- So we've released
thumbnail tutorials before, but in this updated video, I'll show you the latest process, including the cool new free design tools that we recommend so that you can learn how
to make a YouTube thumbnail that looks professional and helps you drive more
traffic to your videos quick and easy. Hey, it's Justin Brown
here from Primal Video, where we help you grow an audience and scale your revenue with online video. If you're new here, make sure you click that subscribe button and all the links to everything I mention in this video, you can find linked in
the description box below. So let's jump into it. Now YouTube thumbnails are one of the most overlooked elements of YouTube optimization. You could have the world's best video, but if no one clicks it in search results or in the
suggested feed on YouTube, then you'll get no views. And all that hard work is
just gonna go to waste. Fortunately though, there
are some simple and free ways to easily create effective thumbnails. So in this video, we're gonna
run through a full custom YouTube thumbnail tutorial, including the latest tools and
processes that we recommend to create professional
looking thumbnails fast. Now, I wanna stress here that you don't need to
be using apps or programs like Photoshop if you can, and you know how to use it, then by all means, go for it. But for most people, this can just be a huge time sink and you can get awesome results, just using simple free
software alternatives. Now, back in the early
days of this channel, Mike, my brother, and business partner actually used to create
most of our thumbnails just using Keynote. But these days there are
some awesome online tools that are more accessible and do an even better job. Now for this, we used to recommend Canva, but we've since found Snappa, which is a similar alternative that does have a few less
restrictions on exports, but also some super powerful
design options and templates in there as well. So it's now our top recommendation
for creating designs like YouTube thumbnails, and you can get everything
you need completely free. So for this tutorial,
we'll be using Snappa, but if you are using
Canva or something else, Photoshop even, then just follow along because the steps are gonna
be mostly the same for you. Now, for anyone that's already familiar with some of our other videos. you'll know that we use and that we recommend a service called Placeit as well for creating logo animations, animated text, animated video intros. Well, they also now support creating YouTube thumbnails as well. So if you already have
a Placeit subscription, or if you're someone who is looking for some animated titles and those sorts of things
to use in your videos, then Placeit could be another option to use
for your thumbnails here too. Okay so getting to the thumbnail tutorial, the first thing we're gonna need. is a photo to use with it. So for all of our thumbnails, we'll usually have my
face on there somewhere. I might be pointing or smiling or holding up a product or a service if that's what the video is about. But the idea here is that you wanna try and
build that familiarity with yourself if you're
going to be in them. So using yourself in
your thumbnail images, but also quickly helping
your viewers decide if your video is for them. So if you're gonna be speaking
about a specific product, hold it up if you've got
it or bring up some photos and those sorts of things of it, so that your viewers can
quickly see that that video is the one that they want to click. So I'm gonna go ahead now and pose for a couple of quick photos and then we'll jump
across to the computer. (camera stutters) Okay so I'm over here now on the computer, I've got our video footage here opened inside a VLC player, which is a free media player on both Windows and a Mac. Now I'm just going through
to find those pieces where I posed for those thumbnails, was down here somewhere. And we wanna try and find few different variations of those that we can save out as images
to use in our thumbnail. So we just find a frame that we want. We pause the video, we come up here to video
and choose snapshot. That will take that screenshot. and save it to your pictures
folder or my pictures. If you're Mac or PC and
you wanna scrub through find all the different variations, all your different fancy
poses that you might use, video snapshot. So you wanna go ahead and save those and then pick which
one out of all of those that you're going to
use in your thumbnail. From there, you wanna head over to Snappa. Now, if you already have an account you can hit login. or you can choose get started for free, just enter your name, email
address, create a password and you're in . That just to show you, if we
go over to the pricing area, you can use Snappa for free. They will give you access
to 5,000 templates in there, 3,000,000 HD photos to use. And it will give you three
free downloads per month. Obviously, if you wanna go above that, then they've got really compelling
plans for those as well. So let me go over to my dashboard, cause I'm already logged in here. And if you're not seeing this create a graphic page
