Cover art that survives a 12-inch sleeve

A record sleeve is 12.375 inches square, printed, folded, glued, and then handled by hands for decades. That’s a very different job to sitting in a grid of thumbnails on a phone. Design for one and you’ll be disappointed by the other.

Resolution is not optional

We ask for artwork at 300 dpi at full sleeve size, which works out to roughly 3712 by 3712 pixels for a single sleeve. Anything pulled straight off a website or an old promo shot tends to arrive around 72 dpi, which looks crisp on a screen and turns soft and blocky the second it’s blown up to sleeve size. If in doubt, send us the largest file you have. We can make a huge image smaller. We cannot invent detail that was never there.

Small text is the first thing to go

Track listings, credits, tiny logos, anything under about 8 point equivalent at final size tends to blur slightly once it’s through litho or digital print onto sleeve board. Rules I actually follow:

• Keep essential text bold and simple rather than a delicate script
• Avoid thin white text on busy backgrounds, it’s the first thing to disappear
• Leave a small quiet margin near the spine, gatefolds especially crush detail there

Colour on screen lies to you, print doesn’t

RGB screens can display colours that plain CMYK print physically cannot reproduce, particularly very saturated pinks and certain electric blues. A design that looks perfect on your laptop can arrive slightly flatter in print, which is normal and not a printing error. We proof everything before a full run so nobody’s surprised, but it saves a step if you design already knowing CMYK is a slightly smaller box than RGB.

Design for the object, not the thumbnail. The thumbnail is temporary. The sleeve sits on a shelf for years.

Spine width depends on the format

A single 7 inch sleeve barely has a spine worth designing for, but a 12 inch LP does, and a 2xLP box has a genuinely wide one that’s often the first thing anyone sees browsing a shelf side on. Get the spine text oriented consistently (we default to reading top to bottom when the sleeve lies flat) and don’t try to cram a full title, artist name and edition note into a spine that’s under two centimetres wide. Pick one, maybe two, and let it breathe.

Matte or gloss changes everything

The same artwork on a matte stock reads calmer and more textured, while gloss stock punches colour and contrast harder but shows fingerprints faster. Neither is objectively better, they’re just different objects. Dark, moody covers tend to suit matte. Anything with Raspberry × Ultramarine energy usually wants gloss to actually earn its keep.

The format changes the brief too. A 7 inch sleeve needs artwork that reads at a fraction of the size, so fine detail is largely wasted on it, bold shapes and a strong single focal point do far more work. A 12 inch LP gives you room to be more considered. A 2xLP box is essentially a small piece of packaging design, with a spine wide enough for proper typography and two sleeves’ worth of inner space to play with, and it’s worth briefing that difference in before you start rather than trying to stretch one piece of art across all three formats.

Send us your files and we’ll flag anything that won’t survive the print before it’s too late to fix. See our formats and start a proof.