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Transcript

Designing Podcast Cover Artwork That Gets Clicks · Buzzcast

• 0:00
  Kevin: Alban, welcome back
• 0:01
  Alban: Kevin, thank you for having me back, why do you say...
• 0:03
  Jordan: Wait a second, Kevin, you're the one that's back.
• 0:06
  Alban: I don't feel like we never said that I was gone, so I don't know if people
• 0:09
  Kevin: Well, you were out of Jacksonville, so, like, welcome back to Jacksonville.
• 0:12
  Alban: Thank you,
• 0:13
  Kevin: We were supposed to record yesterday in which I was going to give you a heads up.
• 0:27
  Alban: It is like the same temperature as what I.
• 0:28
  Alban: We walk out of the airport and the second I step out I go oh, we're home.
• 0:30
  Alban: Yeah, because you get hit with an oppressive wall of humidity.
• 0:35
  Alban: Yes, and I'm a florida man, so it now just that's home.
• 0:39
  Alban: But 86 degrees and 86 degrees are nowhere close to the same feeling.
• 0:46
  Alban: When one of them is high humidity and the other one's low, it's like 20 degrees different.
• 0:50
  Alban: It's just a totally different experience, and I was like I can't wear pants anymore.
• 0:56
  Jordan: Like pants, are off the table for a couple of months.
• 1:01
  Kevin: I know I started to stress because I was like, if it's this hot here, I imagine Texas is pretty darn hot too, and I was like we're like two and a half weeks out from podcast movement.
• 1:10
  Kevin: And I know, jordan, you do not like the heat, no, and I looked right now.
• 1:15
  Kevin: I can only see like the 10 day forecast and it's like a hundred, a hundred in Texas, no, yep, so I don't know exactly what it's going to be at podcast movement, but I'm hoping they get a little cold front or something.
• 1:25
  Alban: Now the benefit is, I think it's at the Gaylord Palms, which is like they have that giant dome and it's kind of like a little city under a dome.
• 1:33
  Alban: Yeah it is.
• 1:33
  Alban: You think Pauly Shore is there.
• 1:35
  Alban: It's like a biodome, but we didn't record yesterday and I think we needed a moment of silence because oh, my God.
• 1:44
  Alban: I can't believe this happened.
• 1:44
  Alban: This is so upsetting.
• 1:46
  Alban: 10 years ago we bought a Samson Q2U and then I just went on this whole thing about praising this mic.
• 1:58
  Alban: It can go through anything, it never breaks.
• 1:59
  Alban: It's so amazing.
• 1:59
  Alban: Samson's the greatest company and Jordan and I recorded a episode on Friday.
• 2:04
  Alban: It worked great.
• 2:05
  Alban: And then yesterday, which was Tuesday, it would not work and we sat there and we tried.
• 2:11
  Alban: We reset computers, we tried to do any number of things got the defibrillator out, perform CPR.
• 2:18
  Kevin: And the capsule is just dead.
• 2:19
  Kevin: I thought about that afterward, after we decided to call it on the recording.
• 2:23
  Kevin: I was like why didn't we just try banging on it Like just smack the hammer.
• 2:27
  Kevin: It works.
• 2:27
  Alban: Sometimes it does.
• 2:28
  Alban: You know, it's funny.
• 2:29
  Alban: As I was packing, I was debating.
• 2:31
  Alban: Do I even take this home?
• 2:32
  Alban: Do I just throw it in the trash?
• 2:34
  Jordan: Yeah.
• 2:35
  Alban: And it's such a core memory having that mic, I had to bring it home, so it's with me.
• 2:39
  Alban: I've also bought a new Samson Q2U to replace it for when we travel.
• 2:48
  Alban: But I might maybe I'll start banging on this and see if I can get it to come back to life.
• 2:51
  Kevin: Yeah, yeah, isn't that ironic.
• 2:51
  Kevin: I just said two weeks ago how this mic is indestructible.
• 2:55
  Kevin: It's a kiss of death.
• 2:56
  Kevin: You can't say that.
• 2:57
  Jordan: It's not just that we said it was indestructible, it's that we based an entire episode around.
• 3:02
  Kevin: how awesome the Q2U was yeah, talk about stuff that doesn't age well.
• 3:06
  Jordan: Yeah.
• 3:07
  Alban: And it also wasn't.
• 3:08
  Alban: It wasn't like I banged it at any point.
• 3:10
  Alban: It sat there on the desk and then I folded up the little tripod feet and I put it in the drawer and I took it out of the drawer and it was done.
• 3:18
  Alban: No clue what happened along that journey.
• 3:20
  Kevin: And you hadn't used it for almost a year before that.
• 3:22
  Kevin: Right Right, Since the previous podcast it was almost like it was just hanging on.
• 3:32
  Kevin: This thing had any bit of soul to it.
• 3:33
  Alban: It was just like I got one more in me.
• 3:33
  Alban: I heard Jordan and I do the episode.
• 3:34
  Alban: It was part of the Stephen Colbert got canceled episode and the Mike's just like I'm done.
• 3:42
  Jordan: I can't exist anymore in this world.
• 3:44
  Alban: That was the last one I could handle.
• 3:46
  Alban: Here we go.
• 3:53
  Jordan: Welcome back to Buzzcast, a podcast about all things.
• 3:55
  Jordan: Podcasting from the people at Buzzsprout Boo boo, boo, Alban.
• 4:00
  Jordan: Sorry, I'm going to cut that because that's not going to make any sense to anybody.
• 4:04
  Kevin: You got all you knew.
• 4:05
  Jordan: Leave it in, leave it, leave it in I was doing finger guns and I had to make noises for it uh, jordan put in a psa here and I'll read it for you.
• 4:13
  Alban: This is an episode where we're going to talk a lot about visuals from a podcast artwork and so, for the best experience, you should use a modern podcast app that supports chapter artwork.
• 4:24
  Alban: And Jordan put down a list of these great apps that show chapter artwork, and they are Pocket Casts, true Fans, podcast, addict, podverse Fountain and Cast-O-Matic.
• 4:36
  Alban: Those are ones that you will be able to see the visuals we're talking about and you'll get a better experience.
• 4:41
  Jordan: Yeah, and maybe we need to be really specific here because these are the podcast apps that support the like podcast namespace chapters.
• 4:49
  Jordan: We did get a message from a listener in the UK that said I wish you supported chapter on Apple Podcasts and I guess Apple Podcasts does also display chapter artwork.
• 5:00
  Alban: Yeah, kind of.
• 5:01
  Alban: So the way that Apple does it, I think Spotify doesn't support any right.
• 5:06
  Jordan: I don't think so.
• 5:06
  Jordan: No, I haven't seen it.
• 5:07
  Alban: The way that Apple does.
• 5:08
  Alban: It is if you embed the artwork in the MP3 file and the downside there is that everybody downloads the artwork, no matter whether they look at it or they don't.
• 5:18
  Alban: It's not a great experience, and so you end up either compressing the artwork down really tiny so it kind of doesn't look good, or you just leave it out.
• 5:22
  Alban: And so you end up either compressing the artwork down really tiny so it kind of doesn't look good, or you just leave it out, and so we leave it out.
• 5:29
  Alban: I mean, apple could update it so they pull from the other ways that podcasting 2.0 has come up with and they only download if people are using an app that actually wants to see the artwork.
• 5:39
  Jordan: Well, the reason why we're talking about how this is a very visual episode is because, really, in podcasting, the only visuals you get for the most part are going to be the podcast cover artwork and the episode artwork and chapter artwork, stuff like that.
• 5:57
  Jordan: So we will be displaying artwork in the chapters.
• 6:01
  Jordan: So if you want to switch to another podcast app while you listen to this episode, go ahead and do that right now.
• 6:13
  Kevin: Now I'll tell you I really do love this when I listen to.
• 6:15
  Kevin: A large percentage of the podcasts I listen to I listen to when I'm driving around, and not many podcasts do chapter art, but I think it was Overcast was the last one I was doing.
• 6:25
  Kevin: I don't know if Pocket Cast does this, but every once in a while I'll be driving in my car using CarPlay and I think the Overcast CarPlay app displays the chapter art right there as I'm driving, and so I love it, Like I'm driving around listening to a podcast and then I'll see something flash.
• 6:37
  Kevin: I'll glance over and it's like the thing they're talking about.
• 6:39
  Kevin: They'll show like, show like whatever you know, a picture of a circuit board or something like that.
• 6:43
  Kevin: I was just listening to this marathon podcast that I think I've talked about on this show before is six hour podcast.
• 6:48
  Kevin: I made it through and you know three and some change, but they referenced a lot of visuals and they didn't use chapter artwork.
• 6:55
  Kevin: And they've totally could have, because everything that they were talking about I think it was actually like screen sharing and stuff, but it would have totally got the gist if they'd just taken a screenshot of it and used it as chapter art.
• 7:05
  Kevin: So it can be a little bit more time intensive on the creative side.
