YouTube Thumbnail Design - Canva, Photoshop, & Figma for Thumbnail Design

1. Why Care About Thumbnails?: Think of any YouTube video you've seen recently. Why did you click on it? Sure. The topic was something you're probably somewhat interested in, but you didn't spend minutes wondering whether to click on it or not. You clicked instantly emotionally, and that's because of the thumbnail. My name is Adam Taylor, and I've created more thumbnails than I want to admit for myself and my clients over the years. YouTube and content creation is one of the main services I offer my agency clients. The same agency that took me from a broke college student to a six figure business owner. In this course, I'll teach you everything I've learned about thumbnail creation so you can take the guesswork out of the equation and have videos perform much better. Let me show you. We'll start with the absolute fundamentals. What makes a thumbnail good? How to think about CTR and retention and why your title and thumbnail should come before you ever hit record. Then we'll break down the design side. Everything from layout, color and contrast to how to structure your text, subject placement, and emotional cues that trigger curiosity and clicks. I'll also walk you through the full technical process step by step tutorials in Canva, Photoshop, and even how to use AI to create and even test the mail variations faster than ever. We'll study thumbnail psychology, look at split test examples and show you how to avoid the most common design mistakes that kill your CTO. And if you're ready to scale, I'll show you how to batch your thumbnails, hire your first designer affordably, and even train them to create high converting designs that match your brand and get results. I've seen good thumbnails change channels overnight. It's time for you to understand these powerful concepts. So take action and join the course right now. 2. See Why Thumbnails Matter: Do Mr. Beast, Mark Rober, Dude Perfect, or any of your favorite YouTubers have in common. They all obsess over their thumbnails. And why do they do it? Well, it's simple. A thumbnail can make or break a video. Finding the right thumbnail can catapult your video to getting more views than you imagine. Or it can tank your video and have YouTube's algorithm stop selling. But if you're here, you probably already knew that thumbnails were important. Now let's talk about why. The number one metric surrounding thumbnails that you need to obsess about is click or CTR. This number is a measure of how many people who see your video as they browse through YouTube actually click on it. And it's expressed as a percentage. So how this works in practice is once you release a video, your title and thumbnail will be shown to viewers as they scroll on YouTube. And every single person who sees that is an impression. Then, depending on how many people actually click on your video, your CTR, YouTube decides how many impressions to give you based on how successful they determined your video to be. Can think of it like impressions being YouTube's currency. They have a certain number of impressions that they can invest, and the highest ROI on their investment is people staying on the platform. So YouTube wants to keep people on the platform as long as possible to make money from ads, and they do so by showing them videos which have a high likelihood of getting clicked on. Here, you start to see why a good thumbnail is so crucial. Now, a bit of a caveat here. YouTube has been around for a while, and at first, they weighed CTR almost exclusively. So if a video had an insanely high CTR, then it would get an insanely high number of views. This is probably why people started to do this. Clickbait was born and people started to create the most ridiculous thumbnails ever. Creators would post soccer videos where the thumbnail showed ten people in a goal or other crazy shenanigans. So, YouTube decided to tweak things, and so they added a retention to them. Retention is a measure of how much of the video the average viewer watches. Again, YouTube makes money by keeping viewers on the platform as long so if every time someone sees a video while browsing, they not only click on it, but watch it in its entirety, then YouTube will show that video to everyone. But why is this retention talk important for us thumbnail creators? Well, after people went on this spree of creating the craziest thumbnails imaginable, YouTube decided to factor retention in, which, in a way nerved clickbait. So videos that had insane titles and thumbnails but didn't deliver on the promise had sharp drop offs and retention, and YouTube learned to stop showing them. Now, am I saying that Clickbait is dead? No. Clickbait is actually one of the strongest tools for creators when conceiving a video title, and, of course, a thumbnail. If you listened carefully, I said videos that didn't deliver on their promises were punished. However, if you find a way to incorporate Clickbait and deliver on your promise, nonetheless, your video can be absolutely killer. This is why Mr. Beast videos dominate. He maintains the elements of the old YouTube Clickbait and delivers on it within the first couple seconds. Then every second is meticulously crafted so that it keeps your attention. But that's a topic for idea here is that having a strong CTR is crucial, but it has to be a healthy CTR, a CTR which is in unison with the rest of your video. This is why certain CTR testing tools are a bit obsolete because they only tell you how well the thumbnail is getting people to click, not how long the views are lasting per click. Instead, YouTube's own thumbnail testing tool, which we'll talk about shows you how a thumbnail is performing based on CTR and retention per click, which is beautiful. And there's plenty of other tools that we'll talk about, which also do this. So a good thumbnail not only makes people click, but is aligned with your video in a way that makes people want to watch more as well. This means for you creating thumbnails is a theme that we're going to see throughout this entire course. Thumbnails shouldn't just be something that you think about after your video is done, but something that you come up with right from the get go. You have to think about what crazy promises you can make and still somewhat deliver on in the hook and throughout the rest of the video without your viewers clicking off within seconds. It's all a balance. This way, you'll be able to guarantee the highest chances of success for your video. And we'll talk a little more about it in the next lesson. 