Saffron | A Graphics Shopfolio & Tutorials

basics

This is literally what everyone needs to know when they start designing on wattpad. I would have found it so useful if I'd known this when I first started designing.

Dimensions
The Wattpad cover size is 512 x 800 or something of the same ratio. Seriously guys, I see square covers too much, and the worst part is they're sometimes a really nice design too. So learn the dimensions.

Formats
Save your graphics in png format. Always. It means it will have higher quality than jpeg, and that can make all the difference between a good and a bad graphic.

Apps/software
Don't use the actual Wattpad cover app, desygner or whatever it's called. It's not good. If you're sticking to mobile, I recommend ibispaint x and pixelab. They do a lot of things that you can do on photoshop and are free. I wouldn't recommend Canva just because there's very little ability to do much beyond slap text on an image. PicsArt is... I mean I've seen people do amazing things with picsart but it doesn't preserve layers and I don't know why you'd choose to use it when there's better, free apps, y'know?

If you're on a computer, I recommend pixlr x and e (the desktop version, not the app). They have a lot of features similar to photoshop and I found it was a great stepping stone to figure out whether I was serious about designing and wanted to pay for photoshop. I've also heard of gimp and photopea being quite good, but I don't know because I've never used them. Then, of course, there's photoshop, if you're willing to pay the money.

Resources
For models: go on deviantart and search up faestock. At first, I always thought you had to pay for faestock's stuff, but that's only because the first things that come up are paid things. If you actually go to their profile, there's tons of free stock images. Or you can just search up on DA 'model stock' or something similar.

For backgrounds: search up 'background stock' on deviantart. You can also find great, high res images on sites such as unsplash, pixabay and pexels which are royalty free.

For textures, brushes and text styles: deviantart. There's tons.

For fonts: I recommend dafont, but there's lots of other free font websites.

Note: please read the terms and conditions laid out by the photographer, artist, designer or whatever when downloading anything, because a lot of the time they're only for personal use or require credit, etc.

Types of cover

So there's lots of types of cover, but the three main ones on wattpad are:
- simple
- minimal
- manip

Examples: