How I make my own art for my Spotify playlists and why I love it
Key things
- Using a combination of text, images, backgrounds and stickers, you can easily create your own Spotify playlist artwork.
- Always try to let the style and mood of your playlist inspire your own cover art.
- Less is more, so avoid cluttering your cover with too many elements for a cleaner look.
Creating and editing Spotify playlists can be great fun, and I’ve spent hours tweaking playlists. However, the artwork that accompanies your playlists has always been a bit overwhelming, as Spotify only uses artwork of the four featured tracks. Well, until now.
Now you can create custom artwork for all your Spotify playlists. With different background colors and gradients, text overlays, stickers and effects to choose from. This means you can put the final look into any Spotify playlist you create.
How to create custom artwork for your Spotify playlists
It’s very easy to start creating custom artwork for your Spotify playlists. It’s more difficult to understand the tool so you can use it to the best of your ability (and get the best results).
To create your own artwork for a Spotify playlist, first either go to a playlist you’ve already created or create a new one. Then tap on hamburger menu (three vertical dots) open the context menu and tap on Create Cover > Create Cover. The feature is in beta, so you may not see it in your app yet.
If you have access to this feature, you’ll see a simple skin with the name of the playlist and a bunch of options underneath. The main options are Text, Image, Backgroundand Stickers.
- Text allows you to add text that will appear on your drawing. You can change the position, style, color and effects.
- Image allows you to add an image for use in a playlist. You can change the location and add a mask and/or effects.
- Background allows you to change colors, add or remove colors, and change the gradient.
- Stickers allows you to add one or more stickers. You can change the size, position, and whether it is in front of or behind other layers.
The key is to experiment with all available options, as a combination of all of the above can lead to satisfactory results. I just did that and created some satisfying artwork of my own. Although, it all had to fit Spotify’s aesthetic, which it calls Spotify Mix.
It should be noted that you can even create custom cover art for playlists created with Spotify’s AI playlist tool.
How to get good results from Spotify’s artwork feature
To write this article, I chose four of my Spotify playlists to create custom artwork for, and here’s what I learned…
Let the style or mood of your playlist inspire your cover. This may sound obvious to some, but think about what events your playlist will be played at or what mood it is intended to create. For me, this was most evident with my “Halloween Party” playlists full of spooky tunes. Purple and black stripes predominate, complete with fire stickers and a spooky character.
Currently there are not enough stickers to choose from, there are only 40 different stickers available. This is simply not enough to cover the wide range of genres, moods, activities and events for which you can create playlists. This became apparent when I was creating the cover for my “Birthday Party” playlist to celebrate two people’s birthdays. Decade names or even individual years would be welcome.
Sometimes less is more, so don’t add too many elements. Your instinct may be to cram a lot of different elements into your cover art, but in reality, depending on the subject of the playlist, fewer elements may work better. The best example of this is the cover of my playlist “Road Trip” with a gray background suggesting a road and two cars passing around the title of the playlist like an orb.
Check out other people’s playlist covers for inspiration. You can start with the custom playlists Spotify creates, as they follow the same aesthetic. There are also some good examples in this Spotify Newsroom post. I’m really not happy with the cover I made for my “Christmas Hits” playlist, but I included it below to give a bad example of my own cover.
Why I love making my own artwork for Spotify playlists
While Spotify’s custom cover maker won’t change your world, it’s a lot of fun. In fact, I personally find it quite addicting and will definitely be making my own cover art for my remaining playlists over the next few days and weeks.
Since you’ve created these unique playlists from scratch and potentially spent hours tweaking them to fit the mood or soundtrack of the event, creating a cover for them seems like the perfect endpoint. And it’s also a great way to stretch your creative muscles.