Alright, so what is a thumbnail? If you know what it is, why should you care
about it? How do you create a thumbnail template? That's exactly what he's gonna
tell us about right now.
We're talking today about designing custom thumbnails
for your YouTube videos and a Nate has, no surprise, some experience and some
insights into that so why don't you walk us through a little bit of that?
Absolutely, it's like we're gonna show you stuff on the computer, show you
exactly how I find a theme or get ideas for a theme, we're gonna go into
Photoshop and so we'll create a thumbnail template but I wanted to start
talking about a theme and where to get ideas for a theme for your thumbnails
and for your channel and I love looking at other channels, I don't think that
there's anything wrong with in fact, I highly encourage it, highly recommend.
Look at other channels especially successful ones and see what they're
doing and get ideas from that and then create your own. You don't want to
just blatantly copy and do everything exactly but you'll get
some great idea.. You can get close. Yeah, so let me bring up my screen here. I've
got four channels that I picked out, what's inside? Okay, they do a really good
job of creating thumbnails that are just still images from their video but these
are custom thumbnails, they're not just letting YouTube decide what image,
they're probably taking a separate photo or grabbing a shot in
their video that's like what's going to create the most curiosity. So if so
basically someone like me, I'm pretty new to this, I know that when I upload a
video, YouTube is going to give me some what I think are just randomly generated
suggestions that I can choose and most of the time people think, well I've got
to pick one of those but there is an option where it says add your own.
So YouTube gives you three options and they're just randomly three different
times in your video and the fourth option that you're talking about is
custom thumbnail. You have to have your account verified
on YouTube to be able to do that. That sounds tricky but when you go into your
settings and go to verify your YouTube channel it will send you a text message
with a code and then you come back to your YouTube channel enter in that code..
Bing! You're verified. I did that recently so that I finally got verified. Yeah, it's
as simple as that and once your channel is verified, you can then upload custom
thumbnails. Meaning, you designed the still image that's going to show on the
screen like.That's pretty cool because that's not even part of YouTube's
premium so I mean it's a fun little feature that you don't have to upgrade
and spend any more money on.And it makes a huge difference. I mean, this
picture is what's gonna entice people to watch your videos so if you've got poor
thumbnails, you're gonna get poor view numbers. If you can get really good
thumbnails, you could have crappy content, you could
have a lousy video but if you have a great thumbnail and a great catchy title,
you'll get a lot of people to click on it. So that's what I like about this
what's inside is, they have a catchy title so they don't need to put any text
over the actual thumbnail, they're just the still photos. Yeah, cause their videos
are so interesting. I mean, my son and I watched this and what's inside a Mexican
jumping view and.. With three million people. Yeah, that is fastened his show an
exacto knife going right inside, I mean, so it's like, that's obviously a very
intentional moment or what's inside a magic chessboard. I'm kind of curious.
That one to me is a little bit less boring but you know maybe they had an
axe chopping into it or something but what's inside a piano? Why are they
out in the woods? That's what I want to know. You know, so he's got a
crazy face looking what's inside, microwave popcorn. Wait a second,
kind of looks like me. That's Dan, meet Dan
Lincoln. Okay. Alright, so this is one example is you just get great still
shots from your video that are intentional and they don't have to be in
your video, you can then afterwards say, okay, what would make a good thumbnail?
Make this face and you know, take a picture of it and you can design
it. Let's show you another example. Okay, this is Sunny Lenarduzzi, this is her
YouTube channel and she does a lot of social media marketing.
Yeah, she puts her face in a lot of them faces and thumbnails for some reason get
results. She's so you know, pretty eyes, pretty face, that's gonna
grab your attention. And something else that you notice is that there's a
theme. You can see her theme has kind of changed over time. Back I guess if we go
back five months ago, she had this gold border around all of her videos except
for that one, had maroon but she kind of sticks to a theme that it looks
like it's evolved over time. Okay, so you can get ideas even just on this one
channel, there's lots of different ideas of and maybe you can look at okay this
is what she used to do this is what she does now. I wonder why she changed, maybe
a certain one worked better oh she only did that one for a month and then she
switched again. So anyway, what I really like is that there's a theme,
she sticks to a theme. What I mean about theme is she always uses the color gold
and she always uses black and white text or white on black. It's kind of part of
her brand. Yeah. Well, so here's another theme.. This is a real fun channel, I've
actually met them and I interviewed them in a couple of episodes about how to
become a youtuber and how to become a vlogger, they live in their RV full time
and they travel around, it's a family of three from Tennessee and they
live in an RV and they go and they visit national parks and vlog about it,
they've got patrons that support them through Aatreon, they get Adsense revenue.
