Youtube Thumbnail Canva Masterclass

1. INTRO TO THE COURSE: Hey everyone, welcome to the masterclass where I show you how to create amazing YouTube thumbnails using Canva in this masterclass, guys, this is going to be the master of class that takes you from 0 to hero. And I'm gonna be honest, I haven't created a masterclass like this that actually drastically improved success. I want to go ahead and show you guys some of the thumbnails that I created that, you know, honestly created some of my successor, most of my success. When it comes down to YouTube, you guys know that I like going on YouTube. You can follow me on YouTube. Of my information will be in the description of the course. But you could see here these thumbnails, these thumbnails are interesting, artistic, colorful. These thumbnails are going to be thumbnails that stand out to the crowd. Now, I'm going to put my money where my mouth is, and I'm going to show you what we're actually going to be talking about in the course. You can see here on my YouTube channel how our traffic was just decreasing in the last 365 days of time. You can see here the YouTube channel just going downhill, downhill, downhill, downhill. And then it shot up forward. You can see your views was going up dramatically. Guys, I didn't pay for this. I didn't pay for the views. I didn't pay for some software to get me there. What I did was I started changing my YouTube thumbnails. I started to focus really, really heavily on my YouTube thumbnails. So in this course, what you're really going to be learning is you're going to be learning how to create thumbnails on every level, in every different aspect we're going to be talking about fonts. We're going to be talking about font colors. We're also going to be talking about how to create 3D looking designs kind of like the one that you're seeing here, or even the one that you're seeing here. We're going to be talking about click-through rates. There's a lot of different aspects to this course that you're going to really want to consume if you are a YouTuber and you're creating YouTube content. Like I said, the results are here, proof is in the pudding. I've done the changes to my YouTube channel. You can feel free to go there. And when it hit a certain new low, I realized that I had to make a change. And if you're there today watching this YouTube channel, and you realize that your YouTube channel has hit a new lower your maybe even a brand new YouTuber. And you want to change the way things are going on your channel. You need to watch this course and you need to sign up now. Okay, Here's a view of my subscribers. My subscribers was teetering on the edge of five to maybe even six subscribers day, some days I'll lose a subscriber for subscribers. You can see here these numbers. But here, look where it went all the way up to. We're getting up to the point where 80 subscribers in one day, 81 subscribers, 46, 3333, 23, you know, 35, 5863. These are much larger numbers if you want better numbers on your YouTube channel, the one thing you need to improve is your YouTube thumbnails. And this masterclass is going to show you every step of the way of exactly what I did. Okay, so that's essentially what this course is on. If you want to go ahead and join, make sure you sign up right now and watch the full course from beginning to end. So you can go from 0 to hero from you, from you to go from nothing to something, from literally no experience to a master in designing thumbnails. All right, let's go ahead and get started. I need to see every single one of you sign up to this course right now. 2. Colors Of Typography: Let's go ahead and talk about our next lesson, where we talk about font, colors or typography colors. The colors of the texts that you have in your thumbnail matters a lot. And it matters because essentially you want your font to stand out. If it doesn't stand out, if your text doesn't stand out, it's not going to be as visually appealing to consumers. And the consumers are the people who are signing up essentially for free. When I design a thumbnail, I make sure that my font color or the color of my text somehow has relation back to some other element in the thumbnail. Usually, I don't have a text color that is just solely alone by itself. Let's go ahead and take some examples of this. You can see here I have the element, the red bubble icon here in this thumbnail. I also have some black distress in the background. I'm going to show you guys how to do all this. But you could see here the different elements of the thumbnail. I have some black distress and I have a black outline for this red bubble logo. Well, for me, that means that I can either include two colors for my font. I could go with red or I could go with black, right? Because I have a black distressed background and I also have a red colored icon. In my case, I feel more comfortable using the color black. So what I did was for the word sale success here on the thumbnail, I included the color black. It stands out very well with the yellow color background. This is what people have to understand is that the background color has to match them well with the color of the text. Okay? And when I say match, they have to be opposites. Obviously, you don't want them to match. You don't want them to be the same colors because if I took this, the word sales and I turned to yellow, the same color as the background. You can not see it