Podcast listeners swipe past you long before they ever hear your intro. Freddy Cruz exposes how lazy cover art turns a solid show into background noise no one ever selects and lays out how to clean it up.

He calls out the usual crimes: titles crammed in like a CVS receipt, cringey microphone clipart from 2009, blurry selfies, and designs that only look decent when they’re the size of a movie poster. Instead, he pushes for simple, square art at 3000 by 3000 pixels, under 512KB, built around your title and maybe your name, with zero fluff slogans fighting for space.

Freddy wants you shrinking your design down to true thumbnail size, because that tiny version inside Apple or Spotify is where the real snap judgment happens. One or two fonts, a locked-in color palette, and a look that actually fits your genre help your show feel deliberate instead of DIY-gone-wrong, and your visuals should line up across every platform you touch.

He wraps by inviting new and aspiring hosts to grab his podcasting roadmap so they are not guessing their way through branding, and he urges listeners to share the episode with anyone stuck wondering why their “great content” still gets skipped.

Subscribe to Your Mic on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Shoot Freddy an email: [email protected].