• 7:10
  Kevin: Like Jordan, for this episode, you are going to have to take some time at the end of the episode and go back and, when you're doing the chapters, grab images and attach them to each one of the chapters.
• 7:18
  Kevin: It does take a little bit more time.
• 7:19
  Kevin: But for special episodes, when you have things that are enhanced by, if you could actually see the thing that we're talking about, I think it makes a lot of sense and it's a nice thing to do for your audience.
• 7:28
  Alban: Yeah, and to riff on Kevin's point a little bit, so you're talking about this episode, six hour DHH marathon episode.
• 7:34
  Alban: They also made a full transcript.
• 7:36
  Alban: There's all these chapters already baked in.
• 7:39
  Alban: They've got timestamps for every, like you know, main point.
• 7:42
  Alban: It's like really really long.
• 7:44
  Alban: They took the time to make a transcript.
• 7:46
  Alban: It wouldn't have been too much more work to take a handful of screenshots of oh, here's what we're talking about and add it to those chapters.
• 7:53
  Alban: Yeah, I'm not sure what podcast hosts they're using, but I think most probably support adding artwork to the chapters, or at least they should.
• 8:01
  Alban: So I'm a proponent.
• 8:03
  Alban: I think it's probably more a lack of knowing that that functionality exists rather than them not wanting to take the extra time.
• 8:10
  Alban: Yeah, but I've been driving before and I was listening to an episode I think it was on Pocket Casts and as they were talking about it, I saw the artwork changed on CarPlay and I glanced over and went oh, that makes a lot more sense now that I've got one little visual.
• 8:25
  Alban: It's a very small update, but I think when it's used it's like really tasteful.
• 8:31
  Jordan: I've actually listened to a few podcasts where they are playing the recordings of a live show that they did, and maybe they did like a special episode, where it's like a game show version.
• 8:40
  Jordan: And it's so cool because when you pull up the chapter artwork and you can like see these two things that they're discussing and it's almost like you're in the audience because they're like putting the slides up as the chapter artwork and that is just so cool.
• 8:53
  Jordan: I love it when people do that.
• 8:54
  Jordan: Okay.
• 8:55
  Jordan: So podcast cover artwork there's kind of like two camps when it comes to podcast cover artwork that I see a lot with new podcasters.
• 9:02
  Jordan: You get either the people that are like, well, if my audio is good, then it doesn't matter, if I have really good podcast artwork and you know you never judge a book by its cover and then you have the other people that are like the podcast artwork is the most important thing, and I'm not really going to pay attention to the content, because as long as, like, the artwork is good, it's going to bring in the people I want to listen to the podcast, and so I definitely want to address why podcast cover artwork is so important, even if it is just a tiny little thumbnail on a mobile screen.
• 9:34
  Jordan: And, Alban, I actually pulled a lot of these points from a talk that you did a few years back at Podcast Movement, so I definitely think that it's going to be a huge advantage for me to be able to pick your brain on this.
• 9:48
  Alban: One of my favorite slides actually from that talk was I always thought it was such a strange phrase don't judge a book by its cover.
• 9:54
  Alban: And I'm like, of course you judge a book by its cover.
• 9:57
  Alban: And I looked up the origin and it's from like the 1830s or something.
• 10:01
  Alban: I don't know the exact date, but it was old enough that I was like oh, it's from like the 1830s or something, I don't know the exact date, but it was old enough that I was like oh everything was a leather bound book.
• 10:08
  Alban: Yeah, like everything looked the same.
• 10:08
  Alban: So it wasn't really you weren't going to learn a lot from the cover.
• 10:12
  Alban: But you do it now.
• 10:14
  Alban: You judge books by its cover.
• 10:15
  Alban: You judge podcast artwork.
• 10:16
  Alban: It's your first impression.
• 10:18
  Alban: If there's good artwork, it kind of shows the person who made it has good taste and you imagine the good taste of the artwork is going to show up in the good taste of audio content.
• 10:30
  Alban: I think that often there's at least a correlation.
• 10:34
  Alban: Even if it's not always a hundred percent correlation, there is a correlation and like it elevates the brand.
• 10:40
  Alban: So I know if I see bad artwork I'm less likely to listen.
• 10:46
  Jordan: Yeah.
• 10:46
  Alban: And I think we ran a survey at one point and 62% of podcast listeners said they're much more likely to click play for the first time on a podcast if they like the artwork.
• 10:57
  Alban: I think that's got to be, if anything, that's underselling it.
• 11:00
  Alban: If you see bad artwork, you're just not going to click play.
• 11:03
  Alban: If you see something that looks attractive, it catches your eye for half a second.
• 11:07
  Alban: That's enough that you might read the title and the description and maybe give it a test.
• 11:12
  Jordan: Yeah, there's been a few podcasts I've come across where I happened to hear the audio before.
• 11:19
  Jordan: Seeing the podcast artwork is a very rare scenario, but sometimes I'll listen and it's like such a good episode.
• 11:26
  Jordan: And then I'll be like, okay, I'm gonna go find that on the podcast app and then I'm going to share it with like a friend or a family member.
• 11:32
  Jordan: And then I see the podcast artwork looks like a little janky and I'm just like, oh crap, now my friend's not going to listen to this because they're gonna be like why are you sharing this with me?
• 11:40
  Jordan: And so it almost gives me like secondhand embarrassment.
• 11:45
  Jordan: If I'm really into a podcast that has really bad cover art.
• 11:48
  Jordan: I don't know if that resonates with you.
• 11:50
  Kevin: I do agree with what you all are saying, but I will offer a slightly different perspective, and that is that I really enjoy independent podcasts, and I enjoy them oftentimes more than like mainstream stuff.
• 12:03
  Kevin: Yeah, so stuff that's, you know, like the Dateline series of podcasts and like Wondry I'm sure I haven't jumped ahead in the outline yet, but I'm sure you're going to feature some Wondry, like they're notoriously great for having fantastic artwork and stuff, and so I do give the podcasters oftentimes a benefit of the doubt, when I'm searching for something new or on a recommendation, that if the podcast artwork doesn't look super professional, super polished, that's not a huge turnoff for me right away.
• 12:27
  Kevin: I do think there is a line, though, like it does have to be good.
• 12:32
  Kevin: I think, as Alvin said and Jordan you alluded to, I do want to get at least an impression that the person's podcast I'm about to listen to has some taste like and they do care about this, you know production that they put out there, and so they at least did something good, but it doesn't have to be award-winning graphic design.
• 12:53
  Jordan: Yeah.
• 12:53
  Kevin: And so, like I think that should be the measure for most people who are starting a podcast is try to do something good.
• 12:59
  Kevin: Again, you don't have to go and spend a lot of money to hire a professional designer.
• 13:01
  Kevin: There are some very good tools.
• 13:01
  Kevin: You don't have to go and spend a lot of money to hire a professional designer.
• 13:05
  Kevin: There are some very good tools available to be able to, and templates available so that you can get something good even if you don't have a lot of design skills, and so I'm sure we're going to cover some of that stuff.
• 13:14
  Kevin: But, just like my opinion is like don't set the bar by looking at the best podcast artwork in the world and say that's what I have to be able to achieve for my own podcast before I launch.
• 13:24
  Jordan: Yeah, and.
• 13:25
  Kevin: I don't want anyone taking that message away.
• 13:27
  Alban: Yeah, maybe what we should do is well, we really can't do this.
• 13:30
  Alban: It would be nice to look at like the worst 20% of artwork, because that's what turns me off.
• 13:35
  Alban: If I see something that's got a big podcast microphone and it's got like the whole podcast name, and then it's got like a guy's face and it's got a big subtitle and it's got like an award badge on there, like there's just so much going on, I go this is in the bottom 10% of artwork.
• 13:52
  Alban: This is probably a bad podcast and that is enough to get me to tap out.
• 13:57
  Alban: I think if you're following the tips we talk about here, you're going to pass the threshold of if this is on point with something I'm interested in.
• 14:12
  Jordan: I'm willing to click play.
• 14:12
  Jordan: Yeah, I think for me, like the, the podcast artwork that I've come across where I'm just like whoa, this is not good is random pictures.
• 14:16
  Jordan: So with like no text, no context, it actually doesn't like go with the theme of the podcast.
• 14:23
  Jordan: But sometimes you'll get people who just post like their selfie from social media and that's like the thumbnail for their podcast, because they're just like well, it's me talking, so I'm going to like post my profile picture as my cover artwork and I go no, don't do that, like nothing else, I think.
• 14:40
  Jordan: I think that's that, along with what you're talking about, Alban, with like social media links and like the website, they'll have all these like thumbnails and stuff on this, like tiny little artwork.
• 14:49
  Jordan: I think those are in the same category of like.
• 14:52
  Jordan: Don't do this for me.
• 14:55
  Alban: Yeah, the reason I say we can't give good examples here is because I wrote a post years ago on, you know, tips for podcast artwork.
• 15:02
  Jordan: And.
• 15:03
  Alban: I gave some examples of like hey, look at these podcasts that have microphones and all the artwork.
