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Dust Jacket Templates

Posted: Mon Oct 22, 2012 8:55 pm
by ProfessorPat
With all of the jacket designs popping up, many of them varying widely in sizes, I decided that we needed a template either to base your designs on, or check that they are right.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/b6j7bkrt4pfimm6/gIdHa9Py0R

Now, to explain how to use them:

The Green is the spine: Put the spine here and do not overlap into the red or your spine will wrap around onto the cover.
The Blue is the cover: Put the cover image on the blue and red. The cover goes from the white edge to the white edge with only the spine covering it.
The Red is the room left to bend: Make this a part of the cover image as stated above. This is purely to ensure the liner notes do not curl onto your cover.

The White is where your liner notes go. You can extend this area or contract it as you see fit. Do not make the liners long enough to cover your entire inside cover, but other than that, this part is completely up to you.

This is a PDF, so if you open it in certain programs it will ask what size you want to import as. This is 9.25"x21" at 300dpi for every file. Changing this will mess with the ability to use this reliably as a template. The DPI can be raised if the dimensions in inches are left as is, though unless your images are all above 300dpi, I don't recommend it.

The files are already in CMYK, but I know Photoshop defaults to converting this to RGB when importing a PDF. Leave this in CMYK for your work and final copies and be sure to save the image as a TIF or PDF to ensure it is lossless and does not lose color quality when sent to the printer.

Re: Dust Jacket Templates

Posted: Mon Oct 22, 2012 9:48 pm
by ProfessorPat
As an example of a working design, I'll show you one that does follow this basic template layout and fits as it should.

I have converted this jacket to PDF and CMYK to be ready for printers to use but, it is all RPpirate's work:

http://sta.sh/21sq0qqlrwth?edit=1

The source from RPpirate with the original RGB PNG files can be found here:
viewtopic.php?p=841#p841

Re: Dust Jacket Templates

Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2012 2:04 pm
by ProfessorPat
If anybody has used these already, template #1 was off and has now been corrected.

The cover sections were too wide and the PDF was based on a 9.25x22 canvas which would have resulted in scaling issues had anyone listened to my claims of 9.25x21 above on it. The new one is once again 9.25x21 and should work as intended.

Please change any jackets that have been made using this accordingly.

Re: Dust Jacket Templates

Posted: Sun Nov 18, 2012 4:49 pm
by L9OBL
not sure how easy they were to find but I'm pretty sure when I made the dust jackets in august I made a simple labeled template for the books. but then again they might have gotten lost so idk *shrug*

Re: Dust Jacket Templates

Posted: Mon Nov 19, 2012 11:53 am
by ProfessorPat
I didn't know about yours, but after I started working on these someone else did link to yours somewhere in another thread. Given the dimensions we have for the books now though, the ones I saw that were supposed to be yours were a bit off from the measurements that I had to work with making mine.