Thingadailies 2025 - Book Covers!

It's February, which means it's time for Thingadailies, the month-long challenge to create a new thing every day. This year, I've decided to use the challenge to learn Affinity Publishing.

Background: I create my covers using Adobe InDesign, which is pretty standard for the industry. But Adobe sucks and you can only use InDesign with a subscription, so I'm paying $300 every year for a program I use maybe 30 minutes every month or two. (Insert rant about subscription software here. I hate it with the heat of a thousand suns.)

Meanwhile, the Affinity suite is reasonably priced and only requires one payment.

For most of the month, I'll be creating new covers for fake books.

Things I know will be an issue going in:

1. Fonts. The one good thing about using InDesign is that Adobe has a ton of fonts licensed for commercial use. I'll either have to license those on my own or switch them.

That's a short list. So let's start by converting an existing InDesign cover to Affinity Publishing.

For reference, here is the paperback spread as it currently exists in InDesign. (Ignore the fact that the spine and back cover have all the info for the previous book in the series. I haven't updated them yet.)

First hurdle — Affinity Publisher doesn't open InDesign's indd files.

I have to open the file in InDesign and export in idml format. Not a big deal, but it means I can't drop my Adobe subscription until I go back and export everything.

Anyhow, I exported the cover in the right format and Affinity Publisher was able to open it.

Not bad, though there are a few obvious problems, mostly to do with replacement fonts not fitting in their boxes. Also, for some reason it decided to hide the back cover text, though I was able to get it to show up again later.

Let's fix the fonts

The original file is using "Collector Comic" for the title font. I found a font that is free for commercial use called Komika that has a similar feel. (I'm not wild about what it's doing with the T, but I'll ignore that for now.)

So now the cover looks like this:

vs the original:

It may not be obvious here, but the colors are slightly different. The only difference I can find in the metadata is that the original has the ColorSync profile set to "sRGB IEC61966-2.1" and the new one has "Generic RGB Profile".

That might not matter much because it has to get converted to the CMYK colorspace for printing anyhow, but it bugs me a little.

Updated problem list

1. Fonts (This will be an ongoing thing)
2. Colors aren't as vibrant

That's enough for day 1.