Create Irresistible YouTube Thumbnails with Canva

1. 1 Introduction: Why Thumbnails matter?: Hi everybody. This is Ronny, welcome to this new class about creating awesome thumbnails with Canva. First of all, welcome to our house. This is where Jenna and I are living here in Sydney, and we create all our courses from this living room. Welcome one more time. All right. This class is going to teach you exactly how to get views on YouTube with very attractive and click worthy thumbnails. If you pay attention to how you get your videos to perform well on YouTube, there are two main factors. The Number 1 factor is optimizing your title, you need to have a very good title full of keywords that people search for, so that your video is being discovered. The Number 2 factor is to have a visual that gets people's attention, that gives people a good reason to click on your image, to click on your video. that's what we're going to focus on in this course. A little bit about us. I'm Ronny, I work at Canva head of communities and Diana, who is here behind the camera, Hi Diana? Diana is a Canva certified creative. Together we create online courses. Let me tell you a little bit more about this specific class. In this class, we are going to teach you about creating thumbnails, but not any thumbnails. We wanted to select two specific thumbnails from two specific videos that are performing well on our YouTube channel. Diana and I run this YouTube channel called Design with Canva. We have 6.2 or 6,300 followers, 6,300 subscribers. Some of our videos are doing way better than others. We wanted to focus on two of these videos that are performing well. We will be selecting the video with the most views over the last month and recreate that thumbnail, Diana is going to show you that, and I am going to recreate the thumbnail of the video that over the life span of our channel has had the best click-through rate. The click-through-rate is when your video is showed to your audience, so there is an impression that means somebody like YouTube is showing that video and when people click on it, so that is the video that has been showed with the most click per number of impressions. That's the click-through rate per impression. It gives us a metric of the quality of the thumbnail, because if people click, there must be a good reason. All right. That's basically the program for today. Then at the end of the class, as always, we will have a project for you. If you're ready, let's jump to Lecture 1. 2. Trends and inspiration: Hello guys, and welcome to this lesson. In this lesson, I want to talk about trends. So I spend a lot of time actually, more than I was expecting, doing some research, reading articles, and then analyzing a bunch of different YouTube channels. I spot some trends, something that a lot of really big channels were doing over and over and over again. With these thumbnails. Yes, with the thumbnails. So I thought this must be working because everyone is doing it. I'm going to share with you all these trends that I found. So it's more than trends, it's also inspiration for our students who need to create their own thumbnails. Yes. Exactly. Sounds good June, let's jump into it. So let's go to the next slide and what I found out is that a lot of YouTubers are using Doodles and also actually this Silhouette around the subject. Like the outline, right? Yes. So for example, if you see this is Gary V, for those who don't know. A lot of people are using these white silhouette around the subject and then this little doodles you see around the person. Yeah. This is a completely different channel, completely different topic. They are using this same thing. So they have the silhouette. Actually she has two like a shadow and the white silhouette and then this little doodle thing. The doodles for those of our students that might not know what doodles are, it's like hand-drawn graphics, illustration that looks hand-drawn anyways, and you can find them in Canva easily. Yes, you can do these kind of effects really easy in Canva. Canva pro, actually for those who do it. So that's doodles and silhouettes outline, I like to call them also around your photos. That's a nice indeed trend that we've been using as well on our channel. I actually really like it because these adds personality and also like a fun texture. Playfulness. Touch of playfulness. I think maybe this is working because people want to have fun when they watch a YouTube video. What's next? Let's go to the next slide. When I was doing my research about these YouTube thumbnails, I found out that a lot of YouTubers are using six universal human expressions. These are the six I found. These are the three first This is when you want to show your face in your YouTube thumbnails and you don't know what kind of face to do. These are the six facial expressions. Happiness, sadness. I want to share with you. Surprise. The first one is happiness and you see this is really excited and a happy face. Almost too much. Happiness can be smiling or. Just ecstatic. Then we have sad and if you see this face and then you read the title, it makes sense. No phone for 24 hours, sad face. Somebody taking away the phone. Then surprise. These people use a lot and we use it also a lot. I try to replicate every face. So happiness, okay, sad. Surprise. Surprise. The surprise face is the one that I saw more of them across different channels. The next slide are the three next. Facial expressions. Universal human expressions. This one is fear. I like the fear one. This one is the best example. That explains why some people smile funny, they're just afraid. Yes exactly. I was like why do they put this kind of face? It's like fear, like scary. What are you going to say about me? What are you going to think about me or So fear is one of the six expressions? Yes. Then anger. Here we have, this is actually. From the movie, right? Yes. Will Smith. Will Smith, he has a channel, really successful channel. I took this one from his channel. So and you are like this one or 11 million views, well-done, Will. No, his channel is amazing. Then disgust, like you can see here, her face. Like a disgusted face. I was also like I didn't understand the faces a lot of YouTubers were doing. Disgust is hard. It's disgust. So these are like three inspirational human expressions that you can use for your thumbnails. Six actually. Yes, six. That's what I said. No, you said three. So six and then next one to the next that trend that I found and this one. Look at this guy. Is the finger pointing and arrows. This we use a lot. Also because like as you see Ronnie, he took this photo of fingers pointing. We do this a lot because you can use it on so many different YouTube thumbnails. I actually saw that this girl, Sarah Peach. I don't know her last name. Sarah Peach. Yes. She call herself like that because her last name is really difficult to pronounce. So it's Sarah Peach. She used these posts a lot. Almost on every thumbnail and the surprise face too. This combo works a lot, surprise face and pointy like Ronnie. The arrows like pointing at something that you are going to talk about in the video. So for example here, Mike. Marcus Brown Lee. Marks. Not Marks, Marcus. Marcus. Marcus Brown Lee. Yeah. His YouTube channel is amazing. So he's going to talk about this phone, pixel three display problem. He's pointing at this phone because he's going to talk about this. In this YouTube channel thumbnail she's going to talk about this Income and what it gets you. Lifestyle. The apartment that you can get being elite. This is another idea of what you can include in your YouTube thumbnails. Pointing arrows. To get the attention of people. That's a good one. What's next? Next, I found that a lot of big channels are using thumbnails in order to create playlist consistency. I also find out because we were trying to replicate that on our channel. We were using exactly the same thumbnail but just changing the number. After this research, I found out that you can change almost everything in the thumbnail but keep something very consistent. Not always the same thumbnail. Here