anymore. So obviously you don't want to match in that sense, but you want to match like as in it's very appealing. They work well together, right there. Obviously not similar whatsoever. They're actually opposing opposites, but they're very similar in that kind of nature. Let's go ahead and take a look at the thumbnail, another thumbnail example here. Here's another example where I had the t-shirts of the characters in the thumbnail white. And a good idea, the outline of the icon is also white. So I might as well use white font. The white stands out and it fits in perfectly within the thumbnail. If I used red colored font, it would blend in with the background that wouldn't be attractive. And so white is going to go well here for this scenario. Now, something I also want to teach and kinda point here is that when you create thumbnails, you have to keep in mind the titling that you're going to use when you include text in the thumbnail, you want to think about how much texture going to use, what texture going to include, and all the things that are related to that. So one aspect of it is, you can see here we're doing Red Bubble Shop or views on the thumbnail. And in the text we have episode number 3. Episode number 3 is something we want to stand out. So that means it will have to be opposing the color of the font that we have here. We have this example in a few situations. Here is a situation where we have read mobile versus t public. If we created both colors the exact same, then they wouldn't stand out from each other and the viewers wouldn't really know that much that there's a difference without seeing the word versus. But we wanted to do is we want to create that contrast immediately between the two concepts. And I actually would have been better if this icon was blue. But what we did instead was we created the blue text here in the red text to show this immediate dichotomy, immediate difference between the text. So you have to understand that creating good thumbnails, it's required to have not only thick, large, visible fonts, but also the typography has to be visible from a color spectrum, right? You don't want to have your colors blending in. You want to, you know, of your text, you want it to pop right out. All right, let's go ahead and move on to the next lesson. 3. Creating Optimal Backgrounds: Now let's talk about creating your background layer thumbnail. When you create a thumbnail, the first thing that you're going to want to do is you're going to want to create the background before you add text, before you add an image before anything like that, create the background. What I like to do is I like to picture it in my head. How's it going to look like? So let's say this is what I kinda wanna do is I have a blank thumbnail here with just text and just an image. Okay. When I create a thumbnail, this is usually what I think of in my head. In the beginning, I think of text, I think of words, I think of an image. I'm not really sure where they're all gonna go, but I think of these things. So let's just save. This is what I'm thinking in my head. This image right here, this shot. Okay. This is what I'm thinking in my head. Well, what I do is I take a blank template and I think, okay, what would be a good background color? Let's say I want to go with the color orange, right? Let's just say I want to go with orange. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going go over here to elements and I'm just going to search orange. Now I have different colors of orange. I have the actual oranges, which I don't want within Canva, but I have gradients and I have like a, just a basic like flattened color, orange like it's just flat, it's orange throughout. And then I have here like a gradient. And then I have here some like watercolor approach, something like that. What I wanna do is I want to try to get fancy here. Okay, don't be afraid to get fancy. Let's go ahead and try this watercolor, and let's see what comes up. If it looks good, then it looks good. If it doesn't look good, then it doesn't look good, right? We can always change these things. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this water column, just going to enlarge it, okay, and as it loads onto my screen, it's going to pop up here. So I have my, my orange color going. Okay. And this is going to be the base to my thumbnail. All right. Now what I wanna do is I want to include the text. All right, so here we have 0 red bubble sales. This is what I'm thinking in my head for an idea of the thumbnail. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go for those large thick fonts again, just going to write them down. I have the word 0, I have the word red bubble. Let's go ahead and add that one. Red bubble, right? And I have sales, that's going to be the next word, right? And notice how I just placed them regularly onto the screen. It doesn't really matter where right now. Okay, 0, red bubble sales. So essentially what I have is I have my text. Okay, I didn't really worry too much about the color of the text, but I know I have my background, which is going to be the color of I know what my background is, the color, right? I can I can also alter my background by going over to clicking on the actual background, select Edit Image. And then what I could do is I go over here to all these settings, the adjust, and I have a few different options. I have clarity that I can improve on. Like