He was a web designer, she is an RN nurse but now they travel and this is their
their career. But they use that same theme, the white with yellow big block
letters, all caps. Yeah, so this is kind of a combination. They take a shot from the
episode right but then they they add in that same color of text and you can see
that there's kind of a shadow from the left edge going in, there's kind of a
shadow.. Oh right. Yes, this one, it looks like it's on the right side but they
just think they put a little filter over the top of them on the side
where the text is. Right, because it helps the text to stand out and not get lost
in that. So in there, they're very consistent,
they've stuck with that theme so even if it were a different picture like this
one here, I don't recognize Marissa right there but because it's the
white and yellow text, just subconsciously, I'll know that that's
like you know, that's those guys. So anyway, I'm gonna show you one more
example and then we'll get into Photoshop and creating a template. So
what I like what Grant has done here on the King Of Random is he put the
kind of the caution tape, he put his logo and at the top
right corner there and obviously, they go for epic shots and they color
enhance them, they picked the points of high action in their videos and grab
that image and and design it out. Well that's clearly a template because
they're just popping in the picture or whatever with that same border with, the
logo whereas the other ones, don't have those, I would imagine that's right.
Okay, so now let's switch over to Photoshop. Okay, so this is a simple
template that we use for Limitless TV and all the template is it's a file that
I reuse over and over, it's always got the logo in the top left corner, it's got
these gold stripes in the you know, the two opposing corners right there and so
then I can go and grab an image and I can paste it over the top of that so
just for the sake of this, it could always be dangerous, right? What if
we go to Google and we'll do it a search, let's say we're making a video about
watermelons, that ought to be safe. Alright, yes, I'm sure it well. Alright, so
well okay, we're good. Now be responsible with your photos, make sure you have the
rights to use all the images that you graph the internet. So let's assume call
it watermelon. Okay, so I'm gonna open that image now.
and I can select all, copy that. I've got the watermelon image in my credit board.
Now I can just go down to the layer or, Kris is in front of his BMW there, I'll
just hit paste and I'll put the watermelon in there. So that's what I
mean by a template and I could come in here and in size it right, I can just, I
like to scale it like that so it'll show me the the borders of the image and I
can just you know, drag it and position it the way that I want. I can do a lot of
settings here in Photoshop and hit enter and so now I've just used my
template and I've just switched out to the background and I can come and change
the text if I want to. Obviously, you might want to move that text to a
different spot and I could show you how to do that. I imagine if you don't have
Photoshop, there's probably also other applications out there that will help
you make your own thumbnails, right? You have to use Photoshop or it won't work
on YouTube. Okay, yes. So if you don't have Photoshop or don't have access to
Photoshop, you can go to google and type in Photoshop alternatives
or free Photoshop alternatives and you'll find lots of
different options. I'll bet you, I bet if we typed in the YouTube thumbnail maker,
there would be somebody. Maybe I should make that. I'd go for it. Should I? Would
that be a way I could make money? I don't think so yes, you should do it. Something
to think about. If people have to make these these custom thumbnails and this
is obviously a very simple weighted, I'm just saying there's probably other
programs that could just just do thumbnails cause you got to be like some
kind of Photoshop genius. Well what you did here was pretty easy. Yeah,
there's lots of things that you can do. I mean, on this on this box.. Let's
go to the words retired at 26. I mean, it's got a little shadow on it and if I
double click on that, I can come in here and increase the distance, you know, so I
can, there's a lot of things that you can do..
The the purpose of this video though, I just want to say, keep it simple
because if there's something specific you want to do, you can then go to Google
or YouTube and type in 'how to add a shadow' right in Photoshop and
you'll learn the specifics. Yeah, you can learn Photoshop in your sleep with all of the
stuff that's out there on it. Yeah, for sure. So maybe one day I'll make some Photoshop
tutorials but the purpose of this one it's just how to create a thumbnail and
I think it's most important to find your theme and to create a template, kind
of create that shell. You can then just reuse over and over and so
you'll just save it as thumbnail template ,you know, .PSD. That's a
Photoshop file and then every time you just open that up, paste it in your new
background, change some text and hit save and it's already the right dimensions
and everything. Ideal dimensions for a thumbnail for YouTube is 1280 x 720 as
described by earth. Right, it tells you that on there, right? I mean.. That's what
YouTube does. Beautiful. You have a
homework assignment, two parts. First part is to study other channels and come up
with an idea for your theme, for your thumb and then create one, just create
one and turn it into your template, that's your assignment then you won't be
graded. Unless you send it to us. Well, they will be graded but not by us,
they'll be graded by how many views and clicks.
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