3. Follow the YouTube Creation Process: No secret that content is crucial in today's business landscape, which is probably why you're here. So I want to briefly cover some things that you should think about when creating a YouTube video, which will inevitably affect your thumbnails design, style, and ultimately performance. First, let's look at all the elements that need to be created for a video. There's an idea, but title thumbnail writing, the script, filming and editing. This is basically everything that goes into video. And I took this straight out of Ali Abdal's video creation structure, which has been a huge help for me when creating videos. Idea here is that by breaking it down into these parts, you can easily see where the bottlenecks are, what's taking you the most time, what's working well for you, and what you could or should outsource. And while this course is about thumbnails, here is a brief method that I propose to tackle each part of the process. But first, we need to talk about something, something that ties directly into thumbnail creation. And whether you want your videos to get search based traffic or browsing based this distinction is crucial because it's two very different ways of positioning your video, and basically the whole approach shifts. Most videos on YouTube aim for browsing based traffic. Browsing based traffic is probably the type of traffic that you are when you consume YouTube on the regular. You get on the app or site, you see what's recommended to you, and you click on whichever video catches your eye for whatever reason. By the end of the course, you'll know exactly the reasons. To stand out in this competitive landscape, you need, as we discussed, a very eye catching click Baty title and thumbnail, which deliver on their promise at least to some extent. Also need people to watch a high percentage of your video, which makes you too bappy because that means they get to keep enslaving their users attention. This is all very different from what works for search based content. While on browsing base, you need to stop people scrolling and make them curious enough to click. Search based people are already searching for something specific, and they need to see that your video is the most relevant solution. While you need a catchy thumbnail and title, you might not have to make it the most flashy. Instead, you might want to make it very clear that if they're searching for a tutorial, that video is, in fact, It's or that if they want to learn something quick, you give them just that. Not only that, but you have to make sure that your title includes the right keywords to rank high in search results in the first place. So very different ways of getting views, and they both have their pros and cons. Browsing based content has a much higher virality potential. If a video is picked up by the algorithm, it can completely blow up. On the other hand, search based content can become an asset. If you manage to make it rank highly, then you can get views from it passively every single month. And not just that, but people coming from search have a much higher intent. Meaning they're not just looking to be entertained. They're typically searching for a specific solution. This means that if you offer that solution, then you can capitalize on their high intent. And not just in the form of free content on the YouTube video, but you might upsell them to a paid version of your solution. All things you need to consider before deciding whether you're doing browsing based or search based content. Now let's go back to our list containing the secrets to YouTube video. Remember, idea, Tito, femil script, writing, filming and editing. The first part is the idea, arguably, where the decision we just made will have the highest impact on. Either way, I recommend you make a list of ideas in book, like 50 or over 100. Just brainstorm here. Now, if you're making browsing based content, you want to come up with ideas which are trendy, relevant, and with high variety potential. Change, but things like tier lists, $1 versus $500 formats like this tend to do pretty well. In this case, you just have to think about how to adapt it to your niche. For example, if your channel or the channel you work with is a guitar channel, then you can do something like top guitarist tear list or $20 guitar versus $10,000 guitar. These aren't the titles that comes after. However, if you're doing search based content, then your process will be quite different. You want to use a tool like VDIQ to find what people are actually looking for regarding your niche. We'll cover how to use VDIQ in the next lesson, but you want to find keywords where there is a high demand and a low supply. Meaning you'll have a competitive advantage by filling that gap in the YouTube market. Longer the keyword, usually the better because it will make your video super relevant for a certain keyword. So if the keyword is guitar tutorial versus how to play Twinkle, twinkle little star finger style arrangement guitar tutorial, then you'll have a pretty good chance of ranking high for the ladder if that's the video that you make. That's how you approach the idea process. You either brainstorm trends in bulk or search keywords in bulk. Now let's move on to the next step. Title thumbnail and script. Ali