I can give it a three for example, I can reduce it, improve it, right? I can maybe reduce the clarity. I can increase the blur of the photo. So if I want more grainy texture or if I wanted to be a little bit blurry, I can do that, right? So I can kinda play with how I want it to be. Now this is a good spot for me. I like this idea. Now what we're gonna do next is we want to have a ranging, want to arrange the text. So 0, red bubble sales is that ideal texts kinda like what I have here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the word 0, put it on top, move the red bubble, move the word red, sales, moving under the word red bubble. So somehow I know that I want this arrangement, whether it's in the middle, whether it's in the corner, it really doesn't matter where I'm just going to leave it where it is for now. So now we have a few things for sure. We have our color in the background, we have our text, and we have our basically our completed version of the thumbnail that's, you know, very visible and very easy to read, but this doesn't look attractive. I could easily create a thumbnail like this, but this is not going to get clicks. It's not going to get people's attention. So let's go ahead and move on to the next aspect where they add more elements. To add more. Essentially, we're beautifying the thumbnail. Let's go ahead and move on to that lesson. 4. Adding Elements Like Distress & Pain Splatter To Your Thumbnails: So the next lesson is where we add more elements to our thumbnail design. And when we add elements, what you're going to learn is that you can actually end up changing different aspects to the thumbnail, something like the background, something like that if you're not satisfied with it. So let's go ahead and jump right in. So some elements that I like to include is first paint splatter. You can see you're actually searched for it already, but you can search for it within Canvas, go to elements and select paint splatter, right? And you have all these different ones that come up. What I like to do is I like to pick ones that I can turn black. So this one I can turn any color I want, right? But comes out black, but I can, I'll select any color I want. For what I'm doing. I'm going to make sure it's black, okay? And I'm going to think, okay, what would be a really nice piece? I can make this bigger, right? And what I could do is I can essentially dropped down my transparency, kinda like this. And I can do this because it will give me more character to the actual design that can move it to the corner. Something like this, something like this, right? I can move kinda like right here, right? And I could do this more than once. So I have another example of paint splatter here. I can drag this one right here. Let's go ahead and do that. And I can also change the transparency right there. Right? And so now you can see here the details starting to change on the thumbnail. Alright, what some other element of things that I can add other than paint splatter. You know, well, I could add a grunge or a distress, same way that we had here to this thumbnail. And I'll show you guys the thumbnail where we have these lines here. We can add it to our thumbnail here, right? So let me go ahead and add some transparency to this. Okay? And what we're gonna do now is we're going to add some grunge. So let's go ahead and search for grunge, that's spelled GRU and GE. And we have a whole bunch of different textures here. And I want to go with something that's a little bit lighter. Let's see what comes up here. We have this seems a little bit light to me and we'll see what comes up. Okay. It almost does look like a paint splatter, but I'm going to enlarge it here and I'm just going to leave it kinda just the way it is. Okay, Now let's look for something, maybe even a little more complex, kind of like this one. And I can just place them all around my screen here. Okay, Let's go ahead and take a look at see all here. And let's go for something a little darker, kinda like this. And you can see here on this grunge, there's a black bar right here. It's almost like a black bar of paint. I'm gonna take that and move that to the edge right here. Okay, just like this. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to change now the transparency because it just simply too dark for me. Okay? And now what I'm going to do is I like the way this is looking so far. So if I was to just remove this text, Let's go ahead and remove the text. Okay, The background is looking something like this. Now for some people, this might be too much commotion going on and you can test things you could like. For example, you could delete this paint splatter. You can drag this grunge back to where it was. You can move this paint splatter here that we had earlier. Let's go ahead and move this one. We can kinda move it like this, then move everything back and we can just give things a nice little test, see how things go, right? And if we like it this way, then we can go back and add our texts. So for me, I'll just go ahead and add my text here because I liked the way it looks. The next thing what we're gonna do is we're going to configure our text to our given design. Alright, so let's go ahead and move on. 5. Configure Font Typography & Background Dynamic: All right, so now what we wanna do is we want to configure our text in terms of color and font to our given design that we have so far. So what