How to Make an Album Cover, Start to Finish

The short answer: To make an album cover, write a one-paragraph brief first — what the record is about, its dominant feeling, its palette in actual colour names, and the approach (portrait, object, typographic, abstract, photographic, illustrated). Then fix the spec: a square 1:1 image, 3000×3000 pixels, sRGB. Then pick a route — design it yourself, commission an artist or photographer, or generate it — and execute against the brief rather than improvising. Finish by exporting a flattened sRGB file with no embedded colour profile and no rotation metadata, and check it at 64 pixels before you deliver it.

Most covers go wrong long before anyone opens a design tool. They go wrong at the moment someone types "album cover" into an image search and starts collecting things they like, because a mood board assembled from other people's finished work is a record of taste, not a set of instructions. What follows is the order that actually holds.

Step 1: Write the brief

Four lines. Written before you look at a single image.

• What the record is about. One sentence, in plain words. Not the feeling — the subject.
• Its dominant feeling. One word, and only one. If you need two, the record probably needs two covers and you have picked the wrong single.
• Its palette, in actual colours. "Sodium orange and near-black with one red accent" is a brief. "Warm and moody" is not — it describes your reaction, and nobody can execute a reaction.
• The approach. Portrait, object, typographic, abstract, photographic or illustrated. Each one signals something different, and choosing it now removes about eighty per cent of the decisions later.

This is the same discipline that makes a good video brief work, for the same reason: concrete nouns and named colours survive being handed to somebody else, and adjectives do not. If you have written a brief for a director before, this will feel familiar — and the full music video workflow starts from these same four lines.

Step 2: Fix the spec before you start

Set the canvas correctly at the beginning and you never have to rescue the file at the end. Square, 3000×3000, sRGB. One master at that size clears every store, because 3000×3000 is the highest figure any of them publishes as a recommendation and everything else sits below it — the individual platform numbers and their sources are in the full spec, platform by platform.

Starting at the right size matters more than it sounds. Spotify's guidance is explicit that you should not upscale images, so a cover built at 1000px and enlarged later is not a cover built at 3000px — and the difference is visible to anyone reviewing it.

Step 3: Choose a route, honestly

Three routes, and the differences are less about quality than about what you are actually buying.

Design it yourself

Cheapest in money, most expensive in decisions. Works best for typographic and object covers, where the craft lives in composition and restraint more than in rendering — and where a single strong choice beats technical polish.

Skill is rarely what sinks a self-made cover. Without a fixed brief you will produce twenty variations, lose the ability to tell them apart, and choose by exhaustion. Judge against the brief, not against how you feel about it at 1am.

Commission it

You are buying judgement, not pixels. An illustrator or photographer with a body of work brings a point of view, tells you when the idea is wrong, and takes responsibility for the result — which is worth a great deal on a record you will live with for years.

The honest costs are two, and only one of them is money. Commissioning is priced per project and scales with the artist's standing, so the range is wide enough that quoting a figure here would be inventing one; get quotes from three people whose work you already like. The cost that surprises people is time: a commission runs on someone else's schedule, plus revision rounds, and it is routinely the longest lead item in a release. Start it when the tracklist locks.

Agree three things in writing before work begins: the deliverable (a flattened 3000×3000 sRGB square, plus the layered source), the number of revision rounds, and the licence — specifically whether it covers merchandise, video and future reissues, not just the streaming release.

Generate it

Fastest and cheapest, and genuinely good at the approaches that have no wrong answer to get wrong: abstract fields, texture, atmosphere, stylised illustration. It is at its worst on anything requiring exactness — a specific person, a specific object rendered accurately, and above all type. Generated lettering remains unreliable, so keep your title and artist name as a real designed layer over the generated image, and do not ask a model for them.

If this is the route you are taking, what an AI album cover generator can and cannot do goes into the detail.

Two practical constraints. Check the terms of the tool you use for commercial rights over the output, since they differ between services and change. And avoid prompting in the name of a living artist whose style you want — the ethical objection and the legal exposure point the same direction, and the result is usually a weak imitation anyway.

Melodious does not generate album covers; it takes the cover you already have and builds the video from it. That is a different job, and it is the next one.

Step 4: Execute against the brief

Whatever the route, the work is the same: make the thing the brief describes, then subtract. Almost every cover improves by removing an element. The ones that fail rarely fail from being too plain.

Two habits are worth forcing. Work in greyscale for a while — if the composition collapses without colour, colour is carrying weight it should not have. And put the file at 64 pixels in a row beside five covers from artists you would sit next to on a playlist. That is the size and the context in which most people will meet it, and the wrong approach announces itself instantly there while staying hidden at full resolution.

Step 5: Export properly

The last mile is where technically fine artwork gets rejected.

• 3000×3000, square, never upscaled from a smaller original.
• Convert to sRGB — do not merely assign it — and flatten the profile into the pixels — Spotify does not support embedded colour profiles.
• Strip metadata, particularly EXIF orientation, so the file cannot arrive sideways.
• One image file. No multi-page layouts, whatever the release format.
• Nothing promotional in the frame — Apple's rules prohibit URLs, logos, marketing content and release dates in artwork.
• JPG at maximum quality for photographic covers, PNG for flat colour, gradients and type. Check your distributor's accepted formats, since some take JPG only.

What the cover has already decided

By the time it is exported, the cover has fixed a palette, a light direction, a subject and a texture — and those are precisely the four things a music video needs before it can start. That is why the sleeve is the cheapest brief you will ever write for the video: the decisions are made, they just need putting into words. From album art to music video works through the extraction, and the full video workflow takes it to a finished cut. If this is a single and not an album, planning the release around it is the next thing worth reading.

Frequently asked questions

What program should I use to make an album cover?+

Any editor that can work at 3000×3000 pixels in sRGB and export a flattened JPG or PNG. Photoshop and Affinity Photo are the standard raster tools; Illustrator and Affinity Designer suit typographic and vector covers; Figma, GIMP, Krita and Photopea all work. The tool matters far less than the brief — the same designer produces the same cover in any of them.

How long does it take to make an album cover?+

The brief takes an hour and saves days. Execution varies enormously by route: a typographic or object cover you design yourself can be finished in an afternoon, while a commissioned illustration runs on the artist's schedule plus revision rounds, and is normally the longest lead item in a release. Start the cover when you lock the tracklist, not when you set the release date.

Is it cheaper to generate an album cover or commission one?+

Generating is cheaper and much faster; commissioning buys judgement, revisions and a person who is accountable for the result. The honest trade is that generation gives you many near-misses quickly and no one to tell you which is right, while a commission gives you fewer options and a professional filtering them. Neither is the correct answer for every release.

Can I use an AI-generated image as my album cover?+

Distributors accept image files, not provenance claims, so the practical constraints are the terms of the tool you used and the rights you can assert. Check whether your generator grants commercial use of its output, avoid prompting in a living artist's name, and keep your own typography as a designed layer instead of asking a model to render your title — generated lettering is still the least reliable part of any image model.

Do I need a designer to make an album cover?+

No, but you need a decision-maker. The failure mode for self-made covers is not lack of skill, it is lack of a fixed brief: without one, you produce twenty variations, cannot tell which is better, and pick by fatigue. Write the brief, choose one approach, and judge everything against it — your taste on the day is not the standard.

What should I do before I send my cover to a distributor?+

Run four checks. Confirm it is square and at least 3000×3000 with no upscaling. Convert to sRGB and flatten the profile into the pixels; tagging is not enough. Strip EXIF orientation so it cannot arrive rotated. And read it at 64 pixels next to other covers in your genre, because that is the size at which most listeners will first meet it.

Cover done. Now the moving version.

Melodious reads your song's structure, storyboards it shot by shot and generates the keyframes in one run — so the video comes out of the same world as the sleeve.

Storyboard your song