appear straight away, you just come up at the top and choose, create a graphic, and
then you'll see this. So in here you can see we've got presets, for Facebook posts, for Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter,
and YouTube thumbnail. Now, if we click on YouTube thumbnail and in here are some great templates so that you don't need to
start from absolute zero with your designs. You actually select any of these and customize them up
for your YouTube video. So if there's any here that
you already liked the look of, then you can select one of these and start to customize it up. So let's say we pick this one here. Then everything in here is editable. We can move the text around. We can change the font, change the colors, change the size, change the background picture. So there are some great
templates that you can use. What we are gonna do for this tutorial is to start from scratch. So we're gonna go to
menu, create a graphic, and take us back to this page. Instead of using the YouTube
thumbnail preset here of 1280 by 720, we're gonna make it a little
bit higher quality than that and make it 1080P or 1920 by 1080. So this will still work for
YouTube as a thumbnail image, but it will actually let you
create a higher quality image than what their preset template is here. So 1920 by 1080, let's go create. So now we have a blank canvas to work from here in Snappa. Now this is the image
that we will be creating, something very similar to our thumbnail that we've used for this exact video. So the first thing we're gonna start with is this background image here. So for that, we wanna go over to YouTube. Let's go to our YouTube channel. We've got our videos, so bring up a heap of our
videos page like this. Now I'm just gonna take
a screenshot of it. So on a Mac, I can hold down
Command plus Shift plus four, or on Windows you can
open up the snipping tool then you can just draw out the area that you wanna take a screenshot of, this measure will capture
the whole area here, 10 to about there, let go of the mouse. And that has saved a screenshot
on our desktop for us. So now we come back over here to Snappa, or you wanna come up the
top here to graphics. We're going to go to uploads. We'll select upload an image. and we're going to find that screenshot that we just saved for the background. Once that's uploaded we
can select that image and it's gonna drop it
into our canvas area here. And now we're just gonna scale it up to make it really, really big. So it covers all of that white area and I'm gonna drag it down a bit. And at the top here, we have a little rotate button. So if I click and hold on
that and move to the left or to the right, you can see that we
can rotate this around. So I'm gonna put a little
bit of an angle on it, maybe something like this. Now let's reposition it up the top here, making sure that it's totally covered the background area here. Now we're gonna click
on it so it's selected and we're gonna come up here to opacity and we are going to lower the opacity or to fade this out. Cause it was pretty faint in our other thumbnail that I showed you. So we hardly wanna see it. Now we wanna come back up
the top here to background. And in here there's lots of photos and
things that you can use, inside of your thumbnails, there's patterns that you can use as well. You can obviously upload
your own as we've just done, or you can pick a color if you
wanna have a color overlay, but for us here, we're gonna get patterns and just pick a pattern
with some random colors but of a gradient or a fade effect. Even something like this one here, we're gonna select this and you can see now because
we'd faded out our image we've now been able to bring
some color through here. Now we can customize this up as well. So you can see it's pretty green here if we come up the top now to effects then we can darken that down
if we wanna make it darker, we can come down here to
hue and slide this across and change the color. So you can see, we can add
a bit more blue in there. We can make it a bit brighter if we want, or lower the brightness. So you can easily change
up the look and feel to dial in what your after, just using some of these
basic settings here. Now see here we've got that
light down the bottom corner if we want it lighter over this side, we can come back over here to background and just hit the flip horizontal. And that's now flipped
it to the bottom there or if we wanna up to top, we can hit the other one flip vertical, and it's now brighter
up the top corner here. Okay so next up, we're gonna
bring in the image of me. So, we come across here to graphics, or again go to upload an image. So we'll go through it and find the image that we want to use, we'll select open. So that file gets uploaded. And then once that's done, if we click on our image here, then that will bring it in to our project. Now what is actually in here, you can pick it up and
you can move it around. You can scale it up and down. You can rotate it, but you actually can't
crop it down from here. So if you do wanna crop