you see, the pictures in the background are completely different. The only thing that stays consistent is this, Will Smith: The Jump and here you keep originals. Also I guess the color correction of each frame they look consistent. So that's also important, it's something more subtle on this series that you might not see or you might not mentioned. So color correction or the filter that you use on your photos. For example, another thing that I found in order to create consistency in your thumbnails is putting something on the left. To the left side. To the lateral of the thumbnail. I've seen this a lot on different channels in order to recreate these consistency across different avenues. This is Yoga with Adrian. We love Adrian. Very good yoga channel. That's what I found out. I really like this one because we were trying to replicate it and we were lost. She does a great job at creating series. Like 30-day challenges, which I guess the yoga channel is very appropriate for that because people do yoga and they want to do a series like go through a cycle of a bootcamp. So it's a very good idea. So I was really happy to find these trends and also learn by watching and analyzing different channels. You can see here also the same thing. Other examples. Like other examples that they changed the picture at the background and keep the same title. I love that you used only the channels that we like in your presentation, that's really cool. They're doing amazing work. Here also the WeeklyVee playlist, they keep the same logo. It's also good. I think it's a trend as well to develop a logo for a specific playlist or a specific show that you have. That's true. I know pushing that at Canva as well. We have Sharing is Caring. I developed a little logo for Sharing is Caring. We have the other playlists, like one for all. We really want to have this branding for your show. If you are serious about getting into YouTube and video production, that might be a good idea to think in terms of shows and to try to brand your different shows differently so they have a different look and feel. So people can clearly distinguish oh, this is the WeeklyVee or oh, this is Sharing is Caring with Ronnie. Because sometimes you upload different videos. Maybe one is about a playlist, like the Weekly Vee, and then you upload a tutorial, and then you upload a vlog video. But these three videos have different thumbnails and when you are going to put your videos in the playlist, they need to be consistent one across all the videos. Agreed. Next. I found out these trends. A lot of channels, maybe all the channels I saw, were using this split image trend, I will say, and I also found out after analyzing all these different thumbnails, that they have different ways to use the split image. One way is before and after. I've seen videos like this on YouTube a lot and I'm sure you too. Before and after. When we're not working we don't watch the same kind of things. Well, at least on my YouTube channel, on the feed, I see a lot of before-and-after because I like to watch photography videos and I see a lot of before and after. For example here, she is like, "How To Look Good on Instagram Photos." Here's a boring photo and this is a more fashion or stylished. After watching the video you get more insights on how to do it right. Yeah. This is a before and after style of YouTube thumbnail. Then we have the versus. You have more explanation in the title like Expectations versus Reality. Then you have here both photos. I've seen this a lot Then we have the two subjects and two scenes. The two subjects is for example, an interview or for example, we are teaching, two people in the same video and they split the image using different colors or maybe two photos of the two people, one next to the other. I saw this a lot. Then the two scenes, I think they were using two different snapshots. How do you say two different scenes of the video? Frames. Frames? Frames of the video, so that you have an idea of what you are going to watch in the video. Like a little storytelling into images. Yeah, making-of. Yes. Two scenes in one thumbnail. I saw this a lot and I really liked it and I think I'm going to implement it more often on our YouTube channels. Good idea. What's next? Yes, this one is the hardest trend and I saw it so many times. I really like it and I'm also going to implement it more, and this is the subject in front of text. For example here, if you pay attention, Will Smith is in front of the Dubai text. You can see that he's in front of the B, the U you see his ear. Big ears. One ear, and what do you call this? The skis. The skis, they are in front of the text and sometimes can be really subtle parts of the body. But they are there and it has a 3-D effect. I love this. Dimension, depth in your photo. Depth in your YouTube thumbnail or any thumbnail. I'm just saying YouTube because I did this analysis on YouTube but can be any thumbnail. Here she's also on top of this banner she drew. We can see that her head is in front of this text and I have a couple of more examples here. This one, I have three because I want to show three different kinds of subject in front of the text. For example, this one, they are covering almost 50 percent of the text. But you can still read it. But you can still read the text because the text is huge. The brain automatically tells you it says, ''Mentors''. You can cover maybe almost 50 percent of the text if you can read the word behind it. Then here he's only covering one word or one letter of the three words. Then here we have something more subtle as I was just saying. It's just like a little finger. That's actually a cool technique. Yes. Because even if it's really subtle like just one finger or one ear, it has a cool effect, 3-D effect. I really like that. Then this is also something that I saw in so many different channels. The text with border. Outline. Outline. Text with outline, I saw this one in this Vanessa Lau channel, Gary V, and so many other channels, I saw it. This actually helps you pop your text. I also saw in this video of Vanessa that she tries to put only four words per title, per thumbnail, because like this, you can stretch your text even bigger, make it bigger on your thumbnail. That's it about text with outline. Then I also saw that a lot of thumbnails had the blocks behind the text. For example here, she has this black rectangle behind the text, so it pops more. Here, it's the opposite, white in a dark text. It's all about contrast. Yes, in order to find contrast for the text to pop more. These are all the channels that I analyzed in order to bring you all these ideas and inspirations. If you want, you can take a screenshot and then try to find them on YouTube, so you can also analyze their YouTube thumbnails. Now we are in our last slide of this lesson. Here I have some recommended fonts, which are Bebas Neue. I think it's pronounced, Neue. Neue, and we have Oswald, Poppins, and Montserrat. So these four fonts, I'm recommending these fonts because they are really big, really bold, and you can use them on your thumbnail, and stretch them really big if you use around four words per thumbnail, and they will be really easy to read if you have a really small thumbnail. Do you recommend to use them in all caps? Yes, I will say. Yes. Because they will be easier for people to read even if your thumbnail is really small. Okay. Well, thank you Diana. These were very cool tips, very interesting trends, and I hope that it will give you some inspiration for creating your thumbnails. In the next lecture, I will be talking about thumbnails strategy. So I'll see you there. 3. 2020 Thumbnail Strategy: Alright guys, welcome back to the class. Thank you Diana, for showing us the trends and inspiration for your YouTube thumbnails. You're welcome.