How to Create the PERFECT YouTube Channel Banner!

1. Introduction: In this Skillshare class, I will show you how to create the perfect YouTube channel banner that makes an impact on your audience, showing unique ways to use your channel art to promote your brand in intentions on YouTube, we will take a look at my old YouTube banner and revamp and improve it, redesigning it from the ground up, I will explain my entire thought process behind each step of the design process, helping you understand how to create and design the perfect planet for your YouTube channel. It doesn't matter what software you use. This class is all about the design process and it will help you regardless of your software of choice, if you want to take your YouTube channel to the next level than Jamie here for this Skillshare class. 2. Good and Bad Channel Banner Examples: Let's first begin by taking a look at some of my old YouTube channel banners from my music channel. Now I do have two different YouTube channels. I've got Ben Roland's music, which has about 14 thousand subscribers. And I have my new tech channel, which has got over 5000 subscribers, but currently gets about 450 thousand views a month. Hopefully, taking a look at some of my old channel banners will give you some ideas, but also help you understand what was wrong with them so you don't repeat the same mistakes. This right here was probably my second or third YouTube banner. Unfortunately, I can't find my original ones as the files have gone. Now I'm a strong believer that it is important to have a set schedule for uploading your YouTube videos, just like when you watch your favorite TV programs, they have a particular day and time that they are. So when I upload my YouTube videos, I have intention to always upload them on set days to try and help my subscribers getting to a little bit of a rhythm because I love watching YouTube, It's all I watched, but I do hate it. The fact that some of my favorite YouTubers with millions of subscribers just upload a video whenever it is ready. So when I began studying my music YouTube channel, I always uploaded on Tuesdays, thursdays and Saturdays. And I did this for like over a year straight and didn't miss a single upload. So I made this clear. The value proposition for somebody subscribing on my channel banner was they were going to get three videos from me on these days. And that was a simple promise. Then to the left-hand side of this, I included some categories and types of videos that I create. So product reviews, live looping, which is a type of genre of performance style within music. And also tutorials on the products that I'm using to do all of this width. Now the reason why I did this on my very first channel was because I hadn't built out my content library yet at this point, I only had a few videos and I want it to be able to show people what the channel was all about because the content simply wasn't ready. Now once I progressed to over 100 videos, I then simplified my channel banner. Obviously I got much better at using Adobe Photoshop from designing on my thumbnails. But my channel now sold itself, as in you would look at my YouTube channel and knew exactly what I was all about. And I didn't need to tell you this anymore because the channel was doing it for me. So with the second redesign, I decided to strip things back. Instead of saying Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday in full words, I abbreviate them to three characters, so they had a bit of symmetry as well. So three characters, three characters, and three characters. It's all about the new videos and the product pitches I show visually explain what my videos are about. We've got a loop station over here by boss, which is a particular brand that I niche down onto. Clearly it is a guitar oriented immediate channel is I'm holding a rock guitar and then to the right-hand side, we've got some music production software over here called Ableton Live, which shows we do some tutorials on that and the pitches speak for themselves. I don't need to write on here Ableton Live tutorials, product reviews, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like I did when I had no content. So the plan for this skill share class is to redesign my channel banner for my brand new tech channel. Now I've been doing this for about three months at this point, it's grown to about 5000 subscribers. And I need to rebrand it to show what it's actually all about because a lot of things have changed. Originally, we were uploading videos on Wednesdays and Fridays. Now, we upload them on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays. So we've got an extra upload. Additionally, the type of content that I initially intended to do on this channel has completely changed. Originally. As you can see, there's GoPro is on here editing type stuff. I was going for that more gadgetry tech orientated direction. However, as you can see from my most popular videos, the path that I took was completely dictated by the success of these videos and it changed. And that's the key to success on YouTube. It's been adaptive with your initial idea and following what works. So you can see here in just four months, we've racked up almost 400 thousand views on these particular iPad orientated videos. So I've really niche down on iPads, iPhones, any Apple product really seems to be working. And to my surprise, the Xbox video as well, seeing that is thrown in, there seems to be doing as you can see, all the Xbox and PlayStation videos are quite high up on the views. So going forward, my strategy is to focus on this category of video for this type of person that is enjoying all of the links between this content. So it's important that we create the correct channel banner to reflect the content on the channel. Because right now there's a huge disconnect between this good don't even have a video on a GoPro and anything that I do have on that type of topic like the drone over here, was a complete failure in terms of a video. 