we're gonna do is we're going to, first of all, try to figure out how they can all fit, right? So we have the concept of 0 red bubble sales, which means zeros are going to forego first, red bubble is going to go next, sales is going to go next. So let me go ahead and drag and drop cells on the bottom red bubble right here. Now what we could do is we can change up the color of the font and the actual font. So here I have the word 0, I have the word red bubble, and I have the word sales. So for me, instantly see some symmetry here. If this was the line of separation, the word red bubble, we have 0, red bubble sales, the word 0 and the word sale should be about the same size to me right now. And that's just the element that I believe that I get when I look at this and this word red bubble is almost like the defining line in between the two. Okay? And what I could do here is I want to change up the font because clearly we already have black in the background with the paint splatter with the grunge. And so what I wanna do is I want to change that up. So for 0, Let's go ahead and go with a white font. Okay, let's go with white. And let's, let's actually do this throughout the whole, entire store. So let's go over here. Let's make sure it's a pure white. Let's go ahead and reload the page. Something went wrong with Canva. By the way, guys, this is okay, this happens. And it's a good thing. We actually have it right here on the course so that you guys can see this with the texts. Would the sales, it's also make this a pure white. Okay? And we're gonna do the same thing with this text here, the red bubble text. All right. Now we have 0, red bubble sales. Now this is a pops a little more, It's definitely a little more cleaner, but it's still not as visible. Well, what we could do is we can add a black outline here in two different ways to the text. So go over here to Effects and we have two of them. We have shadow and we have Lyft. If we just want to just lift our tax, you can see the difference there. Do you guys see the difference between the word 0 here and now here? Let me go ahead and enlarge this so it's a little more visible for you guys. Let's go ahead and drag things back here. You can see 0 like this versus 0 like this, right? Or excuse me, the word 0 here versus here. You can see the difference now, right? Or even the regular versus the ones with the black transparent background. You can see that right here. All right, so it's a difference now for me, I like this little lift feature, okay? And I'm gonna go with extreme intensity when you go with a 100 for intensity, right? And that's what I'm going to stick with. Now. Let's go ahead and zoom out just a little bit. And we can see here that sometimes this paint splatters just overshadowing the image. So what we could do is we can just move this to the side here. And we could go back, drag that word 0 and let it kind of own its own space up there. Okay? And we're gonna do the same thing for the word red bold and the red word sale. So first for sales, let me go ahead and mimic what I just did by clicking lift, increasing the intensity. And you can see here it's more intense. Now, write more visible the word red bubble. We can do the same thing, right? And add some intensity there. We can even change it to the shadow. For this one, we could go the all black shadow. Transparency is non-existent. It's at a 100. We could change the direction of where the color goes. We can also increase some blur kinda like this. We could actually, if we like that feature, we could do this with all of them really, we could go with black here and weak transparency and just increase the amount of blur right here, right? So 0, red bubble sales. Let's do the same thing. Guys, which you're seeing me do is this is what regular people do when they create thumbnails. Nobody knows what they're gonna do right off the bat. They have to give it a test first and they have to try it before they actually do it. And you can see here you can play with the colors and where everything fits and things like that. So we have 0 red bubble sales. Well the next thing we could do is we can create, we can add more defining elements. And then for finding elements aren't really Elements for color or paint splatter or anything like that. But what they are is they're icons, images, things like that, that add those last few finishing touches to your thumbnails. Okay, so let's go ahead and jump right in. 6. Defining Elements Of Thumbnails: All right, so let's talk about defining elements. Defining elements are images, are icons, are things that could get more attention for your image. Well, for me what I like to do is since we're talking about red bubble, I like to go over here to my elements and I like the word to search for red bubble. And actually like to add the icon of what I'm talking about. You can see I've done this before. This thumbnail print on-demand platforms where I included the icons of the actual platforms that I was mentioning like wig shop by red bubble, et cetera. I did the same thing on this one. We're have icons of money on red bubble, things like that. And my goal here is I want my stuff to stand out. So first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to search for red bubble and I'm going to look for an icon or an image related to it. Let's go ahead and see what comes up. If something besides come up. And like I said, sometimes Canvas