[LAUGHTER] Yes, so let's move on. I'm going to take you through this lecture and we are going to talk about thumbnail strategy. So I'm going to develop two particular strategies in this lecture, and I'm also going to go over some common guidelines, tips, or good practices I would say for developing your thumbnails. And then in the next lectures, we will actually get to Canva and design two different thumbnails. Right Canva. [LAUGHTER] I wasn't going to call you Canva. Right Diana? Yeah. All right. So let's get started, I have a little presentation here. Let me start by telling you that the reason why you need good thumbnails is that there is an overload of content especially on YouTube. Over 500 hours of content are uploaded on YouTube every minute. I know it's a number that is difficult to fully comprehend but that means a lot of video uploaded on YouTube every single minute. That means that there is a fierce competition for people's attention on YouTube. Everybody's trying to catch the same eyeball.[LAUGHTER] I saw you wanted to make that same joke. That is the reason why you should put all the chances on your side in order to catch those people's attention. Okay? In order to put all the chances on your side, there are two things you can do. The first one is optimizing your titles. What do people search for on YouTube? You have to find the right key words. You have to optimize your video titles so that people search for certain things on YouTube and they find you. Of course, it's not that straightforward. There is a whole algorithm thing going on and authority building on the platform, but it still comes down to optimizing your video and titles and finding the right keyword. Yeah. And also apart from the title, there is the video description, the tags, and all the text that you put into your video, written text. A whole work of text optimization. I would call that SEO optimization, search engine optimization.This is not what this class is about. This is a class about number two right here. Creating thumbnails that give people a good reason to click on your video. So these are the two things that really you can influence if you want more views on your videos, optimizing your titles, write keywords, and optimizing your thumbnails. So of course, this class is focusing on the later. On the second point. Let me give you my first thumbnail strategy. Are you ready for this? Yeah.[LAUGHTER] The first one is show your face. We already mentioned that. Diana already mentioned that when she was talking about the facial expressions. Remember the six facial expressions; happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, anger, and disgust. Diana can you show us a disgust face? [LAUGHTER] Wait. All right. What about yours? My disgust face? Yeah.[LAUGHTER] All right. Remember guys that these facial expressions, especially if you're going to show your face on your thumbnail, be careful not to overdo it though some of these people are overdoing it. Try to be natural but still have this expression. And I know for some of you guys it's going to be difficult because some of you are shyer than others and they don't like to show their faces. You don't have to show your face but it's a real advantage and it's a real trend. We have observed doing our research, it's something we are doing and it's working for us. Yes and sorry to interrupt but I have a tip here. Some people, I think the one that is the fear example, this is a screenshot of the video. It's not like she was posing for a photo doing this face. Sometimes when you are vlogging or you're talking to the camera, you do these kind of faces without noticing. And while you are watching the video, if you see something like a face that you did and it's really funny or like any of these facial expressions, you can just take a snapshot and use this for your thumbnail. That's a tip. That is a tip indeed. I've done it before and it's working good. We encourage you to do it. So that's the first strategy, show your face. Use the commonly recognized facial expressions. Thumbnails strategy number two. That is one that is increasingly popular on YouTube. This one consists of using bold keywords, or keyword singular, in your thumbnail. Why is that? Because if you choose the right keyword, and you don't need a lot of texts. I would say maximum three to four words on your thumbnails, but these words are super important. How to choose them. Well the idea here is not if you are creating, let's say a tutorial about Canva, create cool thumbnails with Canva. Your thumbnail should probably not say the exact same thing as your title, but you would choose a couple of keywords that would either create attention, create some mystery, or create some kind of intrigue like kind of you give people a good reason to want to know more with these keywords. I have a couple of examples to show you. And you can also use these keywords to complement the text studies in your title. You can also do that. It should be a complimentary thing actually. So I want to show you these two examples that come from our videos that have been working well. The first one it says, PowerPoint killer. And then you see a Canva logo here so it creates some kinds of intrigue like, how is Canva a PowerPoint killer? You want to know. It gives you an incentive, an intrigue like a kind of mystery, and you want to click to know more. And a thing maybe also, a lot of people they don't know that Canva has a presentation feature and you are also putting that on the thumbnail like present feature. Present feature.[OVERLAPPING] So it creates some kind of mystery and creates curiosity, intrigue, you want to know more. And this one, which is my favorite, it says finally and my face is like, finally. Finally, what? Why does Ronny look so shocked. Yes. What is this camera with the Play button here in the background? It seems like something is cooking. I'm not saying what it is. I'm just showing you that in, this video performed really well. It's one of our best performing. Both of these videos are some of our best performing videos. Actually, when you created this thumbnail. Yeah. I was like this is not going to work because what we were doing before, it was putting some keywords, complementary to that title. Similar to the title. Yeah, Kind of to the one on the left. Yeah. So it was very consistent, talking about what is happening in the tutorial. But this one is just finally one face, one expression, kind of like canva logo in a play button. Yeah. So I was like I'm not sure how this is going to work. You didn't believe in me. Yeah. We can say that. But then the video exploded. Yes, and I'm happy that you took this chance, actually. All right, thank you for believing in next time. So these are the two main thumbnail strategy. I would say show your face and use relevant keywords that will create tension, mystery, intrigue. Curiosity. Awaken the curiosity of your viewers, okay? Yeah. So these are the two main overarching strategies, I would say. Now I want to give you a couple of tips on how to implement these strategies and general tips about creating thumbnails for your videos. The first thing I want to raise here is that YouTube is not like TV. When you turn on the TV, the traditional TV, because nowadays people have TVs, but it's mostly connected to the internet, but rewind a couple of years and turn on the TV and you have your favorite like channels. So the content on TV is already playing for you. You don't really pick it; it's there. Unlike on YouTube, you login to YouTube and then you have to click, you have to pick something to start with. That is why thumbnails are so important. That's the first thing I wanted to show you here. I think it's relevant to notice that. Second is that it doesn't matter how good your video is, you could create the best video on YouTube. If nobody is encouraged to click on that video. If nobody discovers that video, among the 500 hours of video uploaded every minute on a platform. Nobody is going to notice your masterpiece of video. So creating a video is one thing and you should not put all your efforts into creating the best video in the world. You should keep a good amount of that effort to create your thumbnail and to optimize your title. So that's my second tip, like don't spend too much time. I've heard people saying they spent as much time creating the thumbnail as the entire video. So