Study Break: Design Your Own YA Book Cover (via 100 Scope Notes)
Saturday, August 8th, 2009
Have you noticed some similarities with YA covers lately? So has the 100 Scope Notes blog, which has instructions for you to create your own YA covers using Picnik, Flickr creative commons images, and your imagination.
Follow Scopes’ instructions to randomly generate an author’s name and a one-word title … then do a search on Flickrcc (hadn’t seen this interface for accessing Flickr Creative Commons images - it’s great!) to serve as your cover art. Flickrcc will let you auto-import your image into Picnik for easy editing and addition of text.
Here’s mine:

My friend Ann suggested that you could get students to create faux covers (maybe a little less queasy-generating than this one?) and then create a bulletin board interspersing the faux with real book covers.
I was able to use Picnik without creating an account, downloading the final product to my hard drive.
Other possible uses for Flickrcc + Picnik in school:
- Create book advertisement posters after reading a book
- Take self-portrait photos, edit them, and add short poetry texts
- Create a tourism postcard representing a setting from a story
- Create a poster showing the theme of a book
- Take a subject students are learning about (Revolutionary War) and make a movie preview poster for it (”Johnny Depp in the Midnight Ride of His Life”) - Ann
- Create posters to classify items scientific characteristics (magnetic or not? reptile or amphibian?) Find a photo that illustrates the concept and label it
This can also be a very quick, one-class project (our efforts took no more than 10 minutes) for times when you want to use technology to motivate learning.
Have fun! If you create one, please let me know!
Have you noticed some similarities with YA covers lately? So has the 100 Scope Notes blog, which has instructions for you to create your own YA covers using Picnik, Flickr creative commons images, and your imagination.
Follow Scopes’ instructions to randomly generate an author’s name and a one-word title … then do a search on Flickrcc (hadn’t seen this interface for accessing Flickr Creative Commons images - it’s great!) to serve as your cover art. Flickrcc will let you auto-import your image into Picnik for easy editing and addition of text.
Here’s mine:

My friend Ann suggested that you could get students to create faux covers (maybe a little less queasy-generating than this one?) and then create a bulletin board interspersing the faux with real book covers.
I was able to use Picnik without creating an account, downloading the final product to my hard drive.
Other possible uses for Flickrcc + Picnik in school:
- Create book advertisement posters after reading a book
- Take self-portrait photos, edit them, and add short poetry texts
- Create a tourism postcard representing a setting from a story
- Create a poster showing the theme of a book
- Take a subject students are learning about (Revolutionary War) and make a movie preview poster for it (”Johnny Depp in the Midnight Ride of His Life”) - Ann
- Create posters to classify items scientific characteristics (magnetic or not? reptile or amphibian?) Find a photo that illustrates the concept and label it
This can also be a very quick, one-class project (our efforts took no more than 10 minutes) for times when you want to use technology to motivate learning.
Have fun! If you create one, please let me know!

















I haven’t yet,but if you have, will you leave a comment?