The Cover Studio

Three panels, one wrap

A print cover is a single sheet that wraps the book: back panel · spine · front panel, plus bleed all round.

The canvas draws all of it at your real trim, with:

• the trim edges — where the paper is cut,
• the bleed — the margin of artwork that gets trimmed away,
• the barcode zone — kept clear on platforms that print their own, and labelled "Your ISBN barcode" on IngramSpark, where you supply it,
• the spine, at the width your page count and paper give it.

Getting around

• Zoom with the toolbar's − / % / +, or Fit to see the whole wrap.
• The canvas refits when the window changes, so a resized browser never leaves you looking at a postage stamp.
• Arrow keys nudge the selected layer; hold Shift to nudge further.

See Keyboard shortcuts for the full list.

Snapping and guides

Dragging a layer snaps to:

• panel centres and edges, and the spine, shown in the accent colour;
• other layers, shown in blue.

That second one is what lets you line a subtitle up with a title, or a series of back-cover elements with each other, without measuring.

Undo

The studio keeps a deep undo history. Ctrl + Z and Shift + Ctrl + Z.

Applying a template is a single undo step, not one per layer, so trying a different look costs you nothing.

Selecting

The Cover Studio is deliberately single-selection.

That is not an oversight. Its layers sit across three panels with different anchors, so dragging a group across the spine would re-home half of them to a different panel and move them somewhere you did not intend. The page designer for layout books, where every layer is on one page, does support multi-selection.

The inspector

The right-hand panel edits whatever is selected, grouped into sections:

Align works against the layer's own panel, so "centre horizontally" on a front-panel layer centres it on the front cover — not on the whole wrap.

With nothing selected, the Design stage's canvas controls handle the background, texture and spine instead.

Narrow screens

• Tablet — the canvas keeps one 300px rail beside it.
• Phone — the canvas sits above a drag-resizable tab sheet with four stops: peek, a third, a half, and full. Drag its handle, tap the handle to cycle, or tap the active tab to collapse it.

The sheet never covers the artwork it is editing: the canvas pads clear of whatever height the sheet currently is.

What to watch for

• Rotated layers hide their resize handles. Set width and height in the inspector instead, or return the layer to 0° to resize by dragging.
• The design does not follow renames. Rename the book and the cover keeps its old text — re-apply a template to pick up the new title and author.