just be mindful about that. I have heard this from big you-tubers. They could spend maybe two days filming and editing. Yeah. They will spend one day or two days on just creating this thumbnail. The perfect thumbnail, right? Yes. They do it and then they redo it and sometimes they upload a video with one thumbnail and they think, no, maybe I would change it again.They change it once again. Once the video is uploaded. That's a good thing that you can, We'll come to that. Yeah. So your thumbnails need to encapsulate the same message as your videos. So it needs to form like a whole. Your thumbnail, your video they should communicate the same message, the same story. So you have to find a way to represent the whole story within your thumbnails. So that's important also. Next, YouTube is a very visual platform. Facebook is also a very visual platform. So your thumbnails should play and obey the same rules. Your thumbnail should be highly visual. So you can see here, I see your thumbnail. I'm excited. I want to click and watch this video. So remember that you are playing on a platform where visual is the name of the game. So be visual like be highly visual. So a great thumbnail will be able to tell the entire story already touched on that point. But if you can really encapsulate the entire story. So if it's a before and after like Diana was mentioning, if it's a process of transformation. Try to illustrate that with your thumbnail. Without watching the video, people should understand what the video is all about just by watching the thumbnail. So the best-performing thumbnails will be the ones that tells the whole story. I think like for example, we have two good examples. Like for example, you have the example of the video thumbnail that creates curiosity. The one that you just showed us with little pencil, what was Finally? Finally, yes. The thumbnail that I'm going to teach in this course is this thumbnail the one that tells the story,. The whole story? Yes. Okay. Perfect. Next, make your thumbnails colorful, bright, and contrasty. So that's tied to the previous tip I just gave you that YouTube is a highly visual platform, so your thumbnails need to be highly visual. What are the rules to get people's attention with visuals? Well, a lot of colors. Showing your face. Bright, contrasty. It needs to stand out. So that's the general rule here. You need to get that attention. You need to be standing out from the rest from the competition. Remember everybody is trying to catch the same ball. Eyeball. So use these techniques, use the graphic design fundamentals like color, brightness, contrast. All of this will help you create powerful thumbnails. What would be click worthy? So you really have to take time and that's why some of the big YouTubers take as long as sometimes a couple of days to create and perfect their thumbnails because they really have to figure out what would be click worthy. You can almost think like Clickbait. Don't go Clickbait showing your tips, showing your bombs on there. What do you mean by Clickbait? Because maybe some people, they don't understand the keyword Clickbait. So Clickbait is some kind of image that would give people a reason to click. To force that click by overdoing it a little bit just to get the click. A typical example is you see a video and you see a close-up on a woman's chest with big boobs, that would be Clickbait because they know, men, would click on that just because they see big boobs. Then Clickbait is if they put a thumbnail and then people would go to the video, they won't see this image.This is Clickbait? Probably. Yeah. They won't see anything related. It's like you fool people into clicking by having a visual that is maybe not related to the content. So we don't encourage you to do this, but it's a fine line. So what would be click worthy? So it's the fine line between click worthy and Clickbait, but you have to experiment. You have to find that frontier between what is too much and what is good enough for making people click. So it's an art. I>> think maybe click worthy or trying to make people click. One of the good examples is the human emotions. Because for example, in your thumbnail, the one that says finally you have a face like what's happening? This is something that gets people attention, but is not Clickbait.I want to go back to this thumbnail. Yes. I would say it's almost Clickbait. Yeah. Because, even if I put the canva video logo and people were waiting for the video feature on canvas. So I'm not saying that video is about this, but I'm suggesting it. So it's Clickbait. Finally, we've been waiting for this. This is kind of like in the border line. Exactly. That's why I was scared when you came up with this idea. I think you got the point. You have to be almost Clickbait, so don't be Clickbait. Be almost clickbait. That's the best way I can articulate this. Yeah, because it's an art. It's a balance. Yeah, exactly. I would say it's a balance like the guy walking on this line here, six foot on top of the floor. You have to balance these things. You have to feel it. What kind of analogy. Is a circus analogy. Next tip. Don't be too distracting. Don't be like this guy here on top. Too crowded, overdoing it. When you look at these thumbnails, you don't really know where to look first. There's too much information going on there. It's too saturated. So don't be too all over the place too crowded. In your thumbnails keep it simple. Stick to your story. You remember his name? I really love this guy on YouTube. Matt D' Avella. Matt D' Avella. D' Avella. D' Avella. He is a very good YouTuber. You can see his thumbnails.They have absolutely no words. Very minimalist. There is harmony between the colors, the color collection, the theme. You see it's quite minimalistic indeed, but it's working. Yeah. I really like this example or actually his thumbnails. Because when you look at his photos, he's telling you the full story of his video in just one photo. That's also an art. This is photography art because we also do photography, and when you want to tell a story, you need to be really careful with all the elements that you include in your photo. He's doing an amazing job with each thumbnail. You need to go to his YouTube channel and check his thumbnails. All right. Yeah. We'll do. Next, I ask for feedback. That's why sometime you can take up to a couple of days to come up with the right thumbnail. Because you create your first thumbnail and then you could use your other social media channels like Facebook group or a Facebook page, or even like Twitter, to post two different versions of your thumbnail and ask your audience which one do you prefer, A or B? Very simple and you can get a good feedback on what your audience would be more entailed to click on. Asking for feedback is always good. Experiment with different styles. That's what I said like thumbnail A, thumbnail B. Get into your analytics. Like leave them on for a couple of days Or a couple of months too because they do Or a couple of months to have enough data, yeah. Yes. Also you could experiment for the same series of videos, for example, if it's tutorials. You create two groups on YouTube, to playlist and then one of the groups you upload one specific style of thumbnails and the other group you upload another style of thumbnails, but these are the same kind of videos. After two or three months, you can go back and see which group performed better. That would give you an indication on what style of thumbnails has performed better. That's also one great thing about YouTube. You can change your thumbnails. Yeah. That's cool. You could even go back to your best performing videos, the ones that have the most views. Like the five ones that have the most views on your channel. Change the thumbnails and see what's going on. Does it go up faster? Does it drop a little bit? You have the choice to either go back to the original thumbnail or if the new one is performing better, then it gives you an indication this is a better style. Don't be afraid to run some experiment. I know a lot of people they will just put one thumbnail