• 15:08
  Alban: It's terrible.
• 15:08
  Alban: And then we sent it out in our newsletter.
• 15:11
  Alban: Apparently, one of them was a buzzsprout podcaster and I just found them and they wrote back and they're like, oh well, we met to update it and I was like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I did that.
• 15:21
  Alban: I feel so bad, so never again.
• 15:24
  Kevin: One of the best ways to learn good design is by looking at bad design, and there used to be a website that was called webpagesatsuckcom and early in my web design career we'd reference this often.
• 15:36
  Kevin: They'd post websites that sucked daily, and so you'd go and check it daily and see bad design and it would give you some ideas of things to steer clear of when you were designing things.
• 15:45
  Kevin: But, as Alvin said, it is offensive.
• 15:48
  Kevin: I think the webpages that suck thing actually got big enough that it was a little bit of a I wouldn't say a badge of honor.
• 15:54
  Kevin: Gosh, I don't know how it could ever been a badge of honor, but maybe like a wake up call or something.
• 15:58
  Kevin: Yeah, and it was the whole web like it was anonymous enough, but doing it across podcast artwork doesn't really feel right.
• 16:04
  Kevin: These are people who care a lot about the craft that they're doing and they might not have had great design skills.
• 16:10
  Kevin: I might not have understood the importance of having decent artwork and, honestly, they might not have just cared that much.
• 16:15
  Kevin: They just wanted to launch your podcast and there's nothing wrong with any of that stuff.
• 16:18
  Kevin: What we're trying to do is give tips to get the best podcast artwork you can, if that's something that's important to you and we think it's important but if you don't, it's your creation, it's your artwork, it's your passion project, and so please don't take offense if we say anything that says like oh, we don't like podcast microphones in podcast artwork and you have one.
• 16:36
  Kevin: Please don't take that as an offense, it's just a general rule of thumb.
• 16:46
  Jordan: That we're saying like this is a little bit overused.
• 16:47
  Jordan: And you want to stand out?
• 16:48
  Jordan: Yep, all right, caveats aside, let's jump into it.
• 16:49
  Jordan: Okay, and before we get into the weeds of how to design podcast cover art, you really need to go into it with like a clear idea of what you're trying to achieve with your podcast artwork design.
• 16:58
  Jordan: So there are a few things that you want to keep in mind when you are designing it or playing with the idea or just kind of like ruminating on how you want your podcast artwork to look.
• 17:07
  Jordan: And the first is to just consider the tone of your podcast.
• 17:11
  Jordan: A lot of times, if you see, like, for example, true crime podcasts and they have like pink or bubbly artwork, you can somewhat assume that that is going to be a comedic view of true crime, right?
• 17:25
  Jordan: Because something really serious, like Up and Vanished or something like that.
• 17:29
  Jordan: It has kind of like moody tones to it.
• 17:31
  Jordan: There's like these dark, foggy pictures and the font is like white or black or red and it just it has that like mood to it.
• 17:40
  Alban: You know the tone of the podcast.
• 17:42
  Alban: Are you trying to be funny?
• 17:43
  Alban: Are you trying to be serious?
• 17:44
  Alban: Are you trying to be serious?
• 17:45
  Alban: Yeah, is it professional?
• 17:46
  Alban: These are the things to kind of load into your brain before you start coming up with ideas.
• 17:50
  Alban: So, like, what's the tone?
• 17:51
  Alban: Another one I think about a lot is who's the audience for the show and what kind of images are they going to recognize.
• 17:59
  Alban: I think the example that I gave at one point was, if you're doing a podcast about Star Wars like there's a lot of like images that you can put in there that look like Star Wars and maybe like the rebel symbol or a lightsaber or something that stuff should be in the artwork because you want this super fans to recognize.
• 18:19
  Alban: Okay, I know what this is.
• 18:21
  Alban: This is for me.
• 18:22
  Alban: We have an example here from a podcast called the Thing About Austin, which Sarah from Wish I'd Known Then podcast sent over.
• 18:30
  Jordan: Yeah.
• 18:30
  Alban: And it looks literary, it looks calming, it kind of is reminiscent of the Victorian era.
• 18:37
  Alban: So it instantly gets you into this mindset of oh, it's a modern podcast about Jane Austen.
• 18:49
  Jordan: This is a very good example that Sarah sent us, because, yeah, you have like this image of Jane Austen, but then there's also just that sort of like postmodern like stamp across her face and then there's like a squiggle outline thing and the colors are punchy, even though it's like this old imagery, and so it really does give you the impression, without even looking at the podcast itself, it does give you the impression that this is like, as you said, a modern take on Jane Austen.
• 19:14
  Jordan: You know, maybe they have like a little bit of like irreverence to it or they're looking at it in like more of a funny manner.
• 19:19
  Jordan: But yeah, I think this is a really good example of considering the tone, who the audience is and then also the imagery that they're going to recognize.
• 19:28
  Kevin: I know nothing about this podcast, but have either of you listened to it?
• 19:31
  Jordan: I have not.
• 19:32
  Alban: I actually don't know that it's about Jane Austen.
• 19:34
  Alban: I guess I assumed it's Jane Austen.
• 19:36
  Alban: It says the thing about Austen, but when I see you know black and white, what are these called Jordan?
• 19:42
  Jordan: lithograph yeah.
• 19:43
  Alban: It's like a lithograph or like some whatever.
• 19:46
  Alban: It's like a dithered do a tone image old timey dithered two tone image.
• 19:50
  Alban: According to Kevin, did I see an old timey looking image and it says thing about Austin.
• 19:56
  Alban: I go yeah, it's probably Jane Austin and it's a good reminder.
• 19:58
  Alban: Like you don't have to put every single word on there, you can actually imply things with your images.
• 20:04
  Jordan: Yeah.
• 20:04
  Kevin: And I think the way they did the treatment of the word Austin over her eyes makes it feel like they're going to give you, like I don't know, some sort of background information, like she's like anonymous or you don't know the backstory.
• 20:16
  Jordan: Sorry, not anonymous.
• 20:17
  Jordan: Oh, I love that.
• 20:18
  Kevin: Yeah, right, they're going to reveal her identity through the podcast.
• 20:21
  Jordan: Yes, reveal her identity through the podcast?
• 20:25
  Jordan: Yes, all right.
• 20:25
  Jordan: And then the last thing that you should think about is how could your podcast stand out in its category?
• 20:28
  Jordan: So, really, the easiest way to do this is to go to the category that your podcast is going to be in and just browse other cover art.
• 20:35
  Jordan: You know what are they doing.
• 20:36
  Jordan: How are?
• 20:37
  Jordan: Um?
• 20:37
  Jordan: I saw on Reddit the other day someone posted and they were like why is red the most popular color in podcasting?
• 20:45
  Jordan: You see it in every single cover art.
• 20:47
  Jordan: Like every cover art uses red.
• 20:48
  Jordan: Well, I mean, if that's the case, maybe stay away from red.
• 20:51
  Jordan: I love this family message that we got from Salem, oregon that says there are many categories, so I feel it is important to match that too.
• 20:58
  Jordan: For some, it's like choosing a wine Is it the name, brand, company, type of wine, or maybe the label design?
• 21:06
  Jordan: For me, 90% of the time, choosing based on the label has served me well, and I think that this is another example of like choosing a book by its cover.
• 21:14
  Jordan: I will fully agree that when I do choose wine, I usually go for the really cool ones.
• 21:20
  Kevin: Yeah, 100%.
• 21:21
  Kevin: There's nothing that disappoints me more than if you're looking at like a wine list, that I'm in at a restaurant and you order what it sounds like a fancy wine and it's expensive, and then it comes to the table and the label is like I was going to say, I was going to use a teenage term for what it is.
• 21:35
  Kevin: My kids say buns.
• 21:36
  Kevin: If it's buns, it's buns.
• 21:39
  Jordan: What does that mean?
• 21:40
  Kevin: Kind of like your rear end.
• 21:42
  Jordan: Oh, okay, on the wine label.
• 21:45
  Kevin: No, it's not literally buns, they just say that's a term they use for when something is not good.
• 21:50
  Jordan: Oh, gotcha, it's not good it stinks right.
• 21:54
  Kevin: It's a bummer, it's a disappointment.
• 21:55
  Jordan: I like the ones that are like really cool, like 19 Crimes has the coolest ones, I don't know.
• 22:04
  Jordan: Yeah, you can actually like hold your phone up to them and it'll be like Harry Potter style.
• 22:06
  Jordan: They'll actually start talking and stuff.
• 22:08
  Jordan: What did you do?
• 22:08
  Jordan: Yeah, did you know that?
• 22:09
  Jordan: No it is so cool.
• 22:11
  Alban: How many bottles of wine had you drank when this happened?
• 22:14
  Alban: They start talking to you.
• 22:18
  Alban: You're like I held my phone up and the wine bottle started talking.
• 22:23
  Jordan: It's really cool, I swear.
• 22:26
  Kevin: We'll check this out at Podcast Move.
