The Album Cover Maker is 100% client-side. Each element — the artist name, the album title, a shape, an uploaded image or the Parental-Advisory badge — is a plain typed object held in the page, and a pure engine draws them onto an in-browser HTML5 <canvas>. When you upload a photo it is read straight into an in-memory Image via an object URL and drawn on-device; the duotone and filter passes run locally with canvas getImageData and ctx.filter, so your photo is never sent anywhere. There is no stock-image library and no AI generation — you bring your own photo, and the other backgrounds are CSS/SVG gradients, procedural patterns and duotones generated in-browser. Export renders the same scene to a canvas at your chosen pixel size and saves it with canvas.toBlob, so every file is produced on your device. The only optional network use is consent-gated ads; everything else works offline once the page is cached. Close the tab and the design is gone unless you exported it.

Streaming cover art must be a 1:1 square in the sRGB colour space. The industry-standard export is 3000×3000 px: Spotify and Apple Music both accept artwork up to 3000–4000 px and downscale internally, so a single 3000² JPEG or PNG under ~4 MB satisfies every distributor at once. The hard minimums are lower — roughly 640 px for Spotify and 1400 px for Apple Music — but small files upscale poorly and can be rejected, so design at 3000² and let the platforms shrink it. This tool exports 3000 / 1400 / 1000 / 640 square, defaults to 3000, and always keeps the canvas a perfect square so your art is never letterboxed or cropped by the platform.

A duotone reduces a photo to two tones. The engine reads each pixel’s luminance (0.299R + 0.587G + 0.114B), then looks it up in a 256-step ramp interpolated between your chosen shadow colour (for the darks) and highlight colour (for the lights), so the whole image is re-coloured with smooth transitions — the classic brand-poster look. For a plain photo background you instead get standard CSS filters — grayscale, brightness, contrast, saturate and blur — applied via the Canvas API. Both run entirely on your device; the processed bitmap is sampled at up to 2000 px for a responsive preview and then scaled to the export size, so a very large source photo softens a touch. Everything is composited under your editable text and shape layers, so you can lay bold typography over a moody duotone in seconds.

Every element is its own layer you can drag, resize from the corners, rotate, re-stack, duplicate and delete. Text layers (artist, title, or any label) expose font family — portable system stacks such as Impact, Helvetica, Georgia and Arial Narrow that render fully offline with no webfont download — plus size, weight, colour, alignment, line-height, letter-spacing and italics, with automatic word-wrap. You can add rectangles, ellipses and lines, upload image layers, and drop in the RIAA-style “Parental Advisory — Explicit Content” badge, which is drawn as one self-contained vector so it stays crisp at any export size. Seven genre templates (hip-hop, indie, electronic, lo-fi, pop, classical and playlist) give a cohesive starting point, and the same engine that draws the live preview renders the final PNG/JPEG, so what you see is exactly what you download.