8 Create Your Book Cover

You can’t judge a book by its cover, but it definitely helps!

Including a designed and branded cover page in your Pressbook project helps represent the professional and scholarly content you’ve created. Centennial College has created a template for you to use in order to create visual cohesion among our many open publications and, more importantly, to make life easier for you.

What you will need

• A Canva Account
  • This is a completely free, online design tool that requires no software installation
• An openly licensed image that reflects the nature of your content

Picking the perfect image

At this point in the process, you should be well-versed about what kind of content you should and not should not be using in an open educational resource; if not, we strongly encourage you to reach out to the OER Lab and the Open Education Librarian to learn more.

You are welcome to use images:

• You’ve made yourself
• That are in the public domain
• Provided by an open image repository
  • Pixabay
  • Pexels
  • Unsplash
  • Flaticon
  • Flickr Creative Commons
• Or select a photo in Canva!

Dimensions

Your image must be at least 800 pixels tall and in portrait style; we strongly suggest finding an image 900 px wide by 1200 px tall.

Make and Upload Your Cover

Make Your Cover Using Our Template

1. Pick and download your image (if applicable)
2. Make note of attribution information (Title, Creator, Source, URL)
3. Open the Centennial College Open Textbook Cover Template (login to Canva will be required)
4. On the left hand side menu choose icon labelled “Upload” and upload your photo
5. Once uploaded, select image in “images” of folder
6. Image will appear in the template; click image to make purple frame with white dots to appear – use these to resize your image to fit the page
7. Once the image is the desired size, right-click and select layer
8. In submenu, click “Send to Back”; image is now in place!
9. Add your title, subtitle* (if applicable), author name and the CC license
10. When finished click “Share” and Download
11. Download as a PNG or JPG

Upload Your Cover to Pressbooks

1. Once you have a cover image you’d like to use for you webbook home page and EPUB exports, enter your book dashboard and select ‘Book Info’
2. Scroll down to ‘Cover Image’. Click Choose File and locate your book cover file on your computer
3. Click Choose to upload that file into the Pressbooks system and click ‘Save’ to complete the cover image change.

If your cover image does not meet the required specifications (minimum height of 800 pixels and width to height ratio between .66 and 1), you will see an error message informing you of what you need to change. Make the necessary changes and try to upload the file again.

If successful, your most recent cover image will be saved to your media library and will be used as the cover image for your webbook and included as the internal cover image in your EPUB exports. Very large images will be automatically downsized to a maximum height of 1500 pixels.

Attribute Your Image

Don’t forget to include any attribution information for images used in your cover page in the “About This Book” section of your Centennial College Open Textbook Template. Instructions have been included.

Attributions