• 22:27
  Kevin: We'll find one of these bottles, All right.
• 22:29
  Alban: Jordan.
• 22:29
  Alban: Please post an image of this in the chapter artwork of the wine bottle.
• 22:35
  Alban: But yeah, I think the point is well made that the right colors are going to match your tone.
• 22:41
  Alban: You're going to want to pick artwork that kind of hits the tone.
• 22:44
  Alban: It hits the images.
• 22:45
  Alban: Who's the audience?
• 22:47
  Alban: We got all.
• 22:47
  Alban: We're thinking about all that.
• 22:48
  Alban: But also, just go look at the category and don't do the exact same thing as everybody else, because the place this really matters is when someone says I want a business podcast, and then they go click on the business section and they scroll through and if everybody has super minimal orange artwork, you don't want to be another super minimal orange artwork.
• 23:09
  Alban: You want to be something that stands out and is a little bit different, so it catches people's eye.
• 23:14
  Alban: So it might be better to be different.
• 23:16
  Kevin: That can be challenging, so don't take.
• 23:18
  Kevin: What we're saying is that we have no empathy for the situation that we're trying to put you in, like business specifically, all of the artwork is that we have no empathy for the situation that we're trying to put you in.
• 23:28
  Kevin: Business specifically, all of the artwork is going to have a similar tone and vibe, because the first thing that we talked about was match the tone and vibe of your podcast.
• 23:30
  Kevin: Well, other people are probably doing that as well, and so when you go look at the business category, the majority of the titles of the podcasts that are written across the artwork are going to be in a sans serif block font.
• 23:40
  Kevin: It's going to be pretty businessy.
• 23:42
  Kevin: It's not going to have a lot of, you know, flair and poppy, beautiful colors and stuff like that, but there is still probably some opportunities to stand out while doing that.
• 23:52
  Kevin: So you do want to fit in, but at the same time, you know you, you want to.
• 23:56
  Kevin: I've got the worst analogies that pop into my head.
• 23:59
  Kevin: I don't know.
• 23:59
  Kevin: You want to go to a fancy wedding and everyone's going to be wearing fancy clothes.
• 24:03
  Kevin: You want to have a little flair.
• 24:04
  Kevin: You want to have a little pocket square with a little dash of color because everyone's wearing, you know, a dark suit, and then you throw a little orange pocket square in your blazer and all of a sudden there's you know who's that guy across the room.
• 24:16
  Alban: I'm so terrible.
• 24:17
  Alban: All right, there's somebody right now who went that's going to help me.
• 24:21
  Alban: Now I know what to do with my artwork.
• 24:22
  Alban: I want to be the cute guy at the wedding wearing a pocket square.
• 24:26
  Alban: That's right.
• 24:27
  Kevin: That's what we're aiming for Right Accessorize that podcast artwork.
• 24:31
  Alban: All right, let me bring us back down to earth for a second.
• 24:33
  Alban: What are the artwork sizes?
• 24:36
  Alban: What are the specs?
• 24:36
  Alban: Give me the facts.
• 24:38
  Jordan: Okay, so you need your classic square show artwork.
• 24:43
  Jordan: This is going to be 3000 by 3000 pixels, one-one ratio it's a perfect square and it's going to be in JPEG or PNG format with 72 DPI resolution, which sounds like a lot of jargon and nonsense, but there's honestly a lot of templates available online that you can draw from.
• 25:01
  Alban: The best being the Buzzsprout Canva integration.
• 25:04
  Jordan: Yes, it is.
• 25:05
  Alban: You know, the things we saw that were most common were if you get over like 500 kilobytes, you start running into some issues, and it just seems like every once in a while Apple will have a little bit of a problem ingesting the artwork, and so we always try to keep you below that number and you've really got to be an exact square.
• 25:23
  Alban: Almost every directory is going to throw a fit if it's not an exact square.
• 25:26
  Alban: So if you use the Buzzsprout Gamba integration, we will only let you create artwork that matches all these requirements, and so you don't really need to think about it.
• 25:35
  Alban: You just click, you pick one of them, that kind of look close, you change colors, you add different elements, make something you love, you click send to Buzzsprout, and you never have to think about file types, size, all the other things.
• 25:48
  Jordan: Which is so nice, and then you can also use that for episode artwork and this is the exact same specs as show artwork, but you want to tweak it for each episode.
• 25:58
  Jordan: Don't.
• 25:59
  Jordan: Don't use the episode artwork to like upload the exact same cover art every single time.
• 26:04
  Jordan: That's too much work.
• 26:05
  Jordan: When you put your cover artwork into Buzzsprout in your podcast info, that's going to populate for every single episode on every podcast player.
• 26:13
  Jordan: It's a one and done deal.
• 26:15
  Jordan: Now, if you have a reason to do episode artwork, a great example of this is actually from Jared from hey Chaplain, the police wellness podcast.
• 26:23
  Jordan: He sent us fantastic podcast artwork and it's the illusionist and this is a podcast I have heard of.
• 26:30
  Jordan: But when I was looking into this a little bit more, they actually use episode artwork in such a creative way.
• 26:36
  Jordan: So the illusionist it's about like words and stuff like that, and they have a classic boggle square as their cover artwork, which is really cute.
• 26:45
  Jordan: But then when you go into their individual episodes, they will use Boggle to write out the word, the word that the episode is like based around, and then they'll take a photo of it and because the Boggle game thing is like a perfect square, that's their episode artwork and I think it's so cool.
• 27:02
  Kevin: It is.
• 27:03
  Kevin: It's very creative.
• 27:04
  Jordan: Yeah.
• 27:04
  Alban: And it's probably pretty easy.
• 27:06
  Alban: They do a lot of work on each of these episodes and then they go and they pull out the boggle square and they write the word Valentine and they take a photo and that's the artwork and they're done.
• 27:16
  Jordan: Yeah.
• 27:16
  Alban: It's really nice because it's a consistent treatment and so it's very obvious like oh, that's an illusionist episode and it's a little bit different, and so you're going to get some nice episode artwork.
• 27:28
  Jordan: It's very like Wes Anderson coded.
• 27:29
  Jordan: Another thing that people use episode artwork for a lot is if you have a guest on and you want to put the guest headshot in the episode artwork, you can do that too, especially if you have like a template saved in Canva that you're going to access through Buzzsprout every time and then you can just like slap that headshot into the template and then they'll save as your episode artwork and it displays really nicely in the podcast apps, all right.
• 27:52
  Jordan: So there is actually a third podcast artwork type that we're going to touch on.
• 27:57
  Jordan: This is more advanced.
• 27:59
  Jordan: You don't have to do this, but it does create kind of like a cool professional sort of thing in certain podcast apps.
• 28:07
  Jordan: Basically, as of right now, the only podcast app that I believe supports this is Apple Podcasts, and that is the full page show art.
• 28:14
  Jordan: So this is different than that square cover art that you see when you're browsing podcasts.
• 28:19
  Jordan: This is like when you're browsing Apple Podcasts you click on, let's say, like code switch and you click on it and then it changes to this like full screen thing and it's.
• 28:28
  Jordan: It's really cool Cause it kind of fades into the episodes, is very professional.
• 28:32
  Jordan: You'll see this with all of the like professional podcasts and you can do this.
• 28:37
  Jordan: It is very difficult.
• 28:39
  Jordan: It has to be done in Photoshop, because they only accept PSD files, and it has to be like layered, and you have to submit it through their promotion form, which is such a weird way of doing it.
• 28:52
  Jordan: Yeah, so you have to apply for promotion in order to get your show page to all art, even if you don't want to be promoted on Apple podcasts.
• 28:59
  Jordan: It's very interesting how they do it.
• 29:01
  Kevin: Yeah, that can be confusing especially because they did add a lot of artwork requirements around podcast subscriptions and when you create a channel in podcast subscriptions they have a bunch of different formats for artwork that you can upload to make your channel stand out and then your specific podcast subscriptions within those channels.
• 29:21
  Alban: And so this is, if you thought there's a good chance, my show is going to be featured in Apple Podcasts new and noteworthy, so you want to go and create this artwork.
• 29:29
  Alban: But I mean, this is custom, this is something you're only going to make for Apple.
• 29:32
  Kevin: I think it has to be right.
• 29:34
  Kevin: Didn't Apple change the requirements that says you have to provide this if you want to be eligible to be featured?
• 29:38
  Alban: Yeah, or am I making that up?
• 29:45
  Alban: To me that's actually a way of saying we kind of want to put a little bit of a burden on the podcasters so that we don't get flooded with requests.
• 29:48
  Alban: You know, you have to put a little bit of effort into getting in.
• 29:52
  Jordan: They actually upped it even more, because now it's like you have to have the full page show art and then you also have to have what they call a hero image in order to be featured.
• 30:02
  Jordan: Yeah, there's a lot of hoops you have to jump through, and then, in addition, as you said, Kevin, with the like, the subscription artwork.
• 30:10
  Jordan: So really, if you wanted to like, just go crazy, you could create like six different kinds of cover art for your podcast.
