Imagine yourself scrolling through Apple Podcasts or another podcast platform. What’s the first thing you see? What draws your attention? Chances are it’s a podcast’s cover art. The visuals of your brand tell your story and help listeners connect with your podcast, so having your cover art on point is so key! 

We definitely didn’t get our cover art perfect on our first try. We went through a few iterations (including a photo of us in snapbacks and an illustration that looked nothing like us!) before creating our current cover art. It may take you a few tries too, and that’s OK. 

To start brainstorming, look at Apple Podcasts’ top lists and notice what art is featured. You’ll see that most of it is clean, simple, bright, and easy to read.

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Here are our top tips to get your design right:

1. Simple is better. Don’t make it too busy, overwhelming, or wordy. Most of the biggest Apple Podcast cover art is just text over a colored background.
2. Keep it classy! Avoid profanity and anything lewd or overly controversial. 
3. Professional photos are the way to go. If you use a pic of yourself, we suggest using a professional photographer. Make sure it’s great quality, clear, and aligns with the tone of your show.
4. Consider outsourcing. If you need help with your design, consider hiring a graphic designer. 99 Designs is a great platform to find talented and affordable freelance designers.

If you want to design your own cover art, there are some amazing FREE design tools you can use. Check out these:

• Canva: Create your own images using one of their custom templates. They offer free and paid versions with different levels of templates and stock photos.
• Snappa: This tool allows you to create eye-catching images quickly with professional-quality templates and a library of more than 500,000 photos. 
• Stencil: It’s super easy to use and offers more than a million icons and images and hundreds of design templates. 
• Desygner: This software has thousands of ready-made beautiful templates that can be easily tweaked, shared, and printed. 

One last thing: Make sure you’re aware of dimensions! Podcast feeds contain artwork that is a minimum size of 1,400 x 1,400 pixels and a maximum size of 3,000 x 3,000 pixels, 72 dpi, in JPEG or PNG format with appropriate file extensions (.jpg, .png), and in the RGB colorspace. To optimize images for mobile devices, Apple recommends compressing your image files.

Want to learn more about optimizing, launching, and growing your pod? Check out our full PodcastPro Program!