How to Make This Book Cover Using Completely Free Software
I started working on a book version of my 365 project a few weeks ago, but the Great Laptop Catastrophe took my work with it, so today I started anew. And in true Keitha fashion, I spent most of my afternoon on the cover.
It was done completely in Irfanview, my favorite quick-and-easy editor created by Irfan Skilhan, so I figured I’d document the steps here in case anyone was interested in doing something similar.
The first step was to open the program and then open the file, but I’m going to assume that those steps are rather self-explanatory :)
This is the image that I’ll be using:
I want the text to go in the bricks as if it was scribbled there. The “text” in this case will read “SELF: Year Two. Photos by Keitha McCall.” Just finding the perfect font took more time that I’d like to admit. I started my search at dafont.com, a fount of free fonts. Some, however, are restricted to personal use only, but many of the creators allow commercial use with a donation or you can buy the font from other sites. “Sketch Block,” the font I fell in love with, happened to fall into the restricted category, but I found out that you can pick it up at myfonts.com . The creator, Lukas Bischoff, does a lot more than just fonts; you can check out his awesome portfolio here.
So the bricks are roughly 45° to the bottom edge of the photo, and Irfanview doesn’t allow you to rotate the text box, so we’re going to have to rotate the photo itself. Luckily, that’s easy enough to do. It turns out they need to be rotated 39°, so that’s the value we’ll use.
Once the photo is rotated, it’s going to look like this:
The pic didn’t come out well, but we basically need to draw a rectangle where the text is going to go. The text is always top-aligned in Irfanview world, so draw your box liberally in the brick you want to use. In this case, I’m going to draw around the top 60% or so of the chosen brick.
Next we go to “Insert Text” under the “Edit” menu.
I typed the word “SELF” in the large box and went to “choose font” to make my font selections.
I chose the fabulous “Sketch Block” font, made it bold just to give it that extra bit against those stones, and played around with the size until I figured out that 300 was just enough to fill the block. I changed the color to white (there aren’t a lot of color options), and pressed “Okay.”
Now I have this:
I continued to make boxes and change the sizes of the fonts to fill the bricks; “YEAR TWO” was size 130, as was “PHOTOS BY.” “KEITHA” was 170 and “McCALL” was 160.
Once all the text was in, it was time to rotate it back to normal.
This time, we’re going to choose the opposite of the original rotation value, so instead of 39, we’re going to type in -39.
We’re left with a LOT of black borders around the origial picture because of all that rotating, so we need to draw one last rectangle around the photo. Ideally you’d be careful to select only the photo, but with the software I’m using to make my book, it doesn’t really matter – there’s easy picture resizing and cropping built-in.
Now just go to the “Edit” menu and choose “Crop Selection.”
And….there you go! One custom-made book cover, thanks to the talents and generosity of both Lukas Bischoff and Irfan Skiljan!