• 30:15
  Alban: But if you're a podcaster, maybe the thing I'd say, 99% of that effort, let's put it on that main artwork, that one three thousand by three thousand show art, and then, if you want to go above that, maybe you make some for the episodes.
• 30:30
  Alban: Yeah, maybe, but the, the full show are.
• 30:33
  Alban: I mean it's cool.
• 30:34
  Alban: It's just, you don't want to add so many things that you don't do anything.
• 30:37
  Alban: You know you have so many other things going on.
• 30:40
  Alban: I would.
• 30:40
  Alban: This isn't where I would prioritize, unless you've got you know, we've got a $10,000 budget and we've got a team working on this show and I think Apple's actually going to pick it up.
• 30:49
  Alban: That's the only time I think I'd be building this out.
• 30:52
  Jordan: Absolutely so, john T, via fan mail.
• 30:55
  Jordan: I hope I said that right.
• 30:56
  Jordan: I'm so sorry if I did not say that.
• 30:58
  Jordan: Right Says is it possible to make any podcast artwork really stand out or just avoid being awful, and are there any noticeable trends in podcast artwork?
• 31:08
  Kevin: Yeah, I think there's definitely an opportunity to make podcast artwork really stand out, like.
• 31:13
  Kevin: I think the answer to that question is yes.
• 31:14
  Kevin: The question I put back at you is do you have the skills to do that and would that be life-giving for you to do?
• 31:21
  Kevin: Like, are you a graphic designer and do you really enjoy design and so you really want your podcast artwork to stand out?
• 31:28
  Kevin: Because, at the end of the day, it's probably not necessary Like the return on investment is going to be low in terms of just getting good, high quality artwork out there, versus really stand out the highest quality, the top 5% of artwork across all of the podcast ecosystem.
• 31:44
  Kevin: If you want to be in that, it better give you something just for you.
• 31:48
  Kevin: You're getting something out of that beyond it actually helping your show, because people don't really share podcasts just because it has amazing podcast cover artwork, just like you wouldn't listen to an album just because it has an amazing album cover.
• 32:00
  Alban: So Jonti asked if there's any notable trends in podcast artwork and I think I would just say these are the same trends that you're going to see in graphic design in general.
• 32:09
  Alban: A lot of artwork has gotten a little bit more simple because we're seeing it on small screens, medium screens, large screens and the best way to handle that is to kind of simplify the artwork, have fewer elements on it.
• 32:23
  Jordan: Yeah, I mean, I think that actually segues nicely into imagery.
• 32:27
  Jordan: If we want to talk about imagery and like those elements that you want to include, probably the most important rule of thumb here is to make sure that the image that you're using is high resolution and like, not pixelated.
• 32:38
  Jordan: Unless you're trying to go for, like a Minecraft sort of vibe and you know you want pixelated, that's fine, but otherwise you want to make sure that all the images you're using are high quality and high resolution.
• 32:52
  Kevin: Now this can be a bit of a challenge because we did mention earlier when we're talking about specs.
• 32:55
  Kevin: So one of the issues that you might run into is that we're talking about using high quality images so you don't get like pixelation or kind of noise in the final image.
• 33:06
  Kevin: That can be hard to do and also stay within the spec that we mentioned earlier of keeping the file size below 500 K.
• 33:12
  Kevin: So I would tell you that the 500 K thing is sort of something that we use as a troubleshooting step when you have an issue with your podcast artwork specifically not showing up in the Apple Podcast app, like the podcast artwork that we use for Buzzcast.
• 33:28
  Kevin: I do not believe that's under 500K, I think it's bigger than that.
• 33:31
  Kevin: We've never had an issue, so we've never had to troubleshoot it.
• 33:34
  Kevin: But if we did start having an issue, it's one of the things we would do is we would open that image up, we would choose a lower quality JPEG setting for that, try to compress it a little bit more to get it under 500K, then re-upload it and see if we can get Apple Podcasts to update.
• 33:47
  Kevin: So I think it's safe for you to start again, especially if you're using a photograph as part of your artwork.
• 33:53
  Kevin: They're notoriously hard to compress and so the file size is going to be bigger, and I think it's okay to start off with a file size that's a little bit over 500K if you need to to get the high quality image.
• 34:04
  Kevin: Most of the time you won't have any problems.
• 34:06
  Kevin: Most of the time that's going to go in just fine.
• 34:08
  Kevin: If you have a problem, you can always write our support team and then that's one of the troubleshooting steps that we might help you walk through is getting the image size a little bit smaller to see if we can get Apple Podcasts to update.
• 34:18
  Jordan: One of the things that I've used in the past is tiny PNG.
• 34:22
  Jordan: It's just this website with a cute little panda bear and you drop your PNG image in there and he'll compress it down for you into a smaller file size.
• 34:30
  Jordan: It's free, it's great, so that's a.
• 34:33
  Jordan: That's something that I've used many a time.
• 34:36
  Kevin: Yeah, it's a very helpful tool, yep.
• 34:38
  Jordan: Yeah.
• 34:38
  Alban: So one of the things we like to look at is we try to keep ourselves limited to like one main image.
• 34:44
  Alban: Yeah, One of the big mistakes we see are people who will post in, like the Facebook group.
• 34:49
  Alban: They're like, hey, which of these should I go with?
• 34:51
  Alban: And they're trying to do too many things in the artwork because they think of it as like this is my one canvas and I got to paint my masterpiece for all of my podcast listeners and really this is going to be a really small thing on their phone.
• 35:07
  Alban: It's going to be a medium thing on CarPlay.
• 35:09
  Alban: People are not going to see a ton of detail.
• 35:12
  Alban: And so really try to limit yourself to one main thing on the screen.
• 35:18
  Alban: So sometimes that's an image of you to host, maybe if you're like a celebrity.
• 35:24
  Alban: A couple examples we had here were Huberman Lab and Mel Robbins podcast, where if you know who the host of the show is and that's actually a draw, then maybe put them on the artwork.
• 35:37
  Alban: If people would not recognize the host specifically the audience you're trying to reach it's a good indicator you shouldn't be on it.
• 35:44
  Alban: So Kevin and I have never put ourselves on this show.
• 35:47
  Alban: Jordan's not on this show.
• 35:49
  Jordan: I'm not.
• 35:50
  Alban: We know if you saw us you wouldn't go.
• 35:53
  Kevin: oh, Kevin Finn got to make sure I listen to him, because you probably don't know what we look like very much yeah right Now, there is the case in which you want to start building your personal brand, so you may want to start speaking at conferences that are aligned with your category.
• 36:07
  Kevin: Whatever you're talking about, like realtors, for example, their image and likeness is a very big part of their brand to stand out in the realtor space.
• 36:14
  Kevin: They want people to get to know them personally.
• 36:16
  Kevin: If you have any sort of video component whether your audience is going to see you on a regular basis then that might be an exception.
• 36:23
  Kevin: You know you're not a celebrity, but your image is part of the brand you're starting you're trying to establish more so than like a logo, mark or certain typography, and so we're not saying don't ever do this or there's no opportunity to do it unless you're a celebrity, but just be intentional about it.
• 36:38
  Kevin: If you have a picture of yourself on there and I were to ask you why do you have a picture of yourself on there?
• 36:41
  Kevin: And I were to ask you why do you have a picture of yourself on your podcast artwork, you know have an answer like oh, I've thought about this and I want to.
• 36:47
  Kevin: X, y, z.
• 36:48
  Jordan: And there's some people that will say you know what I actually love when hosts have their photos on their cover artwork, because it's like I know who it is.
• 36:56
  Jordan: That's talking on the other end and that's totally fine.
• 36:59
  Jordan: But that's also why we have host images for podcasts.
• 37:02
  Jordan: I definitely would be mindful that if the topic of your podcast doesn't really like lend to having a host photo.
• 37:08
  Jordan: So someone I think of is Brian from the support team.
• 37:13
  Jordan: He has a Denver Nuggets podcast, the basketball team and if he just had like a picture of himself like arms crossed on the cover, I don't know if that would be like a huge draw for people, but if they recognized the imagery of that team then maybe they would be more prone to click on the cover art.
• 37:32
  Alban: Yeah, you really want to imagine who's the audience and I want the audience to see oh, this is something made for me.
• 37:39
  Alban: I want them to get that feeling instantly.
• 37:41
  Alban: Maybe a good example would be somebody one of you posted Land of the Giants the artwork they make.
• 37:47
  Alban: Land of the Giants, they do a whole season about one tech company, and so the two examples we have here are the season they did about Twitter.
• 37:57
  Alban: It was called the Twitter Fantasy and it's like a birdcage and the birdcage is open and it's really plain, and then there's a little like text bubble birdcage.
• 38:04
  Alban: And the birdcage is open and it's really plain.
• 38:04
  Alban: And then there's a little like text bubble as the bottom of the birdcage and so it's like the bird got out of the cage.
• 38:11
  Alban: It's also about chatting and it just kind of makes I see it and I go oh, it's kind of a cute play on Twitter.
