A Quick Cover Art Checklist Before Release Day

Cover art lives or dies on a 64-pixel thumbnail. That's the actual size on a Spotify search result, an iMessage music share preview, or an Apple Music browse row. If your art doesn't read at that size, the rest doesn't matter.

I'll show you the checks that catch the common kills, plus the album naming gotcha that bit one of our users last week.

Check it small first

Before you ship, scale the image down to 64×64 and 200×200. Look at it.

• Subject readability — can you tell what it is? A tiny silhouette of a person at 64px reads as a smudge. A bold geometric shape still reads.
• Title legibility — if the title is on the cover, can you read it? Most artist names disappear at thumbnail size unless they're set in a clean sans-serif at 60+pt-equivalent.
• Contrast — does the main subject pop against the background, or do they collapse together?

One strong idea, not five competing ones

If you're describing the cover and you use the word "and" more than twice, simplify.

Too many ideas	One strong idea
Neon city street with a person holding a guitar and rain falling	Rain on neon
Vintage car at sunset with palm trees and a dancer	1973 cherry-red Cadillac
Studio scene with mic and headphones and a notebook	One mic, deep red light

The compressed version generates cleaner because the model has fewer competing instructions.

The albumName trap (fixed last week)

A Music House user passed albumName: "Steam Heat" to the album cover tool. The cover came back with no text — because the underlying prompt template was telling the model "no text, no typography." Fixed in PR #58. If you want the title rendered on the cover, pass albumName and the prompt now leaves room for it. If you don't, leave it empty and the model knows to skip text entirely.

There's also a new raw: true flag that strips the style template completely — handy if you have a sharp aesthetic intent and want the model to take your prompt verbatim with only minimal safety guardrails attached.

Before export

Three quick checks:

1. View at 64×64.
2. Stand 6 feet from your screen and look at the 1024×1024.
3. Send it to one person whose taste you trust. Don't ask if they like it. Ask what they think it's about.

Open the Album Cover Maker. The 64px preview is the one that ships.