Designing an album cover can be the more challenging part of designing any album including various Zookbinders albums. This is because pages and page spreads have a set dimension, but covers can vary depending on the number of pages – which influences the spine width – and the type of cover.
Leather Cameo Covers
Your only design issues with cameo photos on any leather cover is the size of your cameo. When designing your cover in ROES, the size of album you select will activate the cameo sizes available for that specific cover. Please remember an 1/8 inch will be trimmed off each edge of the print before it is adhered to the cover and the color of the liner around your cover cameo will match that of the inscription you select.
Reflectionz and Leather Spine Covers
These are our most popular image covers. They offer the contemporary look of a full bleed image on the front cover with the elegance of leather on the spine and back cover. When creating your cover image for these albums please remember the following measurements: Reflectionz Album Covers = Subtract 2 inches from the width of the book (if you are making a 10×10 album, the cover image will be an 8×10 vertical image). Leather Spine PhotoBook Plus Covers = subtract 1.5 inches from the width of the book. We also recommend that all text is 1/2 of an inch away from the edge.
Photowrap Covers
When creating your photowrap for PhotoBook and PhotoBook Plus covers, using accurate measurements is critical to having your cover images and text line up properly. We have created the following chart to give you your overal canvas size based on your cover size and number of page inserts. 2010 Cover Specs
Once you have your canvas size set, drag guide lines 3/4 of an inch in from each outer edge. Then, from the left guide line, come in the width of your cover (for a 10×10 album come in 10 inches, for an 8×12 album come in 8 inches) and set another guide line there. Now do the same from the far right guide line. Now, from each of these inner guide lines set another guide line 1/2 inch in toward the center of the cover. The remaining gap between these two sets of double lines will be your spine. For more details see our previous article.
Remember that for photowrap covers you will need to design new covers for each sized book you create as these cover files do not proportionally shrink like the pages do because of the 3/4 outter margin and spine width.
With one week under our belts, we’ve received nothing but positive comments on our new matte finish for our PhotoBook and PhotoBook Plus lines. Orders for our all PhotoBook products are up noticeably and over 25% of orders are being made with the new matte finish – after just one week! Photographers are loving the rich, pebble-like finish which is a great compliment to our glossy finish. Unlike our glossy finish however, which is created using a glossy laminate, our new matte finish is printed directly on coated paper without use of a laminate. 