• 38:18
  Jordan: It's also Twitter blue and it's Twitter blue yeah.
• 38:21
  Jordan: Yeah.
• 38:22
  Alban: And then there was another one about Disney and the Disney dilemma, which was about, like, the business model of Disney, how they kind of went through changing business models, I believe, and it's like a hedge maze.
• 38:34
  Alban: Inside the hedge maze is the shape of the of the Mickey Mouse ears, and off in the distance is the castle at Disney World.
• 38:43
  Alban: Yeah it's just a single image that kind of conveys all of this at once.
• 38:48
  Alban: I see that castle.
• 38:49
  Alban: I know where that castle is.
• 38:50
  Alban: It's down in Orlando, florida.
• 38:52
  Alban: It's a dilemma.
• 38:53
  Alban: I see the hedge maze.
• 38:55
  Alban: That feels like Disney.
• 38:56
  Alban: It reminds me of some of the Disney things.
• 38:58
  Alban: I see the ears.
• 38:59
  Alban: I know what character has those ears.
• 39:01
  Alban: It's just like as soon as you see it, it stands out.
• 39:04
  Alban: I know what this is about.
• 39:06
  Alban: Even before I read that subtitle the Disney Dilemma I know it's going to be about Walt Disney Corporation.
• 39:13
  Jordan: You know what's so clever about this too, though If you look at it like, if you really look at it close, it's actually not the castle at Disney World that you see.
• 39:21
  Jordan: It's not Cinderella's castle, it's actually a completely different castle, but they've made this in such a way that you can look at it and know exactly what it is.
• 39:29
  Jordan: I don't know if it's like the colors that they use or what it is, and then the hedge maze, like the Disney Mickey Mouse icon, is not exactly, it's just it's like slightly different.
• 39:41
  Jordan: So they're not going to get in trouble for using, like you know, trademarked or copyrighted imagery, but it's just enough that you know exactly what it is that they're referring to.
• 39:50
  Jordan: Yep, another thing that you could use instead of imagery is large typography or like a logo.
• 39:58
  Jordan: Some podcasts, I think, do this really really well in conveying what the podcast is about, or even the, I want to say, vibe of the podcast is Payne Lindsay's High Strange.
• 40:10
  Jordan: I look at this and it's not a UFO, but I know it's about like UFOs, right, like it's not actually.
• 40:18
  Kevin: I was thinking it gave me like roller skating vibes for some reason.
• 40:21
  Jordan: Oh yeah, see, that's really cool.
• 40:23
  Alban: I was thinking like VHS recordings, like something was recorded on a VHS tape, yeah, but this, this cover art, that's really cool.
• 40:27
  Jordan: I was thinking like VHS recordings like something was recorded on a VHS tape, yeah, but this cover art it's just got this like really it's a dark cover but it has this really bright, almost retro typography that just like really stands out.
• 40:37
  Jordan: And then, of course, you're Wrong About.
• 40:39
  Jordan: It has very simple artwork and it's just really big letters and you can just tell what it is.
• 40:45
  Kevin: Yeah, and there's another very popular podcast that just uses large typography.
• 40:56
  Alban: What podcast is that?
• 40:56
  Alban: That's Buzzcast.
• 40:56
  Alban: That's true.
• 40:57
  Alban: The Buzzcast artwork was Kevin.
• 40:57
  Alban: You just one day started making it right.
• 40:59
  Alban: You were like, oh, this is fun, this would be like a cool little project.
• 41:03
  Kevin: And you made it and you're like this looks good this could be the name of our podcast, right, it was actually like a design experiment.
• 41:13
  Kevin: So I do have a bit of a background in design work and I wanted to challenge myself.
• 41:15
  Kevin: One of the weaker areas of my design background is typography, and so it was just me challenging myself to do a large typographic logo for Buzzcast, and that's where I ended up.
• 41:24
  Alban: I love it, that's cool, I didn't know that were buzzcast, and that's where I ended up.
• 41:27
  Alban: I love it.
• 41:27
  Alban: That's cool.
• 41:28
  Alban: I didn't know that.
• 41:29
  Alban: One of the big mistakes we see is when people have one chance.
• 41:35
  Alban: You know you've got one piece of imagery you can put on this artwork, and the thing people put on is a microphone and some headphones.
• 41:40
  Alban: And the reason they do that is because they think in their mind well, it's a podcast.
• 41:45
  Alban: I record the podcast with a microphone, people listen to it with their headphones.
• 41:49
  Alban: Boom, now everyone's going to know it's a podcast.
• 41:52
  Jordan: Yeah.
• 41:53
  Alban: But it's logical.
• 41:54
  Alban: That would be like and I actually made this.
• 41:57
  Alban: Maybe we can get this image in there, oh, a thousand percent.
• 42:00
  Alban: Imagine a movie poster and I think I did bad boys too and I was like, imagine if bad boys too, instead of having the explosion with Martin Lawrence and Will Smith like in the foreground, explosion behind them and they're holding guns, instead of that you've got like cameras and DVDs, cause like that's how they filmed it.
• 42:19
  Alban: They filmed it with a camera and you know you watched it on a DVD and so like that would be really bad movie poster artwork, because the movie poster is supposed to show you what the movie is going to be about, get you excited, and the one thing people know when they see your podcast artwork is if I listen to it, it probably will be with headphones and I really hope you used a microphone when you recorded it.
• 42:42
  Alban: They know that.
• 42:42
  Alban: They know it's a podcast.
• 42:43
  Alban: Yeah, so use this one space to convey a message about what subject matter is.
• 42:50
  Alban: Unless you are like talking about the podcasting industry or you're talking about microphones, you probably shouldn't have the microphone be on there.
• 42:59
  Alban: Just in the same way, a camera isn't often going to be on the movie poster.
• 43:04
  Jordan: Yeah, and some other things that you might want to avoid when you're creating your podcast.
• 43:09
  Jordan: Cover art is explicit language and images.
• 43:11
  Jordan: Don't have anything inappropriate on it because it'll get reported and get taken down.
• 43:16
  Jordan: Also, like what Land of the Giants does, you don't want to have copyrighted logos or characters.
• 43:22
  Jordan: So, for example, if your podcast is about Star Wars, maybe don't put the Star Wars logo on your podcast cover art.
• 43:30
  Jordan: Maybe do something that like shows that it's Star Wars-esque.
• 43:34
  Jordan: Another thing that Alvin had touched on earlier, which I fully agree on, is marketing or promotional content.
• 43:41
  Jordan: So this is like when people have like the banner, like listen on your favorite podcast app, or they have like social handles and little like icons and tags all over.
• 43:50
  Jordan: I've seen a lot of people have cover art where they put the listen on Apple podcast, listen on Spotify, on the bottom of the cover art, which is really funny.
• 43:59
  Alban: Because the only place people are seeing the place they're probably seeing this is in Apple podcasts.
• 44:03
  Jordan: Yeah.
• 44:04
  Alban: They know they can listen to it right here.
• 44:06
  Jordan: They're aware.
• 44:07
  Jordan: So yeah, try to avoid that, because that can really clutter your podcast artwork and detract from the message you're trying to convey.
• 44:15
  Kevin: There are a lot of things that will be important to you as a podcast creator, that are more important to you than they will be to your audience.
• 44:22
  Kevin: So one of the things that we've done in the past is we've taken this, we've talked about on the show.
• 44:27
  Kevin: We took this laser engraver to Podfest in Orlando and we made people key chains for their podcasts and so on the front of the key chain we inscribed something around like the name of their podcast and we tried to use elements from their podcast cover art and on the back we did a QR code.
• 44:41
  Kevin: I just did another one of these for Brian, who Jordan mentioned earlier in the office.
• 44:47
  Kevin: He has a podcast called Fandom From Afar and his podcast artwork is a map of the US and it has like the Denver Nuggets logo about where Denver is and he has like a little arrow that points over to Jacksonville, which is where he lives, and that's what his podcast is about.
• 45:01
  Kevin: It's like being a fan of a sports team when you don't live in the city of the sports team and his fandom from afar happens to be Denver Nuggets.
• 45:08
  Kevin: But I think he also talks about the topic more generally, like how do we be good fans if we don't live in the city and can't support them locally by going to the sporting events.
• 45:16
  Kevin: So I understand the concept.
• 45:18
  Kevin: But Brian just asked me to do a key chain for him because he saw that we did them at the conferences and he's like, hey, I wasn't at the conference, can you do a key chain for me?
• 45:24
  Kevin: And so what I had to do was try to figure out how to simplify that to fit on a key chain.
• 45:28
  Kevin: And again, I do this for lots of people at the conference and what I do is I take the main idea, and the main idea is that man, you live in Florida and you're a Denver Nuggets fan, and so I, instead of the whole United States, I just took an outline of Florida and instead of like showing Denver Nuggets, like we know that they're in the Denver area and you live in Jacksonville, I just stuck the Denver Nuggets logo like over the Florida map in the Jacksonville area, and then I wrote fandom from afar and his typeface and did it on the key chain.
• 45:55
  Kevin: I gave it to him, and I always wonder how people are going to react to this when I modify their artwork.
• 46:02
  Kevin: But when modifying it, I actually have to simplify it quite a bit to make it work on these key chains and, just like many of the people at the podcast conference who are like, oh, I love this, it's so great.
• 46:10
  Kevin: And really, what did I do to your artwork is all I did was simplify it.
• 46:14
  Kevin: I just took the core idea and I got rid of everything else.
• 46:17
  Kevin: That didn't matter.
• 46:18
  Jordan: Yeah.
• 46:18
  Kevin: One of the things that we've just done for Buzzsprout in the last year is we made these widgets for your phone iOS lock screen widgets and home screen widgets for iOS and Android.
• 46:27
  Kevin: If you have the Buzzsprout app, you can see some of these things.
• 46:29
  Kevin: I love this design exercise because it's so constrained.
• 46:33
  Kevin: You really have to go through this process of just saying, like, what is the absolute core of what you're trying to communicate as simply and as beautifully as possible.
• 46:41
  Kevin: Just stick to that, Nothing superfluous.
• 46:43
  Kevin: So anything else, anything that you can remove from the design, remove from the design and you end up with a much higher quality design at the end of the day.
• 46:50
  Kevin: And so, as you're talking about things not to put in there, don't feel like that's a like constraint is like in a bad sense, like really the most beautiful, highest quality design usually has one of these characteristics in common, and that is that they are simple and that they are not.
• 47:08
  Kevin: They don't have all these extra embellishments everywhere, that they have a clear concept.
• 47:13
  Kevin: They execute on that perfectly well, and then they have the discipline to not add beyond that.
• 47:19
  Alban: Jack Dorsey from Twitter had a quote that was something like the way to nail a design or nail product is to limit the number of elements and then make every one of those elements perfect.
• 47:32
  Alban: Yeah, and it really is true.
• 47:34
  Alban: Like just take out almost everything and then the last few things you have, do the best job you can with, like the one picture, the one little phrase, the very few elements that are on this artwork, because really that's all.
• 47:47
  Alban: You only get one little bit of a chance and then make it as good as possible and then move on.
• 47:52
  Alban: And then when you have like three, four concepts kind of clashing, the real message people get is none of the messages get through.
• 47:59
  Alban: You know, it's just kind of confusing and people look at the next image.
• 48:03
  Jordan: Yeah.
• 48:04
  Alban: I guess that kind of takes me to the text, the rule of thumb I've had for text.
• 48:08
  Alban: I just tell people like you want like five, seven words max.
• 48:12
  Alban: Best would be even fewer and we're trying to do one, maybe two fonts and we're trying to make it really bold and easy to read.
• 48:23
  Alban: But we're limiting.
• 48:25
  Alban: Everybody has the desire to get like the title and a subtitle and something else on there and the name of the host.
• 48:34
  Alban: The more you have, the more cramped everything gets, the more expertise you're going to need in making it all kind of fit together.
• 48:43
  Jordan: Yeah Well, and also think about like I mean that kind of goes into the actual act of titling your podcast, because you want your podcast title to be something that people can easily say like oh, have you listened to this recently?
• 48:56
  Jordan: If you have like a 10 word title, they're going to be like it's something like oh gosh, how's that go?
• 49:03
  Jordan: And so it'll be harder for listeners to even share your podcast too.
• 49:08
  Alban: Yeah, I mean, one of the big mistakes I see a lot, and we may even have fallen into this a little bit is making a pun in your podcast name.
• 49:16
  Jordan: Oh yeah.
• 49:16
  Alban: Because then it's going to just become so hard for people to remember exactly how to spell it or how to find it.
• 49:22
  Jordan: Yeah.
• 49:23
  Alban: And findability is more important than searchability, Like if people know what your show is and they can't find it.
• 49:29
  Alban: That's when it's, that's when you know you're in trouble.
• 49:31
  Jordan: Yeah, and another thing that will help with like choosing what text and what font you want to use for your podcast is just to make sure that you don't use more than two fonts.
• 49:44
  Jordan: That's usually a good rule of thumb.
• 49:45
  Jordan: It, like some of the other things that we've said.
• 49:48
  Jordan: This is not like the end all be all If you have.
• 49:51
  Jordan: I've seen some really cool podcast cover art where, like, each letter is like a different font and it's like really cool and mysterious looking.
• 49:59
  Jordan: That's fine, that's awesome.
• 50:01
  Alban: Like a ransom note.
• 50:02
  Jordan: Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly Like a ransom note, and that that's fine if that's the kind of like design you're going for, where it's a little bit like you know whatever sort of ransom notey.
• 50:12
  Jordan: But generally you'll want to just stick to like two fonts, just because it really simplifies things and it's easier for people to read yeah, that's great advice.
• 50:21
  Kevin: I there's very few designs, especially of this scale, that will benefit by having more than two fonts, and I would say the majority of them can get by with one or at least one family.
• 50:30
  Kevin: So if you're using, like the popular Apple font is San Francisco, like they have the seven or eight different main variations in that family, so you might use a thin version and a bolder version, or a normal version and a heavy version and and version and an italicized version or something like that, and then you know that these fonts are going to complement each other instead of sort of fight against each other, especially if you're not an expert in typography.
• 50:54
  Kevin: So sticking within the same family.
• 50:56
  Kevin: Oftentimes it is tempting for people who don't have a lot of design skills to do some sort of like a slab font for the title of the podcast, and then they want to write their name, but they want to do that like scripty, because it's a name, so a name should be scripty, and they, you know, they go grab their brush script font and it's just becomes illegible at small sizes.
• 51:16
  Kevin: Again, it's best to stay in your lane.
• 51:18
  Kevin: I don't think that people are claiming to be great graphic designers.
• 51:22
  Kevin: They probably know the constraints, and so I think the best tips that we can give you are how to operate safely within the skillset that you have.
• 51:29
  Kevin: Again, I don't want to talk down to any designers who happen to be listening.
• 51:33
  Kevin: If you know your fonts and you've studied typography, then have at it, and I'm not speaking to you, but if you don't, then I would say, at least for starters, pick a font or at a minimum, a family, and just use that one font for your main design and then, when you're done and you're looking at it, if you feel like it's just missing something extra, then maybe you can experiment with introducing a second font.
• 51:54
  Kevin: But I don't think in most cases it's necessary.
• 51:56
  Jordan: Well, if you struggle with pairing up fonts, if you Google like good font pairings, there are plenty of design bloggers that have dedicated their time and expertise to creating lists or databases of like what fonts go well together.
• 52:12
  Jordan: I mean even Canva.
• 52:14
  Jordan: You know, we talked about the Buzzsprout Canva integration.
• 52:16
  Jordan: Canva actually has a section of fonts that go well together and so you can click that and you can easily see what pairings complement each other Right, and that helps a lot too.
• 52:27
  Alban: So yeah, it's a very good tip.
• 52:29
  Alban: We've alluded to this now a lot with the artwork and the typography and everything that you really are designing for a variety of sizes, and so I want to highlight a tool that we really like Only Pods has podcast cover art size preview.
• 52:46
  Alban: So you upload your artwork and then they'll show you like hey, here's what it looks like in Apple podcasts and Spotify and this other app and on car play, and you just get a little bit of a feel for what it's going to look like in all these different areas and often that will help highlight areas that you're strong or areas that you might be struggling.
• 53:05
  Jordan: Yeah, that's a.
• 53:06
  Jordan: That's a tool that I've shared with so many people.
• 53:09
  Jordan: When they ask me you know like I'm struggling with testing out my podcast, do you think this is going to be readable in, like the Apple podcast app and things like that, I'm like, oh yeah, just slap it in this website and then you can see how it's going to look and everything.
• 53:22
  Jordan: And it really helps when you're creating to just kind of like adjust if you realize that maybe your font's so thin that it's illegible on a small thumbnail.
• 53:32
  Alban: All right.
• 53:32
  Alban: We got a fan mail message from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and they reached out and they said they're about to launch their podcast on soccer for fans and parents of young soccer players and they wanted to get some advice on their cover art.
• 53:45
  Alban: I'd say if you want good advice on specific cover art, best place to do that would be to go to our Reddit or subreddit or maybe our Facebook group and just start a thread asking people for feedback.
• 54:00
  Alban: It's really nice to get feedback from more than just a couple of people.
• 54:03
  Alban: It might be hard for us to do that on the podcast, so I'd point you to one of those two and we will be happy to chime in when you do.
• 54:10
  Jordan: Yeah, all right.
• 54:11
  Jordan: And so to wrap up our cover art episode, where can people create cover art, like when they're getting started?
• 54:20
  Jordan: What softwares do we want to point them to?
• 54:23
  Alban: I would say I'd go one of three places.
• 54:25
  Alban: No-transcript.
• 54:55
  Alban: I don't want to point you to any specific tool, but if you are brand new and you want to do this yourself a hundred percent, use the Buzzsprout Canva integration.