it and remove a section, then you will need to do that upfront. So I'm gonna click on this and just press delete on the
keyboard to get rid of it. We're gonna come back
across here to graphics and this time instead
of just clicking on it, to add it in I can come up
to the little corner here crop and rotate. So we're gonna crop off all
of this extra stuff here that we don't want in there. Let's crop it off about there, crop off some of this extra stuff. And we will hit apply
and accept these changes. And that's then created a new version of that cropped file for us. So now we'll select the new one to bring it into our project. And with that image selected there, a new feature inside of Snappa here is the background removal. So if we select this now, that's going to go ahead
and analyze our image and is going to try and
remove the background from that for us. So you can see that's actually
done a pretty good job. It has left the chair in there, but I don't see that as
being too much of an issue because we had to crop that off as we scale this bigger and move it off to the side of the frame. So we're gonna scale this up. Probably turn around there somewhere, move across to the side. Maybe we'll make it a
bit bigger there we go. Somewhere around there. So that's looking pretty good. Now we're gonna add in some text. So we come up here to text,
we'll go add a heading. I get a little text box here to move it to where we want it, but we will just double click on it to be able to edit it. So I'm gonna type in thumbnail. We can select the text in here and we can come over
here and adjust the font. So for us, our font that
we use at Primal Video is Oswald and bold. Now I can make that big up
just using the up arrow here, or we can actually just type in a number if you know how big roughly
you'd like to make it, then we can stretch this out here so that it fits inside that box. Now we'll make this font here white. So again, we selected
it, come back over here and let's make it white 'cause we will have a box
or a color in behind it. So we'll have thumbnail. Now, if you select your text here and come up the top to duplicate, you can create a copy of that layout. So if you're gonna create
multiple text boxes or add multiple words this way, it will save you having to set them all up from scratch each time. So thumbnail tutorial, and we
might add one more in there, duplicate it again, update it. Now it's updated, we'll probably make that smaller cause it's not as important. Most important piece of this thumbnail is the words that say
thumbnail, tutorial updated. We'll probably also
put an exclamation mark on the end of it there, and we can move these around
to where we want them. Okay now I'm gonna add in
some color in behind them. So that text becomes much easier to read. So for that, I'm gonna add in a shape, let's pick a rectangle. It doesn't really matter. You could go a square if
you want it and resize it, but I'm gonna bring it over
here somewhere around here and stretch this out so
that it covers out text. Maybe make it a little bit shorter here. And then we're going to come up here and move that shape behind our text. And we do that using
these little tools here, move layer back or move layer forward. So we wanna move this one back and you might need to
click this a few times, so that it actually
ends up behind our text. And then we can further
adjust the size of the box so that it fits how we would like. Now when you're selecting your layers, if you do want some finer adjustment, you can use the keyboard, arrow keys if you'd like to move things up and down and left and right
in a more granular way than just clicking and
dragging with the mouse. Okay so that's looking pretty good there. I might just move the text out of the way so we can duplicate this background box. So we will hit duplicate on
that one for the next one here. And maybe we'll duplicate it one more time for the bottom one. Let's move it down towards that. Okay so let's move that text back up into the position that we wanted in somewhere around there. Let's grab this next box. Let's send that to the back. We'll move it to the back
so it's behind our text and let's position that
where we want that one and we'll resize that
box, something like that. And likewise with the bottom one here. Now with this bottom one here, instead of just being the gray as well, we could change the color of it and maybe we make it
our Primal Video blue. Maybe what we might do is
just make our background. a little bit darker as well. So if we select on our background, then we've got our opacity here. I can probably fade that
out a little bit more. So just some minor tweaks and adjustments. to make the text stand out. Then we'll come back over here to effect. And maybe we will just darken
this down a little bit. Now the other thing we like
to add in our thumbnail images is any graphics or any logos that will help people quickly work out what the video is about. So we're gonna head to Google.com, we're gonna search for YouTube logo. Now, normally I'd just
come across two images here and find an image that matched and something that was okay
