Transcripts
1. Introduction: Did you just start your very first YouTube channel and you need a nice channel banner to go with all the rest of your branding. Do you already have a YouTube channel that successful, but you just need a fresh new look. While this class is for you, the best way to hold the viewer's attention is to show them something appealing from the first few seconds. And the best way to do that from your YouTube channel is via a great channel header. You want your channel header to be engaging to the viewer, be professional, and stand out from the crowd. The nice thing about the tools available these days is that you don't have to pay any money or hire anyone to make you a professional looking channel header. These days, you can make them yourself with tools I'm going to show you class. You also don't have to be a pro level photographer to find images for your header. I'll show you some free resources on the web that you can use to find high-quality HD, totally free to use images. Once students walk away from this class, they'll have an engaging professional YouTube header without paying a cent. So that appeals to you. Let's hop in, hit enroll.
2. What Makes a Great Channel Banner?: Let's talk about what makes a great channel header. First of all, it should be unique to you. Second, it should be eye-catching and draw the viewer in. Third, it should give visitors to your channel of feeling of what to expect from your videos and forth. It should be optimized to be viewed properly on every size of screen. Here's some examples of great channel headers. From the channel film booth. They use their header to show you in a glanceable way what you'll learn from their channel. They also include an arrow to their featured link where you can work with them on the right side, right off the bat. They've made it easy to see what they do on their channel. They're gonna teach you how to take your videos to the next level by impressing your viewers, sticking out in a niche and becoming memorable. Additionally, they have photos of themselves so that you know what to expect and who you're going to see when you watch their videos. Next up, we have Amy land Dino. Her header is more of a billboard of what her brand's mission is, but it still has a call to action arrow on the bottom right to direct you to her guide. You also get a quick snapshot of her socials. Additionally, some text in the middle to show you what a channel is about and when to expect your next videos. Next we have Mango Street with their banner. You get a really clear picture of what they do on their channel. But you also get a photo of both of them so you know who you'll be watching again, you can see that they do photography and film-making tutorials that don't waste your time. If you've ever checked out there channel, you'll notice they do come true on their promise. The slow-mo guys have a channel about slow-mo videos and they're colorful header gives you a sense of what they do. You can tell that this was a custom image designed just for them and then incorporates the lab coats that they were in their videos. Keep that in mind for your own header. If you have something distinct in your videos, you can add that to your header as well. So where do you start? Well, check out your favorite channel banners and see what are they doing, right? And what can you imitate as far as the imagery in your header? You can either take it yourself or use a site like fiber to hire someone to make a custom designed for you. Additionally, you can use free stock photo websites like Unsplash and Pexels.com in order to find free professional images by professional photographers that you can use in your branding. Here's what we covered in this lesson. First, a great header is unique. It's eye-catching and gives viewers a quick idea of what to expect from your videos. Second, it can be made using your own photography, stock images, or even outsourced to fiver artists. Third, make sure it's formatted properly to look great on all screen sizes, you'll learn how to do that further in the class. Well, it's time to get editing.
3. Finding A Background Image: Since YouTube allows the YouTube header to be scaled all the way to the size of a television. The bigger image you can find, the better. This will give you more moving room and editing room when we start to do that, also, higher contrast colourful images really pop and these draw people's eyes directly to your header. So keep that in mind when we're searching for the photos. But now I'll show you too free to use websites that have tons and tons of professional looking photos that you can use for your headers today, the first website I want to show you as pixels.com, that's PEX ELS.com. This is a free stock photo website that's sourced by photographers around the world. People upload their images to be used by you. Download it as many times as you want. For the first example, I think we're gonna make a header for a travel YouTube channel. So when I think about travel, I usually think about mountains. So I'm gonna go ahead and search for mountain. And another thing to keep in mind, you notice how this image is taller than it is wide. That's called portrait. We want landscape, which is the opposite aspect ratio, longer than it is tall. So that's going to make it easier for it to fit on a traditional screen. So keep that in mind. You don't want the ones that look like they were taken vertically. I really like this one here with this guy in the middle of this mountain. So I'm gonna go ahead and hit this download icon. So I like that image for travel. But I think I'm also going to find one for food, so for example, a cooking channel. So let's go ahead and type in food and just see what we can find here. Very general. I really like this one here. It looks like it's kinda made to be a channel header. Let's download that. And maybe we can get one more just for good measure. I like this 12 has a lot of negative space when you're thinking about finding photos for your YouTube headers. Lot of negative space is gonna give you some room to work with text. So keep that in mind. However, there are ways to get around that in case you don't want just a bunch of blank space in there. That's totally fine. But that'll be my third image. The second site that you can use this just like pixels, but has some more options. And these kind of sites are usually just interchangeable. If it can't find something you really like on one, can easily find it on the other. That's going to be stock snap dot IO. So it looks like this here. And again, if I were to just type in mountain, let's just see what they have available. So you see that they have different types of images on here. But I don't really think this is what I'm going to be going for. However, this is another good stock photography website as well that should hopefully help you find images. Now let's go ahead and start editing them.