and leave it like this forever. Don't. Thumbnail for this video done forever. I was actually going to say something because you said that run these experiments with a high performing videos. Yeah. But actually I will do it the other way. Because if these videos are working well, maybe it's because the thumbnail is doing it's magic. I will do these experiments with videos that are not performing really well. You can check on YouTube. You can see the analytics and see the impression click through rate, and play with the ones that has the lowest click through rate. You can see if by changing the thumbnail you will have an increase on their clicks and yeah. It's a good idea implying that you have already a certain number of followers or subscribers. If you have a small channel, it's possible that your videos with the lowest click through rate have 50 views. So you don't have enough data to really understand if the thumbnail is even making any difference at this stage. Depending on the size of your channels, or the size of the number of views you get. But I think it's a good strategy also. Yeah. Take a set of pictures while shooting your video. You're shooting your video, take half an hour to not just extract a frame from your video afterwards, but during the shooting take your time to shoot some photos like actual photos, higher resolution photos, full-frame with your camera if you have a D-S-L-R or whatever you are using. Take that time, you can see here an example that, I don't remember if this was an actual photo we took or if it was a frame from the video but that's the kind of result. It was a frame. Actually it is a frame of the video, but I just wanted to illustrate that you can take a picture with the same Setup. Setup of, when you are filming the video, instead of filming you can take a couple of photos with the same setup. Good point. Yeah. One thing, be careful about the positioning of your objects. Try to avoid the lower right corner of your thumbnails for putting important information because the YouTube timer, time indicator will always be positioned here. Especially if you are browsing YouTube on a mobile phone, which people do every time more, so using YouTube from your phone. Be careful about this. Then finally, keep an eye at all times on your growth and performances. Use the data that YouTube puts at your disposal, the analytics, the insights, your channel dashboard and get in there. Make some effort to understand them, what they mean and how they affect your performances. I believe this is super important. It's not that straightforward when you first go there you see all these numbers and especially if you're not a number person like me, it could be intimidating. But it's really not that complicated. There are a lot of channels actually on YouTube explaining how these works. I recommend you follow people like Tim Schmoyer, Nick Newman, who are very good at explaining all this and also crushing it on YouTube. Or just type on Google or YouTube how to read YouTube analytics. I'm sure you will find tons of articles and videos that will explain everything. Exactly. That's it for us guys and for this lecture on thumbnail strategy. In the next two lectures, Jenna and I are going to show you step-by-step how to create two different YouTube thumbnails from our own channels. Make sure to follow the lectures. [MUSIC] 4. Recreate Diana's Thumbnail w/ Canva: Guys, here we are in our analytic page in our YouTube channel. I have here the data of the last 28 days. If we go down below here, we see that there is the list of our top videos in this period. The number one is this one, is one of my tutorials. Today I'm going to show you and explain how I created this thumbnail and of course I'm also going to explain why I think this thumbnail is helping me or is helping this video rank first on this list. First I'm going to show you here, the design in Canva, and I'm going to break it down a little bit first to explain why I think this is working, and second, we are going to do the recreation of this design in Canva of course. First thing is that when I created this thumbnail I really thought about telling the full story of the tutorial let's say, in this one thumbnail. In this tutorial, I teach people how to create videos in Canva, but these videos include animations and also include music. Here we have the keywords, "Create videos with animations and music." Also what I did in this thumbnail is to add this block or this rectangular shape behind animations because I knew when I created this tutorial that animations are a hot topic. Then I also used these two elements, the little stars and this animation, because I thought it gave the thumbnail something like a magical or fun to the design. Of course, I included the logo of Canva, so people can recognize really fast that the tutorial is about Canva. Then I also added this brush because I thought it could also add something of creativity to the thumbnail, and some other elements like the paper texture at the back, the gradient, and of course here it is very important that I also included this phone because in the tutorial I teach how to create the video with your phone. The first video that we include in the animation is made with a phone, and also we have here this icon which is really important because it's the symbol of YouTube or video. This icon also helps people recognize really fast that this thumbnail talks about videos even before reading. They see this and they understand, ah, something about videos? Then they can read this and understand the full idea of the tutorial. When I was also doing this research about thumbnails, I read about this, and they were saying that it is really important to tell the story of your video in your thumbnail maybe not in all your thumbnails, but once in a while you can do it. I think because I explain really well everything that I'm teaching in the tutorial in this thumbnail, it's helping this tutorial to retain people's attention because I explain everything that is in there and if people are interested in this topic they will watch till the end. Now let's start with the recreation of this design. The first thing that I'm going to do is to open a blank page in Canva. Here I am in my Canva homepage and the first thing that I'm going to do is to select this presentation category because it has the right measurements or size that I need for this thumbnail. I'm going to click here, and this is going to open a blank page for me to start from scratch. The first thing that we are going to do, I'm going to go back to the original design just to illustrate what I'm going to do now. If you pay attention to the background of this sign there is a paper texture. Behind this gradient, there is a paper texture. I'd like to add once in a while in the background some texture so the design is not so boring and it has something fun, let's do that. What I did is to go to this left menu, and you see here the option backgrounds, let's open this menu, and I'm going to type here in the search box, paper. You will see this texture here, it is the one called folded paper texture, I'm going to add this one to the background. What I'm going to do now is to reduce the transparency, because I don't want it to be too loud in the design, I don't want it to be interfering with my text or the other elements, so I'm going to reduce the transparency. Next step or next layer that I'm going to add to this design is an element. I'm going back to the original design and I'm going to show you. Again, here there is another layer, and it is a gradient actually. A gradient with two colors. I'm going to lock this or wait, here you see, it has two colors. Now I'm going to lock it. Let's go back here to my recreation of the design. Let's go to the left bar menu, and let's select the third option, Elements. Let's open this menu, and what I'm going to do now is to search by gradient. Let's see all the options that Canva provides here. I'm going to search for this option. As you see here we have many different shapes, some of them are square, for example, this one it has two