Journal cover art templates

How to make journal cover art

A cover image has to work at two very different sizes: as a full printed page, and as a thumbnail a few centimetres wide on the journal’s website, in the table of contents and on social media. Most of what makes a cover succeed follows from that. One clear subject, strong contrast and a calm area for the masthead survive the shrink; fine labels, small panels and busy backgrounds do not.

The two templates here show finished covers in two common styles, so you can see how the art, the masthead and the cover story sit together before you send anything. Each picture is a live scene from the LabCanvas 3D Studio, not a flat image, so the structure, camera angle, lighting and depth of field all stay editable.

What journals actually ask for

Cover proposals are usually invited from authors of accepted papers, and the editors choose among them. The journal sets its own masthead, issue line and cover lines, so what you submit is normally the art alone, without any text. Some publishers charge a fee for author-supplied cover art; the invitation or the artwork guidelines will say.

Check the journal’s guidelines for the trim size, bleed, file format and colour mode before you render. A common requirement is 300 dpi at the final printed size. The template artboards are 816 × 1056 px, which is US Letter (8.5 × 11 in) at 96 px per inch, so the layout matches a printed page. For the submission file, render the scene from the 3D Studio with ray tracing on and the Print image size (2550 × 3300 px, which is 8.5 × 11 in at 300 dpi), and download it as PNG.

Composition that survives the thumbnail

• One idea. Show the single thing the paper is about: one molecule, one active site, one device. A cover is not a graphical abstract and does not need to explain the method.
• Leave room at the top. Keep the upper part of the picture dark or plain, because the masthead will sit there. Both templates place it over the darker top of the render.
• Keep the subject off the edges. Trimming and bleed take a few millimetres from every side, and the cover lines usually run along the bottom or one side.
• Use depth, not detail. A shallow depth of field and a dark background separate the subject from its surroundings far better than added objects.
• Test it small. Shrink the whole cover to about 3 cm wide. If the subject is still recognisable, the cover will work in a table of contents.
• Stay accurate. Editors and readers notice wrong chemistry. Render a real structure (the genome cover uses a B-DNA double helix; the catalysis cover shows Fe–N₄ sites in graphene divacancies) rather than a generic shape.

Adapting a template to your paper

Replace the journal name and every line: they are placeholders. Then double-click the picture to open its scene in the 3D Studio, where you can swap in your own structure, for example a crystal, a protein or a molecule you built, and adjust the camera and focus. Update the figure when you are done, and the cover preview refreshes. If the journal does not want a cover but an image for its website or a frontispiece, the same scene can be rendered at any other size.