Sometimes I get e-mails from people who like the covers I do and ask for tips on how to do custom covers of their own. This is a page where I've collected some of the things that strike me was obviously wrong with a lot of custom covers. Following rules like these can make the difference between a custom cover that looks professional and believable, and one that looks phony.

In case you're wondering, all of the graphical examples I give of these problems are from my own covers, which can be seen on the old covers page. I'm not lampooning anyone else's work here.

#1: Personalise the cover art, not the template.

I used to break this rule in subtle ways and regret it, looking back. For example, on the 2003-ish covers for some Gamecube custom covers I did, I'd add in little disclaimers about how the game would only play on an NTSC console, which Nintendo of America never did themselves. Why? Probably just the urge to personalise. You're only changing the artwork, not the cover template.

Continuing with this theme, if you're so proud of your work that you feel the need to add your name somewhere, my best advice is - don't. Again, I used to be guilty of this. If you're going to do it, make it extremely subtle and hide it in a product code or in the background, like an artist would do with their signature.

#2: It has to be high resolution.

Although I personally only look at covers on my screen, if someone's going to print them, then they need all the resolution they can to avoid looking like a pixellated mess.

#3: Everything MUST be in proportion!

Often, you see covers where something just doesn't look right, but you can't immediately see why - then you notice a small detail that's been squashed and is too tall and thin, like an ESRB or Company logo, for example. When you're resizing elements, always hold down the SHIFT key in your graphics program. This will lock the proportions and make sure that everything you resize is done correctly.

For all my old cover designing crimes, I was never guilty of this, because it's incredibly simple. Here's an example I whipped up specially for this article, though:

Speaking of proportion - if you use a font, I'd recommend that you keep the text in the same proportions every time you use it. In other words, don't use one font for the entire back cover, and then randomly use a narrower version of it, like I did for the text at the bottom right of my Shenmue DVD back cover. The real reason I did this was because the text was squashed in at the last minute - and it shows. This is too much text, crammed into too small a space.

#4: Give everything room to breathe.

Don't place elements too close to each other or too close to the edges. This is bad composition and looks incredibly strange, although I'd need a professional designer to tell me the psychological reasoning behind this. Give all the elements on your cover plenty of padding space.

#5: No leftover placeholder text!

If you're working from a template, make sure everything's been filled in! I've seen some covers that are actually based off the templates I made, where the cover creators haven't finished the job, meaning that "PUBLISHER ADDRESS GOES HERE" and "PRODUCT CODE XXXXXXXXXXXX" are visible on the end result. Sloppy!

#6: Work from high-res art.

Look around the web at wallpaper sites and use Google Image to look for good quality pictures. Do this until you find the best quality images possible! Our custom covers are almost never going to look as good when it comes to this kind of quality compared to the publishers themselves (even if they can be better over all), so we need to use the best quality pictures we can get as a starting point.

Don't limit yourself to English-language sites! If the game you're covering is from Japan, go to the Japanese developer's site and dig around and see if you can find some good quality pictures there. Often these sites have cool wallpaper images you can use, that don't make their way over to the US or UK sites.

As a last resort, scan images to use. Especially on consumer (i.e. non-expensive) scanners, the results will be far from perfect when compared to images that have never left the digital domain, but it's still possible to get good results.

#7: Divide the back cover up into obvious zones.

Don't just get some back cover text and cram it onto the back cover in any way imaginable. To make the cover read nicely, it's a good idea to break it up into clearly defined zones. For example, if we were to draw borders around our imaginary zones, we'd get this:

See how the image on the right is a little easier to follow? It's neater and cleaner, whereas the text on the picture on the left flows haphazardly around the inserted pictures.

#8: Make sure colours "go" together!

This is a difficult one to explain, because there are loads of web sites out there explaining Colour Theory. You don't need to have watched too many home decoration TV shows to know that some colours work well together, and others don't. Just keep expirementing until you get a good mix of colours that don't burn out the viewer's eyes!

The golden rule: If a professional company wouldn't do it, you shouldn't do it either.

OK, so that may not be the best example - professional companies, after all, are the people who produced the covers we want to replace in the first place! But even if we don't always like their work, these companies DO follow coherent design rules. Use your head, and if necessary, look back to the official cover that you're replacing to see what parts work from it, and what ones don't.

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