colors but I need a shape that fills my full background. I think this is going to be the right fit. Now I'm going to stretch this element. As you see here, it has two colors, and let's stretch this element. For this design I actually used some of my previous color palette, I think I don't have them in hand here, oh yes, I have them here. One of the colors, let me check here, was this baby blue let's say and baby pink. Let's try to find a baby blue and the baby pink. If you don't have of course these colors in your color palette you can go to the default colors and there are some similar colors over here. Let's do it for example for the baby blue, going to select this one, and if you want to try to get something similar to this color, you can go here to New color, and try to play with the color picker until you find something maybe similar, and also play with the tint around here, maybe a little bit lighter like that. Maybe you can get something similar to what I'm using if you want to recreate exactly the same design. I'm going to use my colors, and the next step, if you see here now we cannot see the paper texture at the back. What I'm going to do is to add some transparency to this layer because I want to see what is happening in the background. I'm going to this icon, the Transparency icon, and I'm going to move the slider to the left side until we can see the background. But we can also see the gradient because if we remove or if we had too much transparency then we cannot see the gradient effect. Let's leave it like this. Maybe we can remove a little bit of transparency from the background, so we can see it more. If you pay attention when I'm moving this gradient layer, there are some pink or fuchsia lines that appear. That is like a cross, that means that my element is exactly aligned to the center, that's what I want, and now that my gradient element is aligned to the center, I'm going to lock this layer or this element, because I'm going to add a lot of elements on top, and I don't want this to move all the time. Let's go back to the original design and let's see what else it is in there. We have text, and let's recreate this, oops, let's lock this. Let's recreate this text box or text boxes. We have three different text boxes here, as you see. I created three different boxes because this one is a different font, and these two are different fonts, but if you pay attention, they have different sizes. The one in white, it's a 120, and this one is a 128. I created three different boxes so I could have more flexibility when designing or deciding the font, size, color and everything [ LAUGHTER] Let's go back to my recreation design and let's add three different text boxes. I'm going to the left menu bar and I'm opening the Text tab and let's go here. We can select any of them. I'm going to click on this one. Let's add three boxes, and let's position them to the left side. Let's add first the text, and then we are going to add all the different settings so they look exactly as my original design. Here it says create videos with animations and music and all the three different boxes are in capital letters which is important for the aesthetic of the design, or at least for recreating this design. I'm going to use everything exactly the same, and all of them are in capital letters. Now I'm going to add all the different settings. I guess the first text box, it was this font called Futura, and as you see, this is in the uploaded fonts. This is a font that I uploaded to my brand kit because I have become a pro. I have these personnel or branded fonts. For the other two text boxes, I'm going to select the two of them because both of them have the same font, and this font is California regular. I also bought this font and I uploaded it to Canvas. If you don't have these fonts, you can also use any other font that you can find here in Canvas, and that maybe looks similar. For example, for the Futura one, the first text box you can use are Archivo or Archivo black. You can just browse through these list of fonts and find something similar. Let's make these text boxes is a little bit bigger. I'm going to reduce the size of this box so it is not so big and it doesn't interfere when I'm designing. What I did here, as you see this one, I already shrink the size of the box. But how did I do this? You can shrink both sides at the same time. I'm going to use these box as element, and instead of just shrinking one size, I'm going to press "Alt" the key Alt, and then I'm going to drag one of the anchors and while I'm pressing Alt, you see that both sides move at the same time. I really like this option and I use it a lot. It helps me because I think it's more precise and it helps me design faster actually. Now I'm going to change the color of the fonts. I'm going here to this menu, and I'm going to click here on the A where it says text color, and I guess this font was blue. The other one was white, and the third one was a dark blue. I don't have that dark blue here, but let's try to make it here. What I'm going to do is to move the pointer a little bit like not in the corner, like a bottom left corner, but a little bit up, and then I'm going to move the tint towards the blue, and maybe something closer to the right actually because if not this without saturation. I guess that color was like this blue something around here. If you don't want to do all of these steps maybe you can just grab the Hex code I'm showing you here, and that's it. Now I'm going to check the size of this text. Let me check. This one is 97.7 and 128. I can just double-click the text box and click here on the numbers, and I can actually type it 97.7 and I need to make these books a little bit bigger. I have it in just one line. This one was 120. Same thing. I'm going to press "Alt" and drag this angle to the right, and I'm going to do the same thing for this 128. Now I'm going to grab all the and align elements to the center and I'm going to add a rectangle to the back of this text box to make it pop a little bit more and also, what I want to show you here, just having the text on this thumbnail, I think actually this one is covering maybe like 40 percent of the space on this thumbnail, go to page manager to see how it looks. You can see that even if I shrink the page a lot, I can still see the text. This is very important when we are creating thumbnails and if we cut this portion into four pieces, it could be like more than 25 percent of this page or the space of the page. Having big text is very important for thumbnails. Let's go back to the recreation of this design, and I need a rectangular shape. I'm going here to the left bar menu, going to open the elements tab, and I'm going to close this old search and go to Shapes. I'm going to select the square shape, and I'm going to make it bigger and adjust the size so it fits my keywords here and it is green color so I'm going to change it for blue as the original design. Now that we are here, I'm going to add the other elements. Let's go for the elements parts of the design which are these little stars and the Canva logo, this paintbrush, and their font. Let me add all these elements. I think this one was a little bit to this side. Let's go to the left bar menu and open the elements tab. We're going to spend a little bit of time here because we are going to strike all the elements that we need for this thumbnail. Let's go and type star and enter, and I'm going to search for a similar star or group of stars that I had in that thumbnail. I am going to do like a quick search here, but I think I saw something very similar at the beginning of the search. I think I'm actually going to go for this one and I guess what I did is to shrink the size of this one. Maybe move it and it will be like this and duplicate the star and make another one smaller, going to position it nearby. Let me check. Well, it's something similar, it's not exactly the same. I think they look more like this. Let me see. Maybe. I think I'm okay with these two stars, maybe it had like a more lighter yellow. Let's use this yellow and I'm going to use