A Warning about Stock Images and Clip Art

While it can be tempting to search on Google images for assets you can use in your cover design, you need to be careful. Many images on Google are heavily licensed. If you think about it, every image you can see online was created by someone or taken by a photographer. Just because an image isn’t watermarked it doesn’t mean that you can use it legally. If you think about this logically, Google Images finds all of the images on the web, unless the web-master specifically takes steps to prevent Google from accessing the images on a site. So, if a company legally purchases very expensive stock photography from Getty images to use on their corporate website, these images will appear on Google images without watermarks. This does not mean that you can use them free of charge. If you want to use the images you need to purchase a license. Read More

The Cover Design Blog

A few years ago I started writing a book on cover design. Like most of the stuff I write, I left it in Google Docs gathering virtual dust for a few years. Recently, I sumbled across it and had one of those nice serendipitous moments when I realised that with a minimal amount of tweaking I would have the basis for a nice series of tutorials on cover design. Sure, there are plenty of youtube video about this subject, but none of them really cover the subject in enough depth to give anyone a fighting chance of designing their own cover. Read More