Guide
How to make a brat cover that looks right
Our first version of this tool produced covers that were almost correct, which turned out to be worse than covers that were obviously a joke. Six settings fixed it. Here they are, with the numbers.
Why "almost right" fails
A brat cover has four visual signals: the specific green, lowercase Arial stretched sideways, a light blur, and type that nearly touches the edges. Get three of the four and people read it as a knockoff. Get all four and nobody questions it, even though the design is four rectangles and a text layer.
The failure we kept hitting was blur. It looks like the obvious lever, so people drag it to the end. On the record the blur is subtle. What actually sells the effect is the proportion of the letters, not the softness.
The six settings, in order
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Start with the word, not the settings
Type your text first and look at it before you touch a slider. Length changes what every other setting should be, so tuning first and typing second wastes your time.
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Load the exact green
Tap the first swatch. That is #8ACE00, the colour on the record. Eyedropping a screenshot gets you within a few points, which is close enough to look wrong next to the real thing.
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Set stretch to about 1.15
The cover is Arial pulled wider than normal. This one setting does more for authenticity than the font choice does.
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Bring the blur to roughly 3
Enough to soften the edges, not enough to hide the letters. The original looks like a photo of a screen, not a smudge.
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Drop the margin to 5 or 6 percent
The letters should crowd the frame. Generous white space makes it look like a corporate slide.
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Export bigger than you need
Pick 1200 for a post and 3000 for a release. Shrinking a large file keeps the blur smooth; enlarging a small one does not.
Everything above is already loaded as the default in the generator. You can get a usable cover without changing anything, which is how it should be.
The numbers on one screen
| Setting | Use this | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Background | #8ACE00 | The cover colour, not a lookalike |
| Text colour | #000000 | Only readable choice on that green |
| Font | Arial, regular | Not bold, not condensed |
| Letters | Lowercase | Part of the design, not a style preference |
| Stretch | 1.15 | 1.25 on Android, which has no Arial |
| Blur | 3 | Under 4 for anything commercial |
| Margin | 5 to 6 percent | Letters should crowd the frame |
| Export | 1200 or 3000 | Posts and releases respectively |
Text length changes everything else
The generator scales type to fill the frame, so a one word cover gets huge letters and a ten
word cover gets small ones. Blur does not scale with them. That is why the same blur setting
looks perfect on "brat" and destroys "we are never going back to that restaurant".
A rough rule from making a few hundred of these: for one or two words, blur 3 to 5 works. For
three to five words, drop to 2. Past six words, go to 1 or turn blur off and lean on the
stretch instead.
Line breaks help more than shrinking does. Press Enter to split a phrase across two or three
lines and the type stays large. The two lines template shows what
that looks like.
Making it look the same on every phone
Arial ships with Windows and macOS. Android does not include it and substitutes Roboto, which
is a little narrower with a different lowercase g. iOS has Helvetica, which is close enough
that most people never notice.
This matters when you design on a laptop and your friend opens it on an Android phone. The
fix is the stretch slider: nudge it from 1.15 to about 1.25 and the two render nearly
identically. Or sidestep it entirely by exporting an image, since a PNG looks the same
everywhere by definition.
When to break the rules
All of the above describes copying the record. Plenty of the best covers we have seen do not.
Black background with green type reads better as a profile picture because circular crops eat
the edges. Comic Sans on yellow is funnier than anything faithful. Blur at 12 makes something
genuinely unreadable, which is occasionally the joke.
The rules are for when you want people to recognise the reference instantly. Once they have,
you can do what you like.
Now make one
The settings above are the defaults, so opening the tool and typing is enough.
Quick answers
How long does this actually take?
About ten seconds for a good one and two minutes for a fussy one. If you are spending longer, you are probably fighting the text length rather than the settings.
What is the single most common mistake?
Too much blur on too small an export. Blur is measured against the canvas, so a value that looks fine at 2000 pixels turns your text into a smear at 400. Export big and let the app shrink it.
Should the text be lowercase?
On the record, yes, and it is a big part of why the cover reads the way it does. Our tool forces lowercase by default. Switch it to "As I typed it" in the Letters dropdown if you want proper nouns capitalised.
How many words fit?
One to four is the sweet spot. Past that the auto-fit shrinks the type and the whole thing starts looking like a quote graphic. If you need a sentence, break it across lines with Enter.
Keep reading
- What font is the brat album cover? Arial, stretched. Why it is not Arial Narrow, and what Android does instead.
- What brat summer actually meant A deliberately ugly green square, a dictionary entry, and a campaign banner.
- The right image size for every app Instagram, TikTok, Spotify, print. One table with the numbers.
- Brat green colour codes Hex, RGB, HSL, CMYK, and why white text on it fails accessibility.