these copy style feature to add the color to the star in just one-click. Now that we are talking about stars, let's select these two and group these two elements. So we just have these two elements together and it's easy to work with them. Now that we have this star search, I'm going just to add sticker, the keyword sticker, and search or create a new search. I'm going to try to find the sticker that I used for my previous design. It was something similar to this shape, but not exactly. It had something like this, the name is one sparkle. Let's add it to the design, make it smaller, and I'm going to add it somewhere here. let's go for the Canva logo. Going to delete or close this search and add Canva into the search box. Here it is, the Canva logo. Let's add this Canva logo and position it somewhere here, going to make it smaller. As you see here, Canva is helping me align this element with the pink or dotted pink line. Next, I need to add one paint brush here to the bottom left. I'm going to search. I think it was somewhere here, kind of hidden. You'll see a lot of elements, but I think I found it here the last time. It wasn't too hidden. The name of the element is paint brush, and I'm going to click into the element to add it into my design. I'm going to put it somewhere here and make it a little bit bigger so we can see it better. I think I'm going to make this one a little bit smaller. Now, I'm going again through the Elements tab and add a phone. Let's see if I type phone. As you see here, I'm going to add this one, actually, it is a frame because we have this cloud and mountains in the back. I can just type phone or go here to the Elements tab and go to Frames, "See All", and you'll find the same phone here. This is actually a frame, and I need a frame because I need to add one of my photos into this phone. Next step, is that if you see here, my sticker, like this star sticker or sparkle sticker, is behind the phone and I need it to be in front of the phone because, I want to see the sticker in my design. I just go here to this button that says "Position" in the top-right section. I'm going to click "Forward". So now my sticker is in front of the phone. I'm going to show you the originally design and as you see, I have one of my personal photos into this phone. What I'm going to do is that I have here my folder with my own photos opened here, and I'm just going to drag my photo into Canva and drop it there. My photo is going to be uploading here. If you see here, there is a gradient loading bar. When it disappears and here we don't see this loading icon, the photo is already in Canva, and I can use it now. I'm just going to drag the photo into the phone. You have to be careful because if you don't see the photo in the phone, it will just be on your design. You'll need to really drag it and wait a little bit, It is just like almost automatic, but wait until the photo comes inside the phone. I'm saying this because people come to me asking me, "Diana, I don't know why my photo is not coming into the phone?" Even if you are doing it on your phone, if you are recreating this design on your phone, just wait a little bit until Canva recognize or puts your photo inside the phone frame. That's just an important thing to mention in this tutorial. We are almost done. Let's go to my original design. I see here that we are only missing this icon. Let's go back to my design and let's find it. Let's go back to elements and let's close this old search. I'm going to type YouTube icon. Let's search for it. I'm not sure if this is the exact keyword that I used for the design, but I think that this icon is going to work. It's maybe the same or very similar. I'm going to change now all the different colors. You see here that this element has four colors, and in my original design, I only have two, blue and white. I'm going to change all the red colors for my blue color, and I'm going to select each of these colors and change them for blue. I'm going to position this icon in front of my phone and make it smaller. The final touch is to add some transparency to this icon so we can see my face, but we can also see the icon. So we need to see both. We are just missing some like dimensions. We need to make some elements bigger so this design is exactly the same as my previews or original design. Let's make this elements bigger somewhere here. But I think it's almost the same. Lets see. I think we nailed this design. As you see, a thumbnail takes time, takes a lot of thinking.This wasn't just one design that I created in one go. Maybe I spent a couple of hours. I came back to this design, and the next time, I did some tweaks. I fixed somewhere here, somewhere there. I try different photos for this design, and I tried different elements, different stars, and this is the final outcome. I just want to tell you and suggest to you or recommend you to play around with your designs. Try different things, try different elements, and different layouts of your thumbnails, because sometimes the first design you create is not the thumbnail you are going to publish. Sometimes you need to create different versions and try different elements and photos for your thumbnail to be amazing. That's it for me and for this lesson. Let's go to the next lesson where Ronny is going to teach us how to recreate his amazing, with highest click-through rate domain. So let's go to that lesson. 5. Recreate Ronny's Thumbnail w/ Canva: Hey guys. Welcome back to the class. In this lecture, I'm going to show you how to reproduce step-by-step, one of the most popular thumbnails from our YouTube channel. As I mentioned in the introduction of this course, we are not going to pick any random video and reproduce this particular thumbnail. We are going to focus on a video that is performing extraordinarily well on our YouTube channel. So let's head over to our YouTube channel first. This is the YouTube Studio, it is called YouTube studio you have to be the admin of your channel to get there. This is where you can access the analytics, the channel analytics. Let's go ahead and click here, and I'm going to go ahead and click on More. The More button here, See More, so I can see all the analytics of the channel. I'm going to pay particular attention to one specific metric and that is the impressions click-through rate. What is that? It is the views per impressions shown. That means that this measures how often viewers watched a video after seeing an impression. What is an impression is simply YouTube showing you video in the search results or in the suggested videos. It gives us an indication of how many times somebody clicks on the video when they see that video, when they are exposed to that video. That should give us a pretty good understanding if our thumbnail is working or not. We are going to sort this column by clicking on it, simply. It will basically gives us the highest number on top. We see here 100 percent click-through. This is probably not a published video, you see on the six views. Let's skip this one, 75 view also not a published video, but this one with the impressions click-through rate of 12 percent has almost 18,000 views. This is definitely a published videos. Let's hover over the title to see the thumbnail, a preview of the thumbnail, PowerPoint Killer present feature Canva. You see here the timer Canva showing the timer, and I can see that there was something behind this timer, so we will talk about this. But now we know which video to focus on, it's called Canva 2.0 Create Better Presentation. Let's jump over to Canvas and recreate that thumbnail. We are now into Canva, and I want to show you the original document in which I created this thumbnail. For this, let me switch over to the overview, and you can see here page 48, this is the thumbnail. It has a big fat text right here, PowerPoint Killer, which is intriguing. I want to click to know what this PowerPoint Killer is. We have a box with some gradient that creates a high contrast with the present feature. We have the Canva logo with the little 2.0 here. I suggest in the reproduction of this thumbnail