Abdal puts all of these together because of what I mentioned in the previous lesson. You want to get that juicy browsing based traffic, then you're going to want to clickbait as much as possible without disappointing your audience. That's going to increase your CTR while maintaining retention, which will make your video perform much better. That's why you need to plan these videos before you even create the video. That's exactly what I want to get across in these introduction lessons. But your thumbnail isn't just an afterthought for your video. Instead, it's intimately connected to your video and its performance. Say that you're going with a guitar example and you're doing the tearless video. Your title might be End of the debate top guitarist Tear list or the most overrated guitarist of all time. For a video like that, your thumbnail might be something like a tear list with blurred pictures of guitarists on the left, and maybe one or two non blurred pictures, so you can tell what it actually is. Then you can have your face on the right thinking really hard or being very serious and maybe with a judge's outfit or a judge's gavel. Then your hug would be something like I played music from over 700 guitarists, and here are the absolute worst ones that you want to stay away. However, for your search based video, your trifecta will be completely different. If you're doing the How to play Twinkle, twinkle little star finger style arrangement guitar tutorial keyword, then that's basically the title. Now, your thumbnail should still be well composed with all of the principles that we'll discuss, but you might not need or want to be as catchy here. Instead, you might want to emphasize the value proposition to show that your video is relevant to the people searching. You could show some very simple sheet music on the bottom, for instance. Then on top, you looking very happy playing the song. And on the left, some text saying something like, learn in 5 minutes. Here, the thumbnail understands the audience, which will increase its click through rate and ideally, retention. Then the hook could be something really simple like after teaching guitar to thousands of students, I found the fastest way to learn your first song. So grab your guitar and just follow. And one little note here, Ali Abdal mentions that the hook should be 30 seconds long. I'm more in the Alex Formsi school of thought, and I think it should be maximum eight and then get straight into the reason that people clicked on the video after. Other aspects of the video creating process don't really have much impact on your thumbnail beyond what we've already talked about. However, I wanted to emphasize the importance of two things. A, knowing the kind of content you're creating so you can make the right thumbnail and B, planning a thumbnail, even if it's just what the basic composition will look like before you even start creating the video. With that, I think we have some pretty solid foundations and understanding of YouTube, and we're ready to dive deeper into the art of the thumbnail. 4. Master Thumbnail Design Basics: Now that we've laid the foundations on how thumbnails fit in your video strategy, it's time to talk about the core design principles because here's the thing. A thumbnail isn't just a pretty image. It's a tool. It's packaging. It's the first few milliseconds of your pitch to the viewer. And unless it's grabbing attention, giving clarity at the same time and most importantly, evoking an emotional response, it's probably not doing its job. So in this lesson, I want to go through the essential principles of thumbnail design. These are the ingredients that you'll see in some form or another across the best performing thumbnails on YouTube. And even though each channel in niche has its own flavor, these fundamentals hold up almost universally. Start from the top. First, you need to have a subject. Now, this might sound obvious, but you'd be surprised at how many thumbnails feel like a visual soup. Most of the time, this is going to be a person, often the creator with a strong readable facial expression. And sometimes it's an object, a product, a graph, a screenshot, money, a thumbnail of another thumbnail. But the point is there has to be something that stands out as the thing. If you can't tell what the focus is in half a second, then neither can anyone else. Next, we have background. A dark background is one of the simplest ways to make your thumbnail stand out. It adds contrast, it makes your subject pop and often feels cleaner and more intentional than a bright or noisy background. You'll see this in Mr. Best thumbnails, Iman Gazi, Alex Harmozi and a lot of other top channels. They know that the background is there to support the subject and not compete with it. Now, that contrast principle extends into color. Bright colors, especially red, yellow, and green can be powerful. They create energy and they help grab the eye. But like with all strong tools, you don't want to overuse them. For example, too much saturation makes things feel childish or just chaotic. Focusing on one or two areas of brightness is usually enough here. A good thought for this is that it should feel like a highlight and not an explosion. Now brings us to text. Text and thumbnails is tricky because it's easy to get lazy with it. You've throw in your title, shrink it down, and then call it a day. But really, thumbnail text should do one of three things. It should either add emotion, add context or add contrast to your title. And, of course, it should be short, like, really short. If you're putting more than four or five words in your thumbnail, it better be absolutely necessary. Most great thumbnails stick to two or three punchy words. Id the ones that provoke curiosity or give some bold opinion. Here you should think things like $0 versus $10,000 or he lied or not worth it. Now, these aren't repeating the title. They're complementing it or