okay. But you're coming and asking me because you're afraid it's a little too, like sexual in nature. If you're concerned about that, then probably the people who are looking at it are also going to think that's what your podcast is about. And now you're attracting the people you don't want to listen. And you're actually pushing away your target market. So only incorporate that kind of explicit stuff. If that is the subject matter of your show.

Gilon:

Does that make sense? Yeah, that totally makes sense. So in the in the vein of images, is there anything that people should be mindful of avoiding beyond you know, explicit things?

Alban:

Yeah, this is like one of our pet peeves, right. So many podcasts have images of microphones, and headphones, and the RSS feed per logo, recently attacked. And the reason is to be like, well, it's a podcast, I want people to know it's a podcast. But this logic doesn't work anywhere else doesn't make sense. I was like, made a meme of like, the cover of badboys to end with like, a DVDs, and cameras across Will Smith's face. And I was like, so petty. This would look ridiculous on a DVD. We don't have DVDs with cameras and the stuff on the covers. We want to know what's the movie about not how was it filmed? Books do not have pictures of typewriters on the front sight writers, you know, that it's actually being written out. So your podcast, unless it is about the music industry, or the podcasting industry, or some type of recording, maybe DJ, like, unless it's one of those areas, you probably should avoid the headphones and microphones, people know they're looking for a podcast, show them what you are really about. Don't use up that valuable real estate to remind people hey, you know, this is podcast, right?

Gilon:

Yeah, that makes total sense. Even though it feels kind of counterintuitive. It can be a newbie move. So even though we feel personally attacked, we will take your advice we've talked about over use images. So some more things to do consistent branding, and I think this is all a part of your overall podcast brand, right? Your cover art is part of your brand, just like your theme music would be part of your brand, just like your intro would be part of your brand. And so you want to I think I want to mention this, you know, if you've got different fonts, just they need to be consistent with your brand. They should probably be used somewhere else as well. Well, it shouldn't just be like five different fonts that you picked out randomly. That's a weird vibe, what is your aesthetic? What are we aiming for here,

Alban:

every piece of this, we want it pulling the same direction. So once we have this brand, the colors picked should pull in that direction, the images use should all indicate the same thing, the words that we picked the music in the podcast, the tone of voice we're using, everything should indicate the same brand. And the same tone through all those things. Because it's too confusing. If you're kind of communicating like, Hey, this is true crime. But on the cover art, it doesn't look like it's very serious. But in the podcast, it's very serious. But the music is like nearing Yeah, we've got so many different feelings. And so it kind of feels like nothing could just be total confusion. So try to line all these things up and say, Are these consistent with each other. And then if I have a larger brand, like this is a podcast for a business, or a church, or for my own thing that I've starting, make sure it's consistent. So go look at the biggest brands in the world, Coca Cola, Apple, Nike, the best branded products in the world, they always include the same elements. So it's obvious, you can't miss a pair of Nike shoes, because you know, it's gonna have the swoosh, you can't miss an Apple product, because they've got the Big Apple logo is because they're doing it consistent brand. And there's certain things they would do and certain things they don't do. And that makes it very easy for you to identify that it's part of a brand.

Gilon:

So getting kind of more on a techie side. What about resolution? What should we be paying attention to when it comes to the resolution of our image?

Alban:

So we have those requirements from really, your 3000 by 3000. So part of that is using high resolution images throughout, can't just search on Google images and like right click and grab some grainy thing. What do you mean, make sure you're using things that are one you're allowed to use, and two that are high enough quality. So maybe go to something like pexels.com P E X E els.com, not pixels pixels. And that's a bunch of free images for you to look at. And you can use any of those. They're all super high quality. So we'll leave that in the description. And then like we said earlier, when you were done, compress that final image so that it fits under the 300 kilobytes for your podcast size. Yeah, yes, artwork size,

Gilon:

there it is. So okay, the How to we've talked about what you need to do. Now we're talking about how to do what you need to do. So how to design it, we love Canva, we've integrated with them. So if you host with Buzzsprout, we have a Buzzsprout Canva integration that allows you to design your own cover art, and it already falls within those specs that we talked about. So there's that part of it that's handled for you. One of

Alban:

the great things about Canva is they've got hundreds of 1000s of templates. And so you don't have to be a pro designer to make something that looks professional in Canva. Instead, you go on there and you say, Hey, where's all the podcast artwork, and you scroll through until you see something like that's pretty close to what I want. Now let me change the title, change some of the colors, edit that background image, it's easy to tell that something already looks good and make adjustments. It's very difficult to start with a blank canvas, and then turn it into something gorgeous later on. If you're not a designer,

Gilon:

definitely. And I totally started on Canva. And I don't even think when I started, they had podcast templates, just really, yeah. So your girl was out here on her own, designing her cover art through Canva. But it helped me for like one to two years. So it was really helpful. And I'm not a designer. So where there can be so many pieces of this that are intimidating. Canva totally made it not intimidating at all and very helpful.

Alban:

If you want to have somebody who can help you and really make something professional, one of our recommendations that I love is 99 designs. 99 designs is really cool, because you pay a flat fee, and it's not going to be cheap, you know, you might be spending four or $500. But you're saying, Here's my budget. And I want a bunch of designers to compete to make the best piece of artwork. And so you write up like, here's my ideas. Here's the theme. Here's the brand, here's the colors, here's the fonts, here's my like, go for it. And then you've got like an army of designers competing and saying, Here's what we think looks good. And then you start picking out the ones that look good, and you send back some adjustments. And you refine with a group of people until you pick the best option out of all of them. And what's so wonderful about this is you may know what you like but only once you see it. And if you're that kind of person. 99 designs is a great way to find your cover art and if you use Buzzsprout in our partner discount section, we actually have a promo code so you get I think a pretty substantial discount if you end up doing 99 designs. Those are

Gilon:

some really great resources. And hopefully we've given you things to think about and Travis, what other things what other resources can people get into to help them really think about what direction they want to take their cover art in.

Travis:

So you got to share it a lot of fantastic tips on how to design podcast cover art for your new podcast. And so the resources I want to point you to are going to help you go deeper on some of the topics that we covered. And also give you some really tangible examples that you can look at to see what we consider good podcast artwork, and some things stay away from. So the first resource is actually a blog that we wrote on how to design, podcast cover art, it covers all the apple podcast requirements that we talked about as far as the pixels and resolutions and color space and those kinds of things in in that blog post. We also have examples of really nicely designed cover art for a variety of different topics, and categories. So if you want to go and get some ideas, then that's a great place to go that blog post, we also have a couple of videos on our YouTube channel that I think you really liked. The first one is an overview of all the design elements you want to have in mind as you're designing your cover art. From the contrasting colors to the simplicity to the word count. Some of the things we talked about in the episode just reiterated, and then a fun video, if you have some time, we actually had a professional designer from Canva, react to 10 different pieces of Buzzsprout cover art, these are podcasts that use Buzzsprout to post and promote their show. And this designer comes in and critiques all 10 of them outlining the things that she loves the things that should be improved. So you can see some really tangible examples and why these different design principles are so important. So if you want to read that blog post, and you want to watch those videos, just scroll down on your phone a little bit to the shownotes. And you'll see links to all of those resources. And the other things we talked about, like tiny PNG and 99 designs and all that stuff.

Alban:

Thank you, Travis. So go ahead and check those out. Get your artwork made. And in the next episode, we are actually going to get you set up in Buzzsprout. So we've got your edited episodes, we've got your artwork, we've got some of the information about your podcast. Now we're gonna bring it all together and get set up in your Buzzsprout account. Till next time he podcasting Theo