Build square cover art in the Cover Art & Canvas Studio — a layer-based editor with animated backgrounds and one-click templates — and export a high-resolution PNG.
Before you start
Cover art is often seen tiny — a couple of centimeters in a phone library — so it has to read at thumbnail size. The Cover Art & Canvas Studio builds one in your browser for free, with nothing uploaded and nothing saved to a server.
On the /albums page, the Start a new cover panel asks for a Title and Artist (these pre-fill the text layers) and a Format toggle. Choose Square cover (1:1) for streaming art. If you already have finished artwork, add it in the optional cover-image upload — it drops into the editor as an image layer you can position and blend. Click Open editor to enter the Studio.
The Studio is a layer editor with up to five layers of four types — background, text, shape, image. The background layer is where motion comes from: it has Solid, Gradient, Image and Visualizer modes (Visualizer runs a real engine behind your art, driven by a synthetic beat, so it animates with no audio at all). If you would rather not start from scratch, the Templates grid applies a complete look in one click — 19 presets like Deep Neon, Visualizer Canvas, Sunset Vibes, Matrix Code and EDM Geometric — with every layer still editable afterward.
On a cover, the artist and title are the message. Give them a clear hierarchy — one dominant, one secondary — and choose a font with enough weight to survive scaling. Text layers get font, size, color, shadow, outline, position, opacity and rotation. Resist crowding; negative space reads as confidence.
The Export Size dropdown offers 1:1 Square (3000×3000), Spotify Canvas (1080×1920), Bandcamp Cover (3000×3000), SoundCloud Header (2480×520) and YouTube Thumbnail (1280×720). Pick 3000×3000 and click Export PNG for a lossless file (or Export JPEG for a smaller one) — 3000×3000 matches what most distributors recommend for streaming cover art.
One design, two formats
Build the square cover first, export it, then click Start over, switch to Vertical Canvas, and rebuild with the same colors and fonts — or upload the exported cover as the image layer so your Canvas loop animates around your artwork. Next: Make a Spotify Canvas Loop.
Ready to try it?
Open the editor and follow along — free, no account, watermark-free exports.
Open the Editor