creating a question in your mind. In fact, sometimes you'll see the text on the thumbnail complement the title in a way that sparks curiosity. For example, one of the formats that is really popular at the time of recording this is the review type thumbnail. The video might be titled something like I played the worst rated golf course in then the thumbnail will show some sort of Yelp review that says something like $200 for this. There the title is giving you the first layer, and the thumbnail is taking you a layer deeper, referencing something specific about the video. Both of them spark curiosity. Both of them click Bit you, but the thumbnails text gives you something specific to click for. A seminar strategy, you'll see a lot is when people compliment their title with a text message bubble. One creator that does colors super well is Marques Brownlee. So, if we look at his videos right here, we can see that a lot of them are all very vibrant in their colors. So we can look at this Sony review right here. We see a blue background, and we see the headphones very clearly. We see this one, the phone being taken apart, and the colors here are very. This one right here is a very good example of how he uses colors because this is a graphic here that is super bright and super saturated in this graphic specifically right here and all works well. It's not something that's chaotic and explosion, but these are vibrant colors and they draw your eye, and we see his facial expression right here, this is just one thumbnail that does this very well. So now here, looking at Iman Gazi's page, we can see that many of his thumbnails have these dark backgrounds. And they work very well because they make these simple designs really stand out. And they contrast this background and make us really look at exactly what he wants us to focus on, right? Here, we have this $0. Then through his head, it comes out as 10,000. And again, this is something that is a very simple concept, a simple design, but it really stands out because of this dark background. We see this here how he as a figure, stands out very much because he's surrounded by this darkened background. Here, this is the case. We can look at here, zero to 1 million. We see that this background, it contains some aspects to it, but that's not where your focus is going at all. Your focus is going to be on this graphic, and your focus is going to be on him on the colors that are present within it and not that super dark background that is there. Someone that really takes advantage of this review style thumbnail is Ryan Trahan. And you can see the views that he gets on this. Right here, he posted this 14 days ago, and he has 6.6 million views on this. So, it says, I tested one star Hotels finale, and we see the review right here with a one star on Yelp, and it says Lock that's not even a full sentence. It's two words, lock window. And conveys something that we see is very clear. We know exactly what this means, and it kind of sparks our curiosity because we want to know exactly what is happening in this video. Is he in danger when he's going to be going to these hotels? And you can see this right here. He does this a lot. We see it right here, one star theme parks, one star airlines. And it's the same kind of formula that he repeats time and time again. And you can look at his views. It seems working. And a similar strategy that you'll see a lot of is when people complement their title with a text message bubble. In this case, the notification shows some provocative click Baty words which build on the title. It's the same idea. It's just an excuse to include something that works with the title to increase curiosity and thus clickth rate. That leads into another important principle Zoom. Zoom in more than feels comfortable. Trust me. Most people view YouTube on their phones, and your thumbnail is going to be this tiny little rectangle in the middle of a feed filled with noise. Face or subject is too small, it's gonna vanish. So crop in and be shameless. We can again see this with Ryan Trahan. Let's look at these two thumbnails right here. If he were to post these pictures on literally anywhere else, then you'd imagine that they'd be way more zoomed out, right? Here, because the thumbnails, he has it so close into his face. This is kind of just a little reference the flip side of this is when you create a thumbnail, you should constantly be zooming out to see the thumbnail as it would look once it's posted on the YouTube feed. So what do I mean by this? Well, here, if we come into Canva, what I mean is that once you're designing this thumbnail, occasionally, every so often, you should zoom out. So on Canva, you can just grab this little bar right here and you can zoom it until whatever feels like it would be the smallest that anyone would see so, here, even at this distance at 14%, we see that this is still very clear. I see the money graphic in the background. I see his facial expression. This is something that's very clear and I can read it. And we also see the text here. Again, people are just going to be seeing a tiny little rectangle. So your cool 1.2% glow that you're super proud of might be completely invisible. Now, this also means that you need to be thinking about composition, which brings us to ratio and layout. You want to make sure that your thumbnail is always 16 by nine, which is the standard YouTube ratio, and that it's designed in a high enough resolution. Recommend working in 12 80 by 720 or 1920 by 1080. Now, don't worry, don't overcomplicate it. You just want to start with the right canvas size, and you're good. Now, within that ratio, you want to think about what the viewer's eye is supposed to go to. This is what people refer to as eye flow. You want to guide the viewer through the thumbnail. Usually, it starts with the subject, especially if it's a face, and then it flows to whatever supporting elements that you've added. So