YouTube is amazing: it’s second largest search engine in the world and has a huge audience of viewers hungry for fresh content. However, if you’re dreaming of making a fortune as a creator and building your own strong viewer community — you do need to remember about creating great channel and video graphics since Day 1. No matter how good your videos are, if you want someone to watch them and subscribe to your channel — you need to create some appealing images pushing the users towards it.
We created for you a special project in Vectr with set sizes for all YouTube graphics and some good hints included. Check it out below and share it with friends:
Now, let’s discuss briefly how to optimize each of the YouTube graphics and make them look great.
Channel Icon
Channel icon is the logotype of your channel. It’s the symbol that makes your channel easily recognizable to your subscribers or viewers, and that triggers the immediate attention of first-time visitors.
By default, the icon for your channel is the image associated with your Google Account. You can easily change the image to a custom one going to Google Account settings.
Channel Art
If the logo makes your channel memorizable, channel art makes it sexy and builds up your subscribers count. Landing on your channel the visitors can say a lot about it just by the look of the channel art — how creative the content creator is and how much he or she cares.
The channel art shouldn’t be too complicated though — it must be a clean and smart image showcasing what the channel is all about: its mood, topics, and providing some important information if necessary. Consider adding your hashtag, slogan or logo to the cover image. A great idea would be also adding some message on the channel art prompting viewers to subscribe. Make sure it also matches well to the colors of the channel icon and video thumbnails.
The tricky thing about the YouTube channel art is that its visible part varies depending on the platform: desktop, mobile or TV. The recommended size for the art image is 2560 x 1440 pixels, but the safe zone visible across all of the devices is 1540 x 427 pixels zone in the center.
Video Thumbnails
Thumbnails serve as mini-marketing posters for your YouTube videos and are very important triggering views and engagement. Time spent on YouTube is valuable, and each user is wondering if the video is worth watching by its thumbnail. The goal is to make them look awesome.
Some tips for creating clickable thumbnails from Creators Playbook created by Google are:
- Start thinking about thumbnail even before shooting the video. Have some proper lighting, frame the shot well, and capture good imagery that make the video compelling.
- Consider shooting photos while filming your videos to capture images for thumbnails.
- Use some graphic editing software to resize, modify, or combine images together in the frame. Make sure the size of the image is appropriate.
- Make sure the thumbnails are visible and readable on the YouTube videos. Even though they may be great when looking at the full screen versions, smaller they may seem not clear.
Measuring the results
Optimizing the icon, channel art and video thumbnails is so vital and strategic that you’re going to see the results immediately. The above-mentioned graphics form the whole visual identity of your YouTube channel, making it attractive for the viewers and prompting them to subscribe for future updates.
The relevant metrics which you could check in YouTube Analytics are the watch time and engagement: which videos are getting most clicked, how many subscribers are you getting versus views? Based on these metrics you could easily identify where you could improve, whether your thumbnails aren’t perfect or the channel art needs a call-to-action to boost subscribes count.
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