4. Editing with Canva: Now that we found our images, I'd like to show you three different websites that are totally free to use to make your channel headers yourself. The first website is canva.com. It's one of my favorite design websites for branding and for marketing. And I've used it in my other skill shared class, which is about how to make professional YouTube thumbnails for your videos that are eye-catching and that you can find but are super easy to make. They also make it easy to making YouTube channel headers as well or channel banners. So that's the first website I'm going to show you. The nice thing about Canada is everything is free to use and you could download as many things as you want. Other websites I'm going to show you are free to use. However, you can only have a specific amount of downloads per month. I think it might be two or three is what I maxed out at. So on those websites you'd want to get it right in the first or second try because you might have to wait until the next month rolls around if you don't want to pay, don't have to worry about that with Canada. Let's hop in. The nice thing about Canvas is if you sign up for your free account, you'll be able to save your designs and come back later, super-useful at their search bar. If you type in youtube channel art, you'll come to this page, which is their templates page for all their YouTube channel banners. So you can notice there's different types. You've just got photos with text, things with different assets such as rectangle's shapes. This one allows you to have multiple photos in the background. This one has a square around it. You can kinda just browse through and see if any of these catch your eye. So the first one I wanted to make with something related to travel. So let's see if I can find something that might look good. Would that guy who is inside the cave that we found? I kinda like this one here. I am drawn to the images in the background even though I'm not going to be using them. But I also do like that black strip. So let's go ahead and click on that one. And just to show you around Canada just a little bit with the layout here. So at the top you're gonna see home. That's how you get back where we came from. File resizes. Nice if you're going to be using the same banner across all social media. So if you wanted to transfer this to like Twitter header, you can do that. On the right side, you can try Canva pro share download is what we'll be using at the very top left again, templates. This is how you can switch between templates right from in the editor. Uploads is where you're gonna be able to upload your own images. Photos is how you can find photos within Canvas. So instead of downloading it from the sites we mentioned, you can find them right within here. Elements is how you can add shapes on the icons and logos and shapes text. If you don't like the text they already have, you can add different text in here. Videos is good if you're making like ads, that's not gonna be useful here. Background, if you'd like to make just a quick background without an image, but more so colors and things like that, textures, you can find them in here. And there's a couple other things you won't need. So first off, let's just say that this travel channel is going to be called Easy trips 101. So I'm going to type in easy trips 101. And then down here, I'll put traveled. Let's do travel tips for the average person. And right away, I don't really like the font it has for that. So I'm gonna go ahead and click up here to the font. And I'm going to click on something else at MIT like maybe what you'll notice is there are someone to crown, Those are not free to you, so just keep that in mind. But you do have access to all the other ones. Okay. I kinda like that one there. And it's looking pretty good. I could already just download this myself, but I do have my own image, so I'm gonna go ahead and click these images in the back and hit delete grid. So this would be a way for you to add multiple images. They already have a grid pre-made. I just want to use one image. So I'm going to delete the whole grid. So I'm gonna go over here to uploads. And I already uploaded the image, so I'm just going to click on it. And now I'm going to drag it to the top and just resize it for myself. Perfect. Now if you go up here to the top right and hip position, you can hit backward and that will put it all the way in the back. And I noticed it's hiding this guy's face. So I'm going to move it a little bit and it looks pretty good. And then I'm gonna click on this black bar they have. And I think I'm gonna do, go up here to this checker box and I'm going to lower the opacity or transparency just so that it does show him behind it. So this would be good to go. However, I want to show you something that'll help you size things properly. So let's just go ahead and download it here at the top right, when you do download something, you'll want to use the JPEG JPEG format because it will be smaller and YouTube does have a file size limit. So let's just hit JPEG and download it here. All right, so now if we go back to YouTube and we open our channel, if you go up here to the top right and hit customize channel, this will be where you can add all of your channel branding. And we'll go to branding at the top. Now if we go to banner image and hit upload, this will allow us to upload our image. So let's upload the image. Now here's what YouTube does for you. It does show you how your image will show up based on how it's being viewed. So if you're looking at it from a smartphone, for example, or a tablet, this is what you'll see, this smallest square if you're viewing it on desktop, this is how big it will usually get. So it's going to stretch all the way across. And then if you're viewing it on a TV, your, your image could show up that huge. But the most important thing to remember is the smallest rectangle is what you want to optimize for. Anything you want to show up in your channel banner on any device needs to be in that little rectangle. So as you can see, everything that is there in that rectangle. I'll hit done. And then on the top right, let's hit publish. And it should give us a little pop-up on the bottom says Go to channel. Let's go ahead and do that. And there it is, easy trips 101. And easy is that. Now I will say, if we go back to Canva, let's say for example, that you have this arranged improperly. So maybe the text was too big to fit in the banner or something was moved down here and you didn't know and then you when you tried to upload it, you're like, Why can't I see what I need to see? I did include a resource in the course description that you can upload to Canada as an image. And it's the resource small image. So the resource large image is basically that template that shows you the entire thing. And then resource small will help you directly in Canvas. So if you open that as an image and then you drag it over here and resize it properly. And then try and drag it to the very middle of your image here. And then if we make sure it's in the middle and in the middle, just like that, we can drop the opacity to see where everything is. So you can see this is outside of my box. So that way I can use this element and drag all that right to the middle. And now it's within my box and I can delete that. So that resource is going to be helpful for you when you're using templates through Canvas, or even Trello, which is our next website, in order to make sure things are sized properly, that's gonna take all of the guesswork out of it without you having to be a graphic designer. So that's the easy way to make a channel header or banner using Canva.com. But I'd like to now show you Trello to give you another option.