text, action, symbols, et cetera. A common trick is to have the person in the thumbnail literally looking at the next. Now coming back to Marcus Brownlee, we see at the thumbnail we were looking earlier how this is the case. We see him looking at the next element right here in the graphic. We see him doing it here in this thumbnail. We see him doing it here. This is something that he's consistently doing. And we can also see aspects of other principles that we discuss in this lesson. For example, right here, clear one is Zoom. We see how he is super zoomed in here, and this is kind of just another way to illustrate. So, humans follow eyelines. It's subtle, but it really does work. Now, let's talk about contrast more deeply. Contrast isn't just about dark versus light. It's about visual hierarchy. So what's in the foreground? What's in the background, and what are you asking your viewers to notice first? Here, you want to use drop shadows, outlines, glow effects, anything that separates your subject from the background. Now, Canva and Photoshop both make this very easy with tools like background removal, glow and shadow settings. We'll talk about this and I'll even walk you through it a lot in future lessons. Without contrast, your thumbnail will feel flat, and flat equals forgettable. This brings us to our final and maybe most important principle, which is readability. This is where most people mess up. You spend an hour designing a beautiful thumbnail. You zoom in and tweak every pixel, and then you forget to actually zoom out. So once it's on the homepage, it's essentially unreadable. As I mentioned, and I'll keep emphasizing, always zoom out when you're previewing your thumbnail. Shringing down to about the size that it'll appear on mobile. Can you tell what the video is about in 1 second? Can you read the text? Can you make out the subject? Would you get an emotional response? If not, it's time to simplify. At the end of the day, YouTube thumbnails are about packaging. Trying to make someone curious enough to click while making sure the visual is clear and not crowded. So to recap, have a clear subject. Use dark backgrounds and bright colors for contrast. Keep your text bold and minimal. Zoom in more than you think you need to. Design at the right ratio. Guide the eye and prioritize contrast and always zoom out to test readability. If you just stick to these principles, you'll already be ahead of 80% of creators on the platform. But of course, we have much more to 5. Develop Thumbnail Ideas With Viewstats: The software we're going to be going over in this lesson is called VistatSP. And this is actually a company that is owned by Mr. Beast. Essentially his value proposition in creating this, he wanted to give other creators on YouTube the tools that he uses to be successful on the platform. Now, here I'm in VistATSP. So this gives us all of these tools that we are going to check out in this lesson. But first, I want to show you viewstats.com, which is the free site that anyone can use. I just want to show you kind of a quick little overview of this before we move into the pro feature. So first off, what we're able to do is look at any YouTube channel. Let's go ahead and go to Mr. Beast, and we're able to see a bunch of stats in relation to their YouTube profile. So, we have all of these, and one way that you can essentially use this for thumbnail inspiration is if you want to come here, you can go top videos, and you can filter, let's say, last 30 days. And we want to take out these filters. We want to take out made for kids. We want to take out music channels, and we can take out movies and trailers. Then we can filter it solely to longs. And then we can go ahead look at all of these videos. And we can see these are the best performing videos, the top 100 viewed YouTube videos in the last 30 days. So we know they're doing something, right, and we can kind of get inspiration from thumbnails this way. Now, of course, you can also go through top channels and see what they're doing. But for the most part, in using the free tool, I like to go with the top videos and kind of search through here. Okay. But now for the fun stuff, let's actually get into the pro software. So as we can see, we have all of these tools. So just as a quick overview of each, we first have competitors. So this essentially allows you to save competitor channels, and then you can track everything that they're doing. So you can get all the metrics. So if you connect your channel, you can then select competitor channels and then get all of those metrics. Here in outliers, we're essentially able to see videos on specific channels that perform essentially much better than the average on that channel. So a 66 point X outlier is saying that this video has 67 times more views than the average of this channel. Then we have the thumbnail search. And this one allows us to just put in keywords or description of, let's say, a thumbnail idea, and then you're able to see a bunch of thumbnails that contain the keywords that you put into the search. Next, we have AB testing. So this takes the AB tests that are ran on YouTube, and it shows us for each individual video which tests were run on that video. And given that we can see, so we're essentially able to study thousands, tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of videos where we get to see the tests that they ran, and we get to see the qualities of their winning thumbnail. So this can essentially help us run better tests ourself and kind of just give us a better idea about what thumbnails should entail. And then next, we have collections and alerts. So collections essentially allows us to create groups of ideas, groups of keywords, and we're able to have all of this research essentially consolidated in one place. Alerts allows us to set keywords, and then we are able to see videos that perform essentially in the parameters that we set with these alerts. So for keywords, if