3. Creating a Template: So let's go ahead and create our YouTube banner template. Now the software I'm going to be using is Affinity Designer. This is very similar to, almost identical to Adobe Photoshop, but it's way cheaper and you just pay it wants, it cost me about 20 pounds in a sale, and that's it. Instead of paying a monthly subscription. Now it doesn't matter if you use the software either using something like Canva, something that is free, it's still follow along with the exact same techniques that we're going to be applying because this isn't going to be about the software. It's going to be about how you design a YouTube banner with intention. So we need to understand what the current specifications are. For a year, she panicked because they actually did recently changed. So if you go up to this page that I'll link in the learning resources. This is a YouTube Help forum on the official YouTube channel stuff. And it gives you the specification of a profile picture or watermark and also a banner image. So you can see down here we have the banner image guidelines and this has given us the minimum dimensions our canvas size needs to be. Now back in the day, this used to be a 2560 by 1440 pixels with a 16 by 9 aspect ratio. But I recently had issues with a file that contain that. And I noticed that they change it on the website to this. Technically, there's not really two major of a difference between the two. But just to be safe, we're going to enter these exact numbers into our software. So over here we're going to create a new document, and we're gonna go ahead and add our page width and our page height to these exact parameters that are listed on the website. And if you don't have this set to pixels, you want to change your document units from millimeters or centimeters over the pixels to ensure this is correct. So this right here is our blank canvas that we're now going to go ahead and build upon. The first thing we want to do is we want to head over to Google Images and just type in YouTube banner guidelines and drag and drop any of the images into your project and scale it to size. So you can see the safe areas of each device type that we'll see this banner. This is very important for placing images and texts, so they don't get cut off on a mobile and tablets. You'll then want to just reduce the opacity of this so it doesn't get in your way. And we can now start to begin to build out our banner. And I just want to paint my background to be solid black color. This is great for adding texts. If you add white text on a black background is going to be a great level of contrast. We're just going to fill that out. So it gives us a point to build from. 4. Basic Banner Design and Branding: Redesigning my channel banner is going to give me a great opportunity to finally figure out the branding on my YouTube channel. Currently, on my music channel, I use this sort of teal green, blue color as my brand color. So everything such as like texts, pop-ups, lower thirds, certain animations, arrows all contain this sort of color scheme between this green color to white and also a dark gray. However, something about this doesn't seem to align with the image I'm trying to portray on my tech channel. And if we take a look at the sort of branding color emotion guide, it shows you a variety of different major brands and their color schemes. And then an explanation as to why these brands fit this particular category of color. And at first you may just think you pick a color that you like and that your brand. But each color has a certain feeling to a customer or viewer that it portrays subliminally. So you can see currently the solid teal green, blue color falls in between this trust and peaceful brackets is showing strength and growth. And it just doesn't really align with what I'm doing. Because you can see this green color is more orientated around farming with John Deere land rovers. So sort of environmental type things. But then if you take a look at the blue, this portrays a different feeling and his associate it with completely different brands. They are still tech orientated like Dell, HP, Facebook, and Twitter. But it's not quite right feeling that I want now I actually think that red would be a more appropriate color to match with what I'm trying to do on the tech channel. Now, I'm currently very young, I'm 21, and I see myself as the next generation of tech YouTubers. So the youthful really aligns with this brand mission. And then you also have excitement which also fits in with young energetic people and Bolt, which then matches my opinions. The tech reviews that I do, I highly recommend taking some time sort of figure out what your values are and your mission statement is for your YouTube channel to sort of find what bracket you fit into for designing and branding channel. So I want to make red the center focus of this U-tube brands. So we're going to put this in a sentence strip in our