does have some issues with having stuff show up, but clearly we got it here and we have different examples of red bubble images. I'll always like the one with the outline, so that's the one that I'm going to stick with. And I'm going to just enlarge it here. And I like this enlarging effect where it's big enough to fit on the screen where people know exactly what it is. But it doesn't necessarily cut off anybody like any other space here so I can make it just big enough to where it fits right there. And it fits on the screen so you can see the red bubble icon now, right? And now what I could do with this red bubble icon is I can just fit it right here. I could even if I wanted to make it smaller, fit it right there, right? Anything kind of the way I want to do it here. And remember the rule that I can always change the background if I'm not happy with the way things look, right, but for now, let's just keep it this way. Now what we're gonna do is type in the word sales, okay? Because I want to get some icons for sales. And here, this, we have a great image that pops up that really catches my attention and I could drag it right here. Okay, so let's go ahead and wait for that to load. But notice here when we create these elements in our red bubble stores, we're giving ourselves the ability to capture more attention. And you can see here it looks beautifully done with the red bubble icon, the sales icon, the text. It all works out perfectly. And this could get a lot of attention if we decide to use this thumbnail, okay. 7. Thumbnail Design Wrap Up: So let's go ahead and wrap up the concept of creating designs for your business, creating thumbnails for your YouTube business, and helping you grow via Canvas. All right, you get to create thumbnails that utilize heavy, thick visible design. Fonts using colors that stand out from the background. And including elements that really make the defining elements more important using Grunge, using paint splatter. And we also add in defining elements that add in some more features to the design and we figured out different ways to manipulate them. Now wherever you want to put this stuff, it doesn't matter. Remember that there are no rules to creating thumbnails and there's no necessary guideline, right? If you want to include thumbnails, you if you wanted to put the image here and have text here, you could do that, right? And you can enlarge it kinda like this, right? And put the text here and then have another image here. This might even look better sometimes, it really just depends on who you are and what you like. And there's nobody who can tell you that something is right or wrong. Remember that practice makes better. Practice will never make perfect. Your thumbnails will never come out perfect. You know, there's an example of a thumbnail that I created here that I was happy about. But then I said, You know, I like this one. Maybe a little bit more could change the outcome of the views on that video. So that's something that I focused on in sometimes thumbnails take a little bit longer to make. Well, in the next lesson, I'm going to share with you guys a little secret of something that I use as a secret weapon to get more views on my thumbnails. 8. Secret Weapon On Youtube Thumbnails: Okay, so let's talk about my secret weapon that I use to get more views on my thumbnails. I actually have it example right here on this thumbnail, which what I like to do is I like to create the neon effect to my fonts. If you look here on my font, I have the word Instagram account. And then here I have another word, how to grow your right. And that's a font here. And then I have, or color here. And then I have another color here. Notice how these are neon colored fonts. There's actually a way to do this within Canvas, and I'm gonna do this with the word Instagram here to show you guys what I'm talking about. You can click on the actual font and go over here to Effects. And then what you do is click on neon. And what this do, what this does is it makes the font a little bit more visible, captures a little more attention. And you should only use this, like I said, as a secret weapon. When you want to capture that extra attention, when you want to dial it in, you gotta make sure you're very wise when you use this. Because if you use it all the time, people will think of it as something normal. They don't usually see this neon effect too much. But when you add this neon effect, people are going to love it when they actually see it. And it's going to get people to click More. So you also want to make it visible. So you can also change up the color of your actual of your actual design here. And the way you could do that as you go over here to this and you just switch the color, right? You just switch the color, maybe you want orange, right? That's, that pops really like. That does a lot. And once again, I'll just do another tutorial to show you how to do it. Click on the actual text, click effects. Click on neon, choose the intensity of how strong you want it, right? And then go over here to color and just manipulate the color however you want to manipulate it, however you want to change it. And that's the secret weapon. And once again, use it wisely because if you overuse it, your fans on YouTube are just not going to appreciate it as much and they're not going to click as much. But this is where my secret weapons to really boost those views.