we set, let's say, minecraft, as we see here, new video that has over, let's say, 5 million views. Every single new minecraft video that has over 5 million views, we will then get alerted too. So first, let's go ahead and go into the thumbnail tool. So this thumbnail search tool, I think, is going to be the best one that we can use to kind of start out our creative process and creating a thumbnail. So let's go ahead and do a broad term here, and let's put in Minecraft. So as we can see, all of these are essentially pretty basic. Like, this is the basic kind of cover art that we have for Minecraft. But we are able to filter it here by outlier score. And we can see more here as well. But having these outliers, we're essentially able to see the Minecraft videos that were posted on all of these channels that performed exceptionally well. So let's go ahead and do a different search here. Let's say that we want to do so, again, this search is now filtered by Outlier score, so we're able to see the best performing videos with this thumbnail search. So depending on what you are going to be making your video on, this can be a super helpful tool. Now let's go ahead and move into AB tests. And again, we can do the same exact thing here, so we can search in a keyword, but instead, I'm going to put in a channel. So I just typed in Ryan Trahan and we can click right here. So, as you can see now, we have one of his most recent videos right here, which is doing this review style thumb. Get to see that he ran three separate tests right here, and then this 11. But we can also see here that he ran more tests. Right here, we have the test number. So we see that he ran four different tests, and we can see how each one have these kind of small subtle differences. But then at the end of the day, we see that he focused on this one, and this was the winning thumbnail with this kind of silhouette of a man in the background with a one star that says we can scroll down and we can continue to see more and more of the ones that he ran here. Now, there's going to be so many lessons to draw out of these tests. And you can do this with so many of your favorite YouTubers, really, and the YouTubers that you know have great thumbnails. You could go through, and there's always going to be new lessons that you can draw this, again, is a great tool to actually get some learning done here. So now let's move into outliers. So in outliers, our search is going to be a little different because instead of searching for content within thumbnails, we're going to be using this search one like it is a YouTube search. So we can search in, as you see right here, topics, niches or channels. But again, no matter what you search, you'll be able to see these outlier scores next to each of these videos. So let's go ahead and put in Channel Jubilee. So here, we're able to look at their videos, and we get to see their outlier scores. But another thing that we can do, again, is come here, and now we get a very thorough filter search. So as you can see, right here, we can sort by outlier score. So this is kind of the basic filtering that we looked at earlier. We can look at Niche. This one here isn't going to matter as much because I put in a specific channel. We can filter by views, duration, outlier score subscribers, and even do a date range right here. Now, along with all of these, we also have more kind of Boolean search terms. So we can have title must include a certain keyword or exclude another keyword. So now what I want to do is I want to put the outlier score to, let's say, 11.5. We can see that eight months ago, this was their highest performing outlier right here, their highest performing video, essentially, with a 17.9 X outlier score. This one has 30 million views. So now let's go ahead and move on to alerts. So let's go ahead and click Get started here, and we can put in a keyword. Let's say our keyword is going to be Airbnb. And we can add in more keywords, but I'm going to just have it to this one single. Again, we can come and do these kind of search filters here, where we can put in keywords that it must include, or we can put in keywords that we want it to exclude. But I'm not going to fill in any of these, and I'm going to go ahead and click Next, and then you can filter it between Longs and shorts, but I'm going to keep it to just longs here. And then we want to choose a minimum total view count. So here, I'm going to do, let's say, 100,000 views, and then now we have finished our alert, and we can add a name right here. I'm just going to put in air, B and B. And now we click Finish. And now I have this alert ready to go. So any new video that fits these alert criteria is then going to be notified, and they are going to be compiled right here. Now, next, we have collections. So let's go ahead and click Make a new connection, and let's go ahead and just stick with this Airbnb. So I'll create. And what I can do is I can create a collection of videos right here. And essentially I can use them to study. So if I find videos that fit a certain criteria that I want to kind of compile and study, I can put them here and I can get all the statistics for them. And this can kind of help me build or maybe help me educate my thumbnail ideas or video ideas. Now, lastly, we have s. So competitors right here, I can go ahead and click Skip. Now, I can add in some competitors. So let's say my competitors is going to be Mr. Beast. I can add his channel right here. Now let's go ahead and add in another one. I'll put in T Series. Okay, I now added in these two competitors. So we get to see their sub amounts, and we get to see their views as well. Click Continue. And now we can see all the updates that have to do with these competitors that we've selected. So if I scroll down here, then I can see kind of all the updates by a chronological order. But if we come to the top, we get to see highlighted updates by Viewstats. So we see here