banner. So that's what we've got so far. We've got a black background and a red censorship. Pretty boring and not that interesting. But I now want to go ahead and begin adding particular text onto this. Recently on my channel, I've really been focusing on a consistent thumbnail design. I've been all over the place in the past trying out new ideas. And finally, I think I have something that I'm happy with and I've been using this particular design of texts that I also want to now include into my YouTube banner. The whole mission statement of this tech channel is to create the most transparent and honest tech reviews possible. And instead of focusing on the more generic approach to a tech review like the specifications, the new features, whatever other tech channel does, I like to sort of focus on the areas that are completely overlooked on the product that require a lot of improvements. Initially, I was thinking of a way to package this as tech from a different perspective or tech reviews from a different point of view. But that felt a little bit too long winded as a channel statement, almost like a, a slogan. So I came up with this instead, honest tech reviews. And I think this sums up my channel in three simple words. I've also gone ahead and added my new upload schedule, which is Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays. But we can take this one step further as this text in isolation isn't quite enough to capture somebody's eye. And we're going to need to take some pictures. 5. Taking Pictures: Now that we've created our project in template for our YouTube banner, we need to take some photographs that will make our banner interesting. Obviously, you could go ahead and use old pitches that you've used on past YouTube videos for thumbnails. Obviously that's what I've done on my music channel. I just use alter photographs and type them all together. But on this particular example, I've got a very clever idea that to make my tech channel a really interesting. So I want to use the red branding theme we briefly touched on in the other video. And I want to have this overhead photography effects. So I'm going to hold various different products over this red card, I can take individual pitches. And then in my editing Photoshop software, I will link all of these images together to create a very seamless channel banner. So we've got a solid red background that's on-brand. And then all these interesting products I'm holding in my hand to give a clear indication of what this channel is about. So I've got a few different proxy that I'm going to use just some books and pieces of paper to give it a bit of intrigue in the background, I've got this piece of red card that will allow us to have a consistent color in each image. And then from that point I can manipulate this in my editing software to change its color to be a bit deeper, red, more saturated, et cetera, great, solid basis. Now the products I'm going to use here, a PlayStation controller and an Xbox controller to signify when you talk about gaming, which goes back to the videos that have been successful on my channel. The new iPhones. I've chosen the white iPhone 13 and the iPhone Pro for a bit of contrast on the red background is I think that will one let the text display very clear on top of it, but also it will create a nice contrast on the red background. And then from that point we'll also use the preexisting image from a previous YouTube video, which is the iPad Mini image with all of these books in the background. So the way I'm going to capture these images is not by taking photographs, it's by setting off the record button on the overhead camera. There's a few reasons behind this. The first one is I don't want the overhead camera to move every single time because I want to have the same framing of this piece of cut with the same perspective of all of the products. So if I'm constantly clicking the shutter button to take an image, it's going to slightly be constantly moving the camera. Additionally, because I'm working on my own and I don't have anybody to help me. I don't want to be doing the whole time. The thing where I click Go, wait for 10 seconds, hold the product. It wasn't right. Do that again. So I'm just going to click record for the video. And then once I've done that, I'll just take some freeze frames from those video clips and turn them into photographs. 6. Creating a Unique YouTube Banner: So what I've decided to do with the photographs that I've taken is to just remove the background is completely from each of the images. I originally tried to match all of the images up and then try to color match the backgrounds with a smooth transition between each image. But it didn't work out quite as well as I thought, and I was unhappy with the results. So instead, I've decided to completely remove the background of each of the images. So I've just gone with the erase brush and I've just penciled out all of the red from the background. And I just have the subjects in isolation for the images that I wish to feature. This will just give me the best consistency of red in the background and I'll keep it nice and bold and clean. Obviously erasing out the background of your images is going to be quite time consuming. But that's why I did take the photographs on a solid color as the backdrop to make this slightly easier. So I'm going to go ahead and place my images onto my background. So I've got my iPad over here, and you can see that the paper unfortunately