Alignment, spacing and why an amateur cover feels off
Show someone two covers and they will tell you which one is professional in about a second. Ask why and they will say the other one "looks a bit off." They are right, and the thing they cannot name is almost always one of four mechanical faults. None of them is about taste, and all four are fixable in an afternoon.
Alignment: everything lines up with something
Pick up any published cover and you can find the invisible lines. The title, the subtitle and the author name share a left edge, or share a center. A band of color starts where the type does. Nothing was placed by eye.
Elements positioned by eye are the largest single cause of a cover that feels untidy without any one thing being visibly wrong. The subtitle sits two pixels off the title's left edge. The author name is centered on the page, the title is centered on the image, and the image is not centered on the page. No individual error is big enough to point at, and together they read as carelessness.
The fix is to choose one line and hang everything off it. Either a left edge the title, subtitle and author all share, or a vertical center they all share. Not both on the same cover. Mixed alignment can be made to work, but it has to be a decision with a reason, and if you cannot state the reason you are looking at an accident.
Alignment applies to the artwork too. A horizon, the edge of a building, the shoulder line of a figure — any strong line in the image is something your type can align to, and doing it makes the type look as though it belongs in the picture rather than on top of it.
Proximity: things that belong together sit together
Readers group by distance before they read a word. Two lines close together are one idea; the same two lines pushed apart are two unrelated things.
This is why a subtitle drifting halfway down the cover stops reading as part of the title. It becomes a caption about some other subject, and the title loses the explanatory half of its meaning — which on nonfiction is where the sale is. Keep a subtitle within its own line's height of the title and it stays attached.
It is also why the author name needs a space of its own. Floated near the bottom edge it looks like a stray element that fell there; too near the title it starts reading as part of it. Give it a deliberate gap and a deliberate distance from the edge, and it reads as the third thing in a hierarchy rather than a leftover.
Consistent spacing: use a small set of gaps
The gaps on a professional cover come from a short list of values — a unit and its multiples. Title to subtitle, one unit. Subtitle to the bottom of the block, two units. Block to the edge, four.
Irregular spacing is the most common tell in a homemade cover, and the hardest for the author to see, because each gap was set to look right on its own. Eleven pixels here, nineteen there, thirty-four somewhere else. The eye is very good at detecting that these numbers are unrelated and very bad at saying why it feels sloppy.
Pick a unit — a fraction of your title's size works well — and make every gap a multiple of it. That also fixes the margins: the space between your type and the trim edge should be one of your values, used on all sides, not whatever remained after you moved things around.
Optical centering: the eye and the ruler disagree
A block of text centered by measurement looks low. This is not an illusion you can ignore; it is why a printed page has a larger bottom margin than top, and why titles on professional covers sit above the mathematical middle.
The eye reads the optical center as slightly above the true one, so raise the block a little and judge it by looking, not by the number. Two things shift it further. Descenders — the tails on g, y, p, j — add measured height the eye does not count as part of the letterform, so a title full of them needs to come up more. Mixed sizes move the weight toward the largest element, so a two-line title with a huge first line and a small second line balances around the big line, not the middle of the pair.
Horizontal centering has the same problem in miniature: a line ending in a comma or a quotation mark measures wider than it looks, and centering by the marks leaves it visibly off.
In the Cover Maker. Trim, bleed and safe-area guides are drawn live over your artwork at your real trim size, so the edges you are spacing to are the real ones — and it checks the cover at thumbnail size, where balance problems show up first. Start your cover → · about the Cover Maker
Three checks that need no design training
Turn it upside down. Rotating the cover 180 degrees stops you reading the words and leaves you looking at shapes and gaps. Misalignment and uneven spacing become obvious, because the part of your brain that was busy reading the title is free to notice them.
Squint at it. Blurring the detail reduces the cover to blocks of light and dark. If the blocks feel lopsided, the balance is wrong; if one block is bigger than you thought, your hierarchy is not what you intended.
Look at it small. Shrink it to the size of a search result. Balance faults survive the shrink even when the details do not — see The thumbnail test.
None of this replaces composition, which is about what the cover is of and where the empty area goes. Alignment and spacing are the layer above: given the composition, this is the difference between finished and nearly finished.
Make your cover
The Cover Maker is free to use: name your book, bring your artwork, and it draws the full wrap — front, spine and back — to your printer's own measurements. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Mistakes that mark a book as self-published · More: Typography and hierarchy · Composition and negative space · Setting a long title without shrinking it