that Mr. Beast started a new AB test. Right now I have Mr. Beast and Tsiies. So that is two competitors, but as you can see here, we can put a maximum of 15 here. So, the kind of value here is clear. It's apparent. All these channels that you know perform well and do good in their spaces and are people that you can steal from that is going to be great to have them always here and have view Stats always kind of highlighting the most important information now, another part of this is that we can also filter what we see here. So instead of selecting all, what we can do is select just a thumbnail change. Or we could select the title change and AB test. So if we want to exclude these recent outlies or subscriber growth or new uploads, and we just want to focus on these ones that are more based on kind of going to be going through and changing their thumbnail or changing their title or the AB test they're going to be running, these are all kind of more metric based things that we can steal from Okay, so we just went through a lot in this software. But one other thing that I still want to show us is their browser extension. So, I already have it attached to Mrome. But what I want to show you is here, if we come onto YouTube, then what we get to see as we are going through our YouTube are these outlier scores. So we get to see this video right here is almost a 50 X outlier. So again, that tells us that this video performed 50 times better in terms of views than Gabe Bolt's average video. So now that we are in this video, we not only get to see that outlier score but we get to see more statistics right here from ViewstAts. We get to see information about their channel, so we get to see their subscribers. We get the views, views per month. And we also get to see uploads per month. We can look at ranking here. So we get to see that this video ranked number one out of their last ten uploads. We get to see why the outliers core was so high at 50 X because looking at all of these videos, we see that some of them reached a few thousand, but some of them didn't even cross 1,000 views. And we can also compare right here, and then we can add in another video here to see kind of the graph of their views, compared to each other. We can also change in the time frame here or we can select just looking at this video's views, again, in a specific time. Right. So I know this was a lot, and as you can see, Vestats has a lot to offer, but here you go. This was everything about Vestat. So this is kind of pricey. It is going to be $50 a month. But as you can see, it is quite a valuable tool. Is it going to be worth that $50? It depends where you're at with your YouTube career and how much you're willing to invest. But it's clear there is value to this, and there's probably at least something that you can pull from this. Try it for a month and create a bunch of different thumbnails with their thumbnail search, and you can see how it goes from there. Alright, that's it for this lesson. 6. Avoid These Huge Thumbnail Mistakes: Since we already spoke about the thumbnail design essentials and the theories and kind of just thought practices that underpin the best thumbnails, I also wanted to go through a lesson breaking down thumbnail mistakes. There's two ways I could have went about this lesson. We either could have looked at thumbnails from underperforming channels, and we could have spoke about why I think that those thumbnails and those videos aren't performing as well as they could. Now, another approach that we can do is instead of looking at smaller underperforming channels, we could look at some of the top channels, and we could look at thumbnail split tests that they did, and we could see the winning thumbnails of those split tests, and we can then discuss and talk about why that winning thumbnail is the one that won and why the other thumbnails lost out. I think this is a better approach because we're looking at essentially the best of the best that YouTube can offer us. So there's much more to learn here. Now, the first one that we are going to go over is Ryan Trehan right here. And we're going to look at this video right here. I tested one star Hotels finale. Now, we get to see that his current thumbnail is this one right here. Now, let's go ahead and look at the other thumbnails that lost out in this test. We see the first test that he ran right here consisted of these three. We see that his current one isn't here at all. So let's go ahead and skip ahead to where this one is. So his current thumbnail right now wasn't added until his fourth test of this. Now, we can see judging by these prior tests that we could assume here from test one that this is the one that won because if we look at the next test, we see split tests between these two different variations. And then with this third variation, we see, again, it's split testing with more with this kind of style. They're just changing the text. Finally, on this text, we see the final thumbnail that is now the current thumbnail. Now, I think it's no surprise that this is the thumbnail that won out on this test. Because if we want to look at this one, for example, this isn't necessarily a very clear image. If we look back here, we see these eyes. And we want this thumbnail to tell a story. We see the title is Eye Tested One star Hotels. So what's the story of each of these thumbnail? Well, here, this is going for something that's quite nice. You know, we see that this is a dangerous, maybe a creepy, a scary kind of hotel. But if we go ahead and come back here, if we look at this just in this view right here, which honestly, isn't going to be that different than somebody looking on their phone, it's not super clear what is happening here. We can't really clearly see that these are eyes. So just looking from this far distance, it's kind of clear why this one didn't do as well. Now, let's look at these two right here. Again, it's a similar story here