Even though many people continue to advertise the end of CDs and DVDs, I still think they are here to stay for a while. Sure, nowadays most of us share personal videos captured on our phones via the cloud, but movies and longer home videos are still easier to share and watch on CD, DVD, or Blu-ray discs.
Burning Blu-ray discs is still not such a common practice and may never be, but many people still burn their own CDs and DVDs. If you are burning your own discs, you always need to create a beautiful custom label to match. It just looks tasteless – use a permanent marker to mark your freshly burned CD!
In this article, I will show you where you can find many templates to create your own CD, DVD or Blu-ray label covers in Word. The nice thing is that all CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray discs have the same diameter, so they can all fit on the same label. In addition, there are many templates for CD and DVD cases, including standard booklets for compact CD cases and inserts for DVD cases.
Word templates
When you walk into a store like Staples or OfficeMax, you’ll always find labels from Avery. They’ve been around for a long time and pretty much make up most of the labels you use when printing from Word. The same goes for printing CD and DVD labels. Avery has many different labels that you can buy, print, peel, and apply directly to your disc.
Check out their CD and DVD templates here and you will find over 50 different templates for you to download. Besides Word, they also have templates in Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe InDesign formats.
Click on the one you want and you can download it. Be sure to select the “Template only” option, otherwise it will download an installer that will try to install malware on your system. If you are only uploading a template, it must be in DOC format. Open the file and you will see the template is ready to use in Word.
The only problem that occurs is that you may receive a message from Word that the document is open in Protected View. Since the file was downloaded from the Internet, Word does not trust it, and you will have to manually click the “Allow Editing” button to edit the file. I scanned a couple of files myself with an antivirus program and they turned out to be clean, so this is just a warning in case you downloaded a file from a malicious website. Hopefully Avery will not upload viruses to its Word documents any time soon.
Now that you can edit the file, you can start entering text, adding images, and customizing the label. Below, I downloaded a blank template and then added some WordArt and text at the bottom for my music tracks.
I recommend downloading a shortcut that already has text included because it is much easier to edit than trying to do it yourself. It took me about 15 minutes to properly align all the text in the screenshot above. Using this template from Avery, you can simply click a box and edit the text yourself.
Avery is certainly not the only site that has CD and DVD label templates. Another good site is Neato, where you can find many CD and DVD label templates, as well as CD and DVD insert and insert templates. Another company called Stomper .has about a dozen free templates that you can download.
Of course, you will either have to buy real template print labels from these sites, or you can print them on your own paper if you like. I mentioned Avery first because it’s easiest to find at your local office supply store. Microsoft used to have a bunch of CD / DVD templates on their Office Templates website, but now they have been removed for an unknown reason.
Luckily, you can still find some of these Microsoft templates, but you’ll have to search from within Word itself. To do this, click “File” and then “New”.
In the Search online templates box, enter the word CD. You should get multiple results including CD / DVD labels and inserts / covers.
Hope this helps you in your CD / DVD project. If you have any problems, feel free to leave comments and I’ll try to help. Enjoy!
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