that we drop this 2.0 thing here. Why? Simply because first, there is a YouTube time indicator that will come here. We have learned that in the previous lectures. That's the first reason. The second reason is that it's no longer really relevant to talk about Canva 2.0. What is Canva 2.0 anyway? Is Canva 2.0 is when Canva upgraded its editor when from the 1.0 version to 2.0, and at the time they were calling this the editor 2.0. But it's no longer really relevant. I'm just going to ditch that for these actual version of the thermally. Then what do we have here? We have something that seems to be like a frame or a grid with a photo inside and some color filter over it. Then we have a gradient in the background. Let's go ahead and reproduce similar thumbnails. I'm going to head back to the Canva homepage and create a new document, which is a presentation. I'm going to click on "Presentation", and I'm going to drag this tab over here. Let's start with the base, which is a gradient. For that, I'm going to use a grid. I'm going to position my gradient into a grid. I could skip this phase if I want, but I like to have my things properly stored into grids so it's easier to manipulate. Just clicking on Grid, which is good, it's going to fill up my entire screen, and then we need a gradient. Head over to your photos and search for gradient. Just typing in gradient, and you have different options here given you by Canva, but it's simply start just browsing here and see if you find a gradient that you like this purple one. Let's see if we find something any better. This one is a nice too. This one, I'm going to go for this one. Using this, I can double-click on it as well. Let me show you by zooming out, like if you want your gradient to be slightly different like this. We have our gradient. That's the first phase, I would say the first stage of the creation of this thumbnail right here. Let me go back. We have the gradient, slightly different gradient by it doesn't really matter too much. We have our first gradient. I'm going to lock this first layer right here. Then again adding another grid on top of that, and that's where our photo is going to come. Let's go ahead and click on photos. I need to find a man presenting to an audience, and see if we have interesting results here. I want to see the screen, so we understand it's all about presentation and it's all about PowerPoint, and doesn't have to be a man, could be a woman. Let's see this. Maybe it's a bit boring. Let's see if we can find something better. We have this could be, but then this man right here would be where my text is. not ideal. Let me continue and find the right photo here. I'm going to go with this one, and I would try to flip this. This looks good. Of course, I need to work on that photo right here. I'm going to click on it, go to adjust, and I will start by desaturating. I'll are also add some decrease the brightness and add a bit more contrast. Now, I can start modifying the transparency of this photo to let my gradient peers through it, shine through it. I'm going to go with 40 percent, and then we can come back to that later and adjust. But we clearly see this is a presentation and there is a guy presenting here in the background who is not going to be under an other important element of my thumbnail. That's good. We understand the story. It's about presentation. Let's reproduce this text. I'm going to add a text box by hitting the T-key on my keyboard, and this needs to say my three words. I'm going to select the text right here, and it's all cap, POWER POINT KILLER. Selecting this text and justifying to the left, making this bigger, way bigger. I'm going to use the same font as the other thumbnail. I don't remember where it was Proxima Nova. Let's see if we have something Proxima Nova, I think it was an imported funded uploaded. There's something similar but it's not exactly the same, which is fine. I'm going to reduce the spacing here PowerPoint Killer to about this, and make this way bigger, like this. PowerPoint Killer. This is good. Maybe a little bit more spacing, not too much, maybe 0.8, like this, that's good. PowerPoint Killer, and I can see that my background here, maybe I could have a little bit less of intensity, so it's more darker, and I have more contrast on my thumbnail. I can also reduce the transparency here a bit more to 35. I still want to see what's going on in the background. That's good. The next element here was another box that's had another gradient in it. Let's find this element. For this, I like to use grids as well. I'm just going to resize this to the size of the bucks. I will align it with the K here and the Killer like this. What I did here, I just added another gradient in there. Going back to my photos, searching for gradient, don't need to be all the caps, and finding the nice gradient something that will pop, something like this. This will definitely pop, but one thing I realized that my original gradient, my original thumbnail was less luminous, less purple, I would say so. I can work on that. I'm going to continue tweaking this to achieve what I'm trying to achieve. To reproduce this perfects thumbnail, something like this. I can even reduce the brightness on my photo right here, something like that. That's a bit more like the original, though it's still more colorful, but we can work with that. Now adding another text-box here, so another T-key, and this says in all caps. It says present feature. The present feature is actually when Canva introduced this new presents. The presenter view, that was the first time they introduced it, and I believe this is Montserrat Classic actually. Make this bigger, maybe 60, something like that. The present feature. Everything is big so we can read it even though we zoom back to size 10. So that's very important when you create your thumbnails. I encourage you to zoom all the way out to about 10 percent so you can see how little the thumbnail can look. Because when you look at the thumbnail on your phone, it's going to be very little, but if you can still read everything, if it's still legible than perfect, you actually made it correctly. We're almost done with this. We only need the Canva logo. For that's very easy, go to your Elements, type in Canva, and you'd get the Canva logo that you can bring here, and I'm going to rotate this by 45 percent, position it in the corner and make that bigger. I want the word to touch here and touch here, but still leave some empty spaces here, can make this slightly bigger. This seems about right. We can still see my presenter here that consisted of the, the slide behind him, and this is a line with this. I can maybe lift this up slightly like this, but making sure we are not leaving any space here in the corner without the logo. It's actually looking pretty good. This is my best shot at reproducing this thumbnail. This one is a little bit more off like less color. But I think this one has enough contrast to get us a fair amount of clicks on this thumbnails. This is what I have for you guys in this lecture, and I will see you in the next lecture. 6. Class Project: All right guys, congratulations, you have made it to the end. By now, you should be able to create very good thumbnails with Canva. You graduated from this class, congratulation, there is no certificates, but we believe in you. No but seriously, we would love to see you in action right now. We have a little project for you, for this class, and the project of course, for you to create a thumbnail. Okay, so you might not be a video creator, so if you're not a video creator, you've never made any video in your life, that's okay. You can still create a thumbnail for a fictional video, or you can pick one of our video and redo the thumbnail if you wish. So please use Canva, create a thumbnail by following the steps and the strategies that we teach you in this class and post that thumbnail in the project section so that we can see it and that also we can review it, gives you a feedback on it. That's it for us guys, we hope that this class was useful and we will see you in the next one.