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Creating your cover with Viovio is a piece of cake. During Step 2 of the Product Maker, simply upload a front and back image, enter your text, and you're done! For many customers this is all they need, and they're off to checkout.

Gaining Knowledge, Losing Bliss

Professionals and designers need more information and details about how design their cover. First, we cannot emphasize this enough:

Three #1 Rules of Cover Design

Do not try to be precise about placements of items on your cover.
Do not try to place anything on the spine
Leave lots of bleed. You cannot be too conservative moving elements away from the edge.

All about Covers

We HIGHLY recommend your covers be created as RGB .jpg files
We HIGHLY recommend you leave plenty of room around your cover edges so important items (heads, text) are not trimmed.

These recommendations are in place because our covers are printed as a single image file. Thus, we must flatten everything in order to make a uniform print. To avoid font and color space issues all cover manipulation is processed with RGB .jpg images. Images that are not RGB .jpgs are converted in the background and this may lead to some format and color space miscalculation. Thus, we recommend you perform the conversion prior to uploading your cover file. See these screen captures for information on saving a PDF as a JPG.

Living on the edge is bad

Your mother probably told you this and hopefully you listened. If you set up your image to run to the very edge of the fold or crop guides, you will be disappointed. Binding equipment can easily have 1/4" fluctuation between cycles. Please compensate for this fluctuation.

Cover Dimensions

Perfect Bound Softcover

All softcover books have 1/8" (3mm) bleed on all edges, so the cover should be .25" (6mm) larger than the final book size.

Spine width for softcover books is 300 pages (150 sheets) per inch, or 118 pages (59 sheets) per cm.

Casewrap Hardcover : 8.5"x8.5"

Binding Type	Total Dimensions	Safety Margin for Turn-in (Bleed)	Spine
Quick Binding	19.65"x10.25"	1.25"	.65"
Pro Binding	19.65"x10.25"	1.0"	24-80 pages: .3125"; 81-120 pages: .5"; 120-160 pages: .5625"
Template	Photoshop .psd	.PNG

Casewrap Hardcover : 8.5"x11"

Binding Type	Total Dimensions	Safety Margin for Turn-in (Bleed)	Spine
Quick Binding	19.65"x12.75"	1.25"	.65"
Pro Binding	19.65"x12.75"	1.0"	24-80 pages: .3125"; 81-120 pages: .5"; 120-160 pages: .5625"
Template	Photoshop .psd	.PNG

Getting all wrapped up

The full wrap cover is another great feature of Viovio that many individuals use to make breathtaking books. This option is easily selected under the "Advanced" tab during Step 2. of the Product Maker. This option will auto-stretch the front cover image to exactly fit the entire book.

I am very disappointed to hear that I cannot use a PDF as my cover. I have white text on a black background, and have had bad results from snapfish as their process of converting RGB to CMYK causes the shades of gray in the font anti-aliasing to have a pronounced Cyan shift. Using the info palette in Photoshop confirms RGB 132,132,132 will be CMYK 50%,42%,42%,6%. Also the file size grows from 1.5MB to 5.4MB (600dpi).

Richard, you can upload a PDF as a cover image. We just recommend a .jpg Just make sure the resolution is 300 dpi and that all important items (heads, people, text) are at least .25 from the edge on all sides.

I uploaded a horizontal PDF file for interior pages and it shows as such in the preview. I then uploaded a horizontal JPG for the front cover but the cover shows as a vertical. What am I doing wrong? How come the cover shows as long side vertical and interior shows as long side horizontal?

Hi Adrian,

This is usually a rotation issue when uploading the file - typically when setting the page layout as landscape, instead of actually defining a true landscape page size.

Book is done, and the online images of it are almost perfect. A slight problem with the front cover. I had given enough space on all four sidea for the cutting, but it looks like only the left side was cut, none off the right side. Now
there is a three sided black border on my cover. There had been well more than the minimum given to all four sides for the cutting, without worries, but I see it didn't work right. Is it fixable ? I could redo the original picture, to give it an even thicker black stripe on it's left side, and delete the first attempt from the book. Can that work ?
If anybody is into ficticious ghost photos, that's what my photobook is about. Nothing scary, just haunting ...

I put my book out for sale 5 nano seconds ago. where can people go to find it ?

Hi Tom,
I just got my latest book, and in the preview page it also looked like the left was cut off and the right was over weighted. But from experience (with an almost identical cover concept) I knew that it wasn't this lopsided when printed. So I kept my image centered and it was fine. What I'm trying to say so badly is what I saw on the screen was not what the finished product looked like. Can anyone from viovio comment on this for my future knowledge?
Judy

Yes, you can remove the current cover and upload a new cover if you would like. Just select the product and select the cover options link to be taken to the stage where you make changes to your covers

I'm making a PDF for a softcover A4 book and making a separate file for the document itself and one for the cover. The cover has a continuous image - can I export the PDF as a spread or do I need to keep it in separate pages? Seems like the spread is the correct option but I couldn't find anything on the site about it -

For Viovio you need separate pages even for the 2-page spreads. Here is a link to our 2-page spread page

Book Cover Specifications

Gaining Knowledge, Losing Bliss

All about Covers

Living on the edge is bad