Podcasting Q&A

How to design stunning Podcast Cover Art that stands out in Apple Podcasts

• Buzzsprout

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If you want your podcast to be successful, you need your podcast's artwork to truly stand out from the crowd.

It's your listeners first impression when they discover your show, and sets the tone for what people can expect when they subscribe.

So in this episode, you'll learn how to make your podcast artwork stands out and how to easily create stunning artwork inside of Buzzsprout if you're not a graphic designer.

Learn more tips about how to make podcast artwork that stands out over on our blog.

Record your podcasting question at Speakpipe.com/Buzzsprout to be featured on a future episode.

Review Podcasting Q&A in Podchaser or Apple Podcasts to let us know what you think of the show.

Travis:

If you want your podcast to be successful, one of the most important things that you need to do is make great podcast artwork. It's your listeners first impression when they discover your show, and really sets the tone for what people can expect when they subscribe. So in this video, we're gonna talk about how to make sure your podcast really stands out from your artworks perspective, and also how to easily create stunning artwork inside of Buzzsprout. If you're not a graphic designer, when it comes to designing podcast artwork, as opposed to any other kind of internet graphic that you'll see on social media or YouTube or anything like that are five key things. The first one is you want the design to be simple, you don't want it to be too complex, too crowded, too many things going on, you want someone to be able to look at your podcast artwork, and know immediately what kind of podcasts you have, what the name of your podcast is, and what they can expect when they listen to it. So if you have a podcast about dogs, you should probably have a picture of a dog somewhere on your podcast artwork, if you have a podcast about marriage and relationships that should be displayed very simply. And very clearly, with your artwork. You want someone to see your work and feel like they know what your podcast is about. Because remember, people are scrolling through on their phones, they're browsing on the app, they're not going through and just like dissecting every single podcast to see is this one I should listen to is this one I should listen to. They're looking for things that jumped out at them. And so if they're kind of in the mindset of Oh, yeah, I do want to kind of see a new marriage podcast that might be helpful for me. And then yours pops up, and it's very clearly the thing they're looking for, there's a higher likelihood, they're gonna click on it and listen to an episode. So you want your podcast artworks design to be simple. Along those lines, you also want to use contrasting colors to help make your artwork pop off of the screen. If all of the colors that you're using are pretty close to each other, we're talking like blue and purple put together and maybe like a little bit of green, or a bunch of orange, red, yellow tones, then, especially as you get to a smaller size, it's just gonna start blending together. And so if again, you're trying to jump off the screen, and make it really easy for someone to see and understand what your podcast is about using contrast in colors, to really make it very clear and legible. What your podcast are, we're just trying to communicate, that's really going to help people see your artwork, help it stand out and decide, okay, that is something I want to listen to. The third thing that you need to make sure that you test for is that your artwork still looks good when it's super tiny, because remember, most people are going to see your podcast first on their phone, and not even like full screen on your phone, like this little this little itty bitty box on their phone, and you're surrounding your artwork with a bunch of other artwork. And so if you design your artwork, full screen on a computer or a laptop, and it's like 10 inches big, then it might look good at that size. But if you shrink it down really small, you want to make sure you can still understand what's going on. So test it at different sizes, look at it on your phone, put it farther away from you on your desk, anything to kind of test and see is this something that still makes sense at a really small size, because that's going to make or break whether somebody looks at your podcast understands what it's about, and decides to follow it and start listening to episodes. The fourth thing you need to do is limit the number of words on your podcast artwork. Now this might sound like super weird, like what do you mean limit the number of words if you have too many words, on your podcast artwork, it feels cluttered, it's hard to know what to look at what to focus on what's important, not important. And it ends up just being something that people scroll past. And so if you have the name of your podcast, the first last and middle names and the suffixes of every single host that's on the podcast, a tagline a website. Now it just becomes a bunch of text that nobody can make heads or tails of. So limit the texts on your artwork to like the name of your podcast. And that's it. So in addition to any design elements, you want to include pictures graphics, limit the number of words that show up in your podcast artwork. And then the last thing that you need to be aware of and these are more technical details, but nonetheless very important, is you want to make sure that your podcast artwork, aspect ratio is a square, I don't know square this is that's kind of rectangular but a square meaning the width and the height are the same dimension because that is what podcast apps in directories like Apple podcast and Spotify, what your artwork to be, they've created all the formatting around your podcast artwork to be square. So make sure it is a square and the recommended size that we tell most people to use is 3000 by 3000 pixels. That means that if it's really small, or if it's really really big, like you just happen to have podcasters and listeners that listen to your show on a television, it's still gonna look good, even blown up to that big size. You'll also want to save it as a PNG or a JPEG file. Alright, none of these words file formats PNG or JPEG is the file format you want to use for your podcast artwork that's gonna make podcast apps happy with you when you submit your artwork that's going to keep your artwork from getting rejected. And make sure that no matter how big or small, your podcast shows up on somebody's screen, it still looks good. So those are the things that you'll need to do in order to make your podcast artwork, stand out in podcast apps, and really attract your listeners to your show. Now, if you aren't a professional graphic designer that already knows how to make podcast artwork like this, and if you don't have a huge budget in order to hire a graphic designer, you may be wondering, well, what's the best solution for me, and we think that that solution is Canva. canva.com is an online graphic design platform that has lots of templates and tools that you can use to create really nice graphics. For free, they do have a pro plan if you want to unlock even more templates. But for most people, the free plan is actually really great. And to make it easier to use Canva. To create your podcast artwork, we just integrated it with Buzzsprout. So if you host your podcast with Buzzsprout, there's a new feature in your podcast settings, all you have to do is go over to the podcast settings tab on your screen, scroll down to where you see your artwork, and then click the button that says design artwork with Canva. When you click that, and you open up the screen, it will ask you to log in. So if you have an existing user account with Canva, you can connect that or you can sign in with Facebook or Google and get right into the design studio. And what's really cool about this feature is that right here on the screen, within Buzzsprout, you have all these templates you can use. So you just scroll through, find one that you like, that you think really fits the vibe of what you're going for, that's kind of close to what you want. And then you can change the images, you can update the text to say whatever you want, you can move things around. And then once you have it exactly the way that you want it and really dialed in, you just click a button that says send to Buzzsprout. And then Canva. Using all those technical details we just talked about will send that podcast artwork to your Buzzsprout account. If you really are happy with it, you just click Save podcast info, and you're done. That's your artwork. So if you're looking something that's really straightforward, easy to do, and it's going to make your podcast artwork stand out without having to use Photoshop or some other kind of professional design software. We think this new Canva feature within Buzzsprout is really going to help you and your podcast. We hope you enjoyed this special episode of Podcasting Q&A and we can't wait to see what you create with this new podcast our work tool integrated with Buzzsprout and Canva. If you have a question you want to ask on a future. If you have a question you want us to answer on a future episode of Podcasting Q&A. All you have to do is go to speakpipe.com/B zzsprout or click the link in the show notes and you can sub it a brief audio message Podcast ng Q&A is available both as a vi eo and a podcast. So if you pre er watching video, you can sub cribe to the Buzzsprout YouTube channel to see the video version of this episode. Or you can str p or you can subscribe to Podc sting Q&A, your favorite podcast listening app. Well that's t for today. Thanks for listeni g and as always keep podcast ng