5. Editing with Crello: All right. Moving right along to Trello.com. Now this is another website that you can sign up for your free account so that you can use it. And if you type in youtube channel art, you'll get to see all of their templates as well. And now they have a bunch of different templates to the nice thing is they do a pretty good job of sizing things. But you'll notice some of these are pretty big images. For example, if I were to click on this one, get ready for study abroad. This is not going to be sized properly for our YouTube banner. So for example, I already uploaded that resource. And if I were to drag this like so, that is in the middle and all of the other information they have is not gonna be viewable on any device except maybe a television. Whereas on the top, you know, his face will be cutoff, the text is gone. So that's why that resource super helpful and just good for you to know kind of what you're working with. But they do have some other templates that will work pretty good. For example, I wanted to do a food channel. Let's click on this one here. I think I can use this kind of with the food idea I had. Once it's opened up, I'll show you around Trello, at the top left, you got new design. So if you wanted to scrap, what you're doing is sort of new one, my projects, this comes in handy if you have a free account like we like we mentioned, you've got back and forward. So you've got undo and redo at the top left as well. And then you're going to have download at the top right and the left side, similar to Canada, you have all your templates accessible. The photo library Trello provides objects is going to be your little icons background. If you just wanna make a background image, however, you're going to notice a lot of these are going to cost money. We're going to skip that text and my files. Now what I'll do is click on the background image, which is actually this green one. I'm gonna delete it. I'm also gonna delete these pictures of kids. I'm also going to delete these icons. And finally, I'm gonna go to upload image or video. And I'm gonna upload our image of these vegetables. Once it pops up, let's go ahead and click on our image here on the left. And the nice thing about Trello, as you go up here to this layering icon, you can hit set as background and let's go ahead and do that. Bam, it's resized. I left in these other elements just because I think they might work with what I'm going for here. And I noticed this text, I don't really need it. And let's just say good eating, cooking videos weekly. Now if we upload our resource and drag that in as well, will be able to see exactly what's going to be visible on every device. So let's go ahead and drag that in. And as you can see, when we lower our opacity using the checker boxes at the top, that's going to be in view, so that's perfect. Let's go ahead and delete it now and hit download J peg. And we'll hop back over to our channel, customize channel. Once the next page opens up branding change, let's go ahead and upload our new image. And it'll show us what it should look like, which looks pretty good to meet. Publish. And let's go to our channel. And that looks pretty good. So that's kind of how to use Trello super easy. And you can see as long as you get the sizing right, it's going to look pretty professional and pretty nice. But let's move on to the final website, which is snapper.
6. Editing with Snappa: Alright, so now we're at snapper.com. Now I saved this one for last simply because this one is the most picky on how many it'll allow you to download. And that's frustrating if you don't want to pay anything. So I wanted to save that for the end. You can still download, I think twice a month. So if you get it right in the first couple of tries, you're going to be set. However, it's just something to keep in mind. Now, here's the reason that I'm even highlighting snap up. It has one unique feature that I think might actually be pretty useful. So it'll be best if I can show you on a template that is bright. So let's go over here to Derek star and let's try that out. And you'll notice they already have this template preloaded baked into their editor. So that's super good because you're not kinda guessing and doing this guesswork on where is it or even uploading the resource that I gave you. It's already there. So that's the nice thing about snap up. And just to show you around snap up just a little bit. You'll see at the top left you've got background. So this will allow you to change your background image or upload a new one, remove the one you already have, reposition it. You're going to have effects. So this will allow you to change the effects on whatever you have clicked. Text is going to allow you to add your own text to the image. Graphics is again icons and finally shapes. And then at the top, top here you're gonna see move the layer forward, backward, duplicate a layer, rotate a layer and delete. And up here you're gonna see toggle safe zone. So that's how you show and hide that safe zone template. I love that piece. I'm not gonna spend too much time on how to edit using Snap, but just because it's basically the exact same as the other couple websites. And as long as you just kind of click around, you should be able to do the same thing we did on the others. But I just wanted to show this final resource because if you want to take all the guesswork out of it possible, this is a super great way to go.
7. Class Project & Wrap Up!: Alright, so here are the images we were able to make ourself using these free websites and free resources for your class project. I'd love to see what you were able to make an accomplished through these websites for free. We'd love to see what you can come up with. So please upload a project in the class project section. Additionally, if you're interested in seeing any other YouTube branding health, or had to grow a YouTube channel. I have a couple other classes here on skill share that you can check out below as well, but that's enough for me to cope, to see what you create. Thanks for watching.
Storm, Photographer, Videographer, Teacher
