Background
To express my love for music, and the Spotify platform, I made a variety of cover art images for Spotify playlists during 2022 and 2023. Experimenting dimensions, colors and font sizes, to get the desired results.
Soundtrack to your Life
My entire life I’ve been an avid music listener, starting with radio and cassette tapes, moving to CD’s and MP3’s, and now a long time subscriber to Spotify premium. Along the way I have made playlists for myself and friends, to express myself, capture the current times, and, as my sister put it, create soundtracks to my life.
In recent years Spotify made it easier to also upload cover art to custom playlists, and when I started making Trance playlists to some of my favorite songs from A State of Trance, I decided these also needed some unique cover art.
I was able to source royalty free photos from Unsplash, and created a theme in InDesign to strengthen the seasonal summer and winter themes of the playlists. Now every time I play my own playlists, I also get to see the cover art I made, which is very exciting.
Dimensions
If you wish to make your own, the Spotify’s cover art requirements are as follows:
Your cover art needs to be:
- TIFF, PNG, or JPG format using lossless encoding.
- The highest resolution available.
- At least 640px wide and tall.
- 1:1 aspect ratio.
- Encoded with an sRGB color space, 24bits per pixel, with color profiles applied directly.
- Don’t upscale images.
- Spotify also doesn’t support embedded color profiles and orientation metadata.
Reflections
This was a fun project which I get to enjoy every day when I play music, and I hope to build upon this going forward, making a seasonal playlist around every 6 months. The variety of sizes Spotify uses to display the cover art, has taught me to possibly consider different font sizes in the future, to make text more legible.
Overall I am quite pleased with the results, and happy to have gotten to experiment on something different, that I’ve never made before, and yet that I still use every day. I can definitely recommend customizing your Spotify playlists with some custom cover art.