got cut off in this image. So we will need to sort this out somehow. And I also have my two iPhones. And as I mentioned when I was taking the photographs, I chose the white iPhone to create a bit of contrast against the red, and it seemed to have turned out quite well. Now inside of each layer for both the iPhone and the iPad, I have gone ahead and applied some color grading effects to make them pop a little bit more. As without them, the images did look a little bit flat. I recommend doing that and I could go ahead and maybe adjust the white balance on his clip. It be better to make it match because the white iPhone looks a little bit too yellow and has more of a cream luck. So to avoid any mistakes while I'm moving around these images, I'm going to lock this layer with the text because it bang on center and I don't want to accidentally move it. So that now means it's locked and it will accidentally be deleted or edited. Now if we just take a quick look at our guidelines, you will see that our images are looking pretty good. So if I just increase the opacity here just a tad, you can see over here we've got this iPhone perfectly in line with the mobile bit, so this will just cut off clean. And then there's the additional iPhone to fill out that extra space for people on desktop and also tablets. And then over to the right-hand side, we've got our iPads or a nicely positioned with the pencil fitting imperfect for the mobile devices. And then there's a bit of over spill. Once again, the people who are on tablets and also desktops. Now we do need to resolve a slight issue with this and not is the cutoff of this book over here and this cut-off of the paper. So a simple solution would be to increase the size of the image. So we could try and increase it to sort of reach the top of here. But you can now see the top of the iPad going to get cut off by the guideline. So I'm personally, I'm going to go for a rotation, so we're going to rotate that. So it aligns, they're not ideal. But I think it should work okay, in terms of completing the corner of this sheet of paper, I could maybe super-imposed some of the images that we took earlier when we were doing these iPhone images in the other room. Or I could try and use this corner of this piece of paper. Either role would work, okay, but what I could try instead is grabbing my eraser tool, increasing it's sort of feather parameters, so we're just reduced that hardness. So it's got a bit more of a soft edge. And I could just sort of increase the size of it and almost fade out those bits of paper. It writes this two layers to this clip, so it looks a bit messy right now. But if we get this about right, it might just create a smooth transition. That might work. Okay? So I actually decided to just remove that piece of paper entirely and just clean it up and it looks perfectly fine and it makes the text a little bit more legible. Now the next thing that you're probably asking is, well, how did we get rid of all of this excess imagery in this few things you could do, you could either grab your brush tool and just sort of wipe all of that with the eraser. Or we can just simply grab this shape over here and change its color to be black. And then we can just pull it down, which works as well. We can do that at the top. And also the bond, nice and quick and easy. And this gives you a bit of an idea of what the final YouTube channel banner will end up looking like. I've actually decided to flip the iPad Mini off to the side if nominal writing left-handed, just something about it that looked a little bit better because it gives space for the tech reviews and flows inwards. But I do need to manipulate the home screen because all the text is the wrong way around. So I have raised the outline and I will place this here instead. 7. Uploading your YouTube Channel Banner: Here we go. This is our final YouTube channel banner. And you can see it is very effective. It tells you when we're uploading what types of videos we do in a very clear and concise manner. We can now go ahead and export this. We go over to the export section and we're going to export it out as a PNG. Make sure it's of high quality. And remember, it needs to be less than six megabytes in order to allow you to upload it. And as you can see here, this is being compressed perfectly fine and it should have no issues at 471 kilobytes. The final step is uploading your channel banner. You want to head into the customization tab within the YouTube studio and go ahead and click Change. You can then go and locate the folder on your actual computer and select it and click Upload. Then if you don't know the steps correctly and follow the correct resolution as we did at the start of this tutorial, you can see that our YouTube channel, channel banner fits perfectly into the viewable sections. It's viewable on desktop, viewable all devices just as we intended within our software, then you can just go ahead and click Done. And it will change once you click Publish. And if we view my channel, you can now see we've got our brand new channel banner. 8. Learn MORE about YouTube!: If you enjoyed this class and you want to learn more about improving your YouTube content, check out my entire series here on Skillshare. I have a variety of different classes covering a range of tips and tricks to help you take your YouTube channel to another level. But as always, I-beam them, Rollins, thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next wall.