• 55:04
  Jordan: Yeah.
• 55:10
  Alban: I feel like we have not promoted this as much as we probably should, because it's such a good integration that we can set all the parameters.
• 55:13
  Alban: We're getting exactly the right specifications.
• 55:16
  Alban: Canva thrives in making design easy for people because it's templatized, that.
• 55:22
  Alban: They're going to give you a bunch of templates.
• 55:23
  Alban: You're going to find one that is close.
• 55:25
  Alban: You're going to change the colors.
• 55:26
  Alban: You're going to add you a bunch of templates.
• 55:27
  Alban: You're going to find one that is close.
• 55:27
  Alban: You're going to change the colors.
• 55:27
  Alban: You're going to add an image, but it's all going to work together.
• 55:30
  Alban: You're only changing a few variables to get something unique.
• 55:33
  Alban: And then it comes back to Buzzsprout, all ready to go.
• 55:36
  Alban: If you don't want to spend money and you're not already using some design software that you personally love, I would say almost everybody should be using the Buzzsprout Canva integration.
• 55:48
  Jordan: Yeah, I agree, all right.
• 55:49
  Jordan: Well, I am really excited that we got to talk about cover artwork.
• 55:53
  Jordan: It's been a while.
• 55:54
  Jordan: There's been a lot of new artwork rules and things like that that have come into the podcasting ecosystem, so I think that this was long overdue and hopefully it helps everyone create their podcast artwork, episode artwork, chapter artwork, whatever you want to do, all right.
• 56:09
  Jordan: So for our next main episode, I want to talk about coming up with ideas for your episode.
• 56:15
  Jordan: I know that we talk a lot about, you know, keep podcasting, and that can seem really daunting when you kind of like zoom out to like a macro view of your podcast and you realize, like I have to create 70 episodes.
• 56:26
  Jordan: I'm gonna run out of ideas if I have to create 70 episodes.
• 56:29
  Jordan: So I think it would be really fun to talk about, like how to keep these ideas going for your podcast, to make sure that you keep podcasting, make sure that you stay on top of, like your content calendar and tools that will help with that.
• 56:44
  Jordan: So if any of our listeners have any tips on you know, how they come up with ideas for their podcast or tools that they use when content planning, I would love if you would just tap the Texas Show link in the show notes and send those our way so that I can plan the next episode.
• 57:00
  Jordan: As always, thank you all for listening and keep podcasting.
• 57:08
  Kevin: What generation am I?
• 57:09
  Kevin: Do you guys know?
• 57:10
  Kevin: Like, am I a Gen X?
• 57:12
  Kevin: I think you're Gen X.
• 57:13
  Kevin: I think I'm a Gen X too.
• 57:14
  Kevin: It's like a child of the 80s.
• 57:16
  Jordan: We're Gen X, you're like you might be a cusper.
• 57:19
  Alban: Wait, are you born in?
• 57:20
  Kevin: 79 or 80?
• 57:21
  Kevin: Neither, but I don't want to say when I was born, because I'll have my identity stolen.
• 57:24
  Kevin: So what generation is it the people who are afraid of getting their identity stolen?
• 57:32
  Alban: Boomers?
• 57:32
  Alban: Definitely not like my kids.
• 57:33
  Alban: My kids are not afraid of it at all.
• 57:34
  Alban: They put all their information everywhere.
• 57:35
  Alban: You're not a boomer.
• 57:35
  Alban: I think you're Gen X.
• 57:36
  Alban: I think you're safely inside of Gen X.
• 57:38
  Jordan: Kevin, you'll be fine as long as you just like, copy and paste the message in Facebook that you don't give them permission.
• 57:45
  Kevin: I know not to do it, but I will say I'm the generation that would be tempted to do that.
• 57:49
  Kevin: Yeah, you do not have the rights to use my photographs Facebook, all right.
• 57:54
  Kevin: So that generation, uh, we had a rough week.
• 57:57
  Kevin: Oh, you know, we had some people who were big, like when I was growing up.
• 58:01
  Kevin: We just had three of them pass away in the last week we had you know, ozzy Osbourne, hulk Hogan and Malcolm Jamal Warner.
• 58:08
  Jordan: Yeah.
• 58:09
  Kevin: And Sam, what's his name?
• 58:11
  Kevin: Sandberg baseball guy.
• 58:12
  Kevin: Oh, ryan Sandberg, ryan Sandberg, yeah, yeah, so it's been a heavy week.
• 58:16
  Kevin: Really hard and I will say, in varying degrees.
• 58:19
  Kevin: Was I, like you know, huge fans of that?
• 58:21
  Kevin: I wasn't, but they, I have distinct memories when I think of actually four of them, including Ryan Sandberg, any four of them, like there are memories I have as growing up and like watching them, you know, play baseball or whatever.
• 58:33
  Kevin: It used to be WWF I know they changed it to WWE, but like Hulk.
• 58:36
  Kevin: Hogan was like huge when we were in the eighties.
• 58:40
  Jordan: The.
• 58:40
  Kevin: Cosby show again.
• 58:41
  Kevin: Sorry, controversial show I understand, but Malcolm Jamal Warner, like he's a huge, like famous person and Ozzy Osbourne like all the controversy of Ozzy did something crazy at this concert again last, like I don't know.
• 58:54
  Kevin: I guess what I'm saying is like did it hit you guys in the same way or are you like, nah, it wasn't.
• 58:58
  Kevin: Didn't really have memories of those people.
• 59:00
  Alban: The one that really did was Ryan Sandberg actually.
• 59:03
  Alban: Yeah, because he was the first good baseball player that I had their card.
• 59:08
  Alban: Yeah, when I was a kid, I remember being in my friend's house and I was, you know, five years old or something and he's going through his baseball cards and he was like, oh, that's a good one here and he gave it to me.
• 59:18
  Alban: It was Ryan Sandberg and I still remember it and I had it forever.
• 59:23
  Alban: And then I want to say, like two days before he passed, I was at a garage sale and they had a bunch of baseball cards and I flipped open the book and I saw a Ryan Sandberg card and I remembered, like with my friends trading cards, and I was like, man, I wonder what he's up to.
• 59:38
  Alban: And yeah, I just thought of him.
• 59:40
  Alban: And then it was like two days later I saw that he passed and he wasn't all that old.
• 59:44
  Alban: No, yeah, wow, it is sad.
• 59:47
  Alban: It kind of surprises me how sad I can feel sometimes seeing even celebrities that I didn't have many fond memories of, just realizing.
• 59:55
  Alban: You know, that's not just a loss for that person but there's family and friends that really knew and cared for them deeply.
• 1:00:02
  Jordan: Yeah, I think for me Ozzy was really tough because my mom was like a huge fan of Black Sabbath when I was growing up and then we watched the Osbournes obviously in the early aughts Like that was the best show on television.
• 1:00:16
  Jordan: It was so funny and we really fell in love with that whole family.
• 1:00:19
  Jordan: And now obviously Kelly has gone on to do amazing things and his son, jack Osborne, has this awesome production company and he would pull in Sharon and Ozzy for a lot of like his paranormal investigation shows and it was so funny because Ozzy wants nothing to do with any of it, even though he's like the Prince of Darkness, and it was hilarious.
• 1:00:40
  Jordan: And so I just have like such like a warm spot in my heart for that family.
• 1:00:45
  Jordan: And I think Ozzy was really tough for me because I've even recently been watching a lot of the shows that he's been in and, yeah, he's just so sweet.
• 1:00:55
  Alban: I think that's actually what made him so endearing was the.
• 1:00:57
  Alban: I was too young for Black Sabbath but when the Osbournes came out and you're like this is the guy who was just like wild and was playing all this like satanic music and biting the head off of a bat and all this stuff, and then he realized he's like trying to be a good dad and it was like, yeah, we actually did too many drugs, we did too much, we drank too much.
• 1:01:21
  Alban: You know better, be better now.
• 1:01:23
  Jordan: Chasing the cats around the house.
• 1:01:25
  Jordan: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:01:26
  Kevin: Yeah, I yeah.
• 1:01:28
  Kevin: I don't know.
• 1:01:29
  Kevin: Maybe I'm just getting to a certain age where it's like you have just memories of these celebrities who were part of I don't know core childhood memories, like growing up and just listening to music or watching certain things on TV that these people were a part of.
• 1:01:41
  Kevin: And then they are just gone and it just feels like they were just like larger than life.
• 1:01:45
  Kevin: They could never be gone, and it just makes you, like I don't know, wrestle with your own humanity a little bit Like time marches on.
• 1:01:51
  Kevin: Nobody lasts forever.
• 1:01:52
  Kevin: Anyway, rough week for whatever generation I am, but it's good to hear that you guys can at least.
• 1:01:57
  Jordan: We're struggling with you.
• 1:01:58
  Kevin: You can struggle with me.
• 1:01:59
  Jordan: Yeah, we're in it with you.
• 1:02:01
  Kevin: Yeah, so for anybody who lost a hero or just whatever, yeah, you're not alone, thank you.