Choosing Your Podcast Title, Artwork, and Description

Jack -

Your podcast title, artwork, and description are often the determining factor on whether someone will give your show a shot or not. People might be scrolling through suggested podcasts looking for something to jump out at them. These three things can be all that's needed for someone to give your show a shot.

Choosing a Title

The title should attempt to capture the essence of the show. This might be descriptive, or playful, or just a common thing that's said on the show.

Examples of descriptive podcast titles:

  • American History Tellers
  • Smart Passive Income
  • Stuff You Missed in History Class
  • Eat This, Not That!

From reading those titles above, you have a good guess as to what those shows are about.

Examples of podcast titles that are phrases heard on the show:

  • Dear Sugars
  • Still Processing
  • The Way I Heard It
  • Pardon My Take

Presumably these titles are something you'll hear them say on the show frequently. 1

Examples of podcast titles that are made up words:

  • Freakonomics
  • Radiolab
  • Disgraceland
  • The Loudini
  • The H3 Podcast
  • Invisibilia

You wouldn't know what these shows above are about unless you're already familiar with them. This is risky at first because people won't be drawn in by the name only if they aren't already familiar with it.

Examples of podcasts with the host in the title:

  • The Tim Ferriss Show
  • The Joe Rogan Experience
  • The Dave Ramsey Show

Shows that have the host in the title usually only do that because the host is famous.

Examples of one word titles:

  • Lore
  • Criminal
  • Serial
  • S-Town
  • Caliphate
  • Casefile

I love podcast titles that are one word. To me this is elegant and powerful. If you're all out of ideas on what title to make for your show, just use your favorite word in the world and that may just be good enough.

Choosing Podcast Artwork

According to Apple Podcasts, the image requirements are:

Podcast feeds contain artwork that is a minimum size of 1400 x 1400 pixels and a maximum size of 3000 x 3000 pixels, 72 dpi, in JPEG or PNG format with appropriate file extensions (.jpg, .png), and in the RGB colorspace. To optimize images for mobile devices, Apple recommends compressing your image files.

Additionally iTunes strictly forbids:

Content that could be construed as racist, misogynist, or homophobic.

References to illegal drugs, profanity, or violence in the title, description, artwork, or episodes.

Content depicting graphic sex, violence, gore, illegal drugs, or hate themes.

Third-party content or trademarks without legal authorization or usage rights.

The words Apple Music, iTunes Store, iTunes, Apple Podcasts, or Apple Inc.

iTunes Store logo, Apple Podcasts logo, Apple logo, or the term Exclusive without prior authorization from Apple.

Creating Artwork

Launching your first podcast with DIY home-made artwork is perfectly fine. If you start growing and developing a bigger audience you can always change the artwork later to something better.

Free tools you can use to create artwork with:

Styles

Plain Fonts

You don't have to get fancy with the artwork, sometimes simple is best. These shows have only a plain font with no additional artwork. The Criminal one just has the network logo on the bottom, so it doesn't count.

Host

If you really want to focus on the show host, you can throw a picture of them in the artwork.

Words and Icons

Original designs and artworks can be used for the podcast artwork.

Full Graphics

Graphics like these are busy, detailed, and vibrant.

Tips

When choosing fonts, feel free to be inspired by movie poster fonts. They offer a lot of style and inspiration.

Even though Apple Podcasts requires the artwork to be 1400x1400 or more, most podcast players will only display the artwork at 70x70. To help give you a picture of how your artwork will look at this scale use one of these handy tools:

https://PodcastCoverPreview.com

https://podcastartworkcheck.com/

By putting your artwork in there usually gives you a great insight into how your artwork compares to others. You want yours to jump out and be noticed by others.

Writing the Podcast Description

The podcast description has huge potential to get people to listen to your show. You may have got their interest with the title and artwork and now they want to know more about what the show is, so they will read the description. If you can nail this and really captivate them, you may just earn another listener.

Start out with your show's subtitle. This should be a description of your show in 10 words or less. This will satisfy people who just want a quick answer as to what the show is about. if they want to know more, then you can intrigue them further with a more detailed explanation of what the show is about.