for us to use in our videos. Something like this from Wikipedia. that generally okay to
use, but in this case, YouTube does provide their logos. You can get brand resources here. And it does clearly say that though while this page
is here to get you started, all users need to be approved by YouTube. So technically you're supposed to get
their approval for this, but I would say that we fall
in the very low category here. of using their logo. So download it, the logo, head back over to Snappa, we're go top to graphics, let's go to upload an image. Let's find that logo,
we're gonna select on that and it's dropped in and now we just put it where we'd want it. Maybe we make it a little bit bigger. Now because this thumbnail
that we're creating is a little meta and
it's about thumbnails, we probably add a few
others in there as well. So head back over to our YouTube channel and I'll probably just
take some more screenshots. of some of these to showcase in there. So I will zoom in on the page here using Command plus or Control
plus if you're on Windows and again, I'll be using
Command plus Shift plus four or the snipping tool on Windows to bring up our screenshot tool to capture some of these thumbnail images. So we've got one there,
mark up three of these. Now we head back to Snappa, graphics, upload an image, select those three new ones and go open and let's
select each one of them to drop them into our project. And you might notice the quality on these isn't that great, but it's
not gonna be a problem 'cause we're gonna make
them pretty small on here. Just as example, thumbnail images. So make them pretty small. Maybe I'll scale them
all down at this point. So they're all about the same size and the third one as well. And we can pick them up
and move them around. Now you will have one
over here, somewhere, move me across so we've
got a bit more room. Select this one here and let's start moving it to the back. Keep clicking it. Here you go, just behind my head. Now, if we select that thumbnail, we can rotate it a little bit to stands out a little bit on there and maybe we'll add a little thin border around the outside of this as well. So how we do that, is that we have to do it
by adding another shape. So if we add a shape, let's come down here
just to the empty shape, click on that, drops
it in our project here, let's change the color to white and let's move it up near this box. We will rotate it as well. And then we just position it
so that it fits on our image. And we might make that
box a little bit thinner and we'll wanna send that
border to the back as well, move it back further, keep clicking until it
goes behind my head. So now we'll quickly do the
same for the other two as well. Now we'll grab that border there first and I will duplicate that. So we'd have to keep recreating that to move it out of the way here first, bring up the next one so that we wanna have it about here, straighten this back up and put it on top and we can move them back. And the same as the image itself, keep clicking on this until
it's back behind our picture. There we go. So we got two in there. So the same for the third one, let's duplicate that border first, and grab our third one, move it across. Maybe we'll put a bit of an
angle on this one as well, reposition the border on top of it and send it to the back. Okay so now that we've got
those graphic elements in there, might just resize a few things
just to make it all fit. And we'll move this across a little bit. Same with the box behind it. Let's bring the text in that shape on top of this thumbnail image. So we're going to bring
those ones forward. And likewise with that
background there as well, let's bring that forward. and maybe we'll move these over just a little bit as well
so then more central. Okay so that's looking pretty good, once you've got it how you'd like it, remember to come up the
top here to hit save, you're not gonna lose your hard work. And then when you're ready to add it onto your YouTube videos, so you're just gonna come
up the top here to download. And then the one I recommend you use here for your YouTube thumbnails
is the web optimized JPEG. So I select on that and
give you a thumbnail a name, let's call it YouTube thumb and save that. And then you wanna head
over to your YouTube channel into the studio dashboard
area, come down to videos. And then to the video that you wanna add the thumbnail image on. Press the little details
or edit button here. And then down here, it
says upload thumbnail, we're gonna click on that, select your image and press open. And you can see our new
thumbnail images updated here. You just wanna hit save to
make sure that that is applied. So that's how easy it is to
create great looking thumbnails for your YouTube videos, just using Snappa. All right so now that you've got your thumbnail templates sorted, another powerful element of branding is animated titles and
introductions to use in your videos. And I wanna stress that it is not as hard as you might think. And linked on screen is a video
to help you with just that. And I'll see you in the next one.