between comparing this thumbnail to this one. Here, if you're looking closely, you can really tell that this is a silhouette of a person. From a distance, the head there is clear. But comparing to this one, this is much more clearly a person right here, and their body looks much more clear, almost like they're about to attack Ryan Trahan in this thumbnail. So this is achieved by not only clarity, but also with contrast. We see the color right here, this yellow orange color that makes the silhouette of the man stand out super clearly as compared to this, where we have a curtain, and the man here is kind of difficult to make out. You know, it's kind of clear that it's a man, but this one here is just so much more clear and almost a little bit more threatening. Okay, so the main takeaways from this is that first, we don't want to have things that are too small. We went over this. We want to have our thumbnails, all the things that we want people to pay attention to to be big. We want them to be zoomed in and clear. And secondly, we want to have contrast, and we want to have the things that are going to be contributing to the story of our thumbnail, things that are going to be standing out and clear. Alright, so now let's go ahead and move on to the next thumbnail. Now, for our next set of thumbnails, we're going to be looking at Mark Robers testing the world's smartest crow video. So we can see here that he ran a lot of tests on this video. There's eight tests here, and we can see right here from the first test that the winner is right here in our first test. And from jumps, we can also see that the actual winner is something that's a little bit more vibrant than this one. But we can speak about that in the test that we see it come up. Now, in just looking at the other thumbnails that are part of this first test, we see first, I want to compare this one to these chess ones. Now, I'd say why this one performed better than this one is because we see a much clearer story in these two thumbnails as compared to this one. And that's because we see in these two thumbnails, the crow right here, standing almost in counterpart to Mark Rober and going against him. Now if in this thumbnail, we saw something like the crow looking like it was actually solving the Rubis cube, then that might be a different story, and we might see this thumbnail performing a little bit better, but we don't see that. Now, let's look at these two thumbnails right here. Now, I'd say why this one performed better than this one is because, again, we see a more clear story being told right here because here it looks like the crow is involved and engaged in this game of chess against Mark Rober. Right here, it doesn't necessarily look like that because it looks like the crow is just kind of looking at Mark Rober, and he doesn't look very engaged in this game of chess. So here, I would say, I'd argue that this is a more clear story of a thumbnail. Now, let's go ahead and move on to the second thumbnail test. Now, again, here, we see that he ran this exact test again, but now taking out this one. So here, there isn't much to talk about. We already covered this. So let's go ahead and move on. Now, for this one, we see a very small difference. And the difference here is just in the crow. Now, again, I'd say this one probably performed better because there's more contrast here. We see this black crow on this lighter background against these white ponds right here, these white chess pieces. And here, there's a little bit more kind of conflict in the colors because the black is really what contrasts from everything. The white kind of blends in with other things. So I'd say the black here is much more contrasting from everything else in the thumbnail that this crow is standing beside. Now, let's move on to the next one. So here we finally get to see the current thumbnail in this test. And we see here from if we look at the back test to this, what is clear is that there is much more vibrance in the current thumbnail than there was in this thumbnail. No, that one is a self explanatory principle that we've already discussed. Contrast and making things stand out from not only the thumbnail, but also just the overall YouTube feed is obviously going to bring eyes to your thumbnail and make it perform better. And now, looking within this test, we see that the difference here is testing a crow just standing here or having the pieces in its mouth. And as we can see, we know that this one was the winner of this test. And I'd kind of say that I bet the results here were very, very close. And I'd say this one won again, because we're seeing more of a contrast here. We have Mark Rober versus this crow all over this board. Here, with the pieces in its mouth, it's kind of mixing the elements in the thumbnail and not creating as clear of a kind of picture and story here. So now let's move on. If we look at this next test, again, he's coming back this thumbnail. He really wanted this one to win for whatever reason, but it just kept losing every test. So we can go ahead and move on. Now, here we also see thumbnails where the crow is standing without Mark Rober, and obviously here, we see that these one's lost out. And I think this one is also kind of just self explanatory. This thumbnail is just clearly telling a much more compelling picture right here, telling a compelling story because here we're seeing crow go against Mark Rober in a chess game? A crow playing chess is crazy. Here, we're seeing a crow maybe put money into this or potentially take money out of this box. And here, it's not super clear what this crow could be doing that's very smart. So this one having one is kind of just very self explanatory. Now, if we move on to this next one, we also see he's testing out the same concept here. But of course, this one is going to win out. Now, here in this last test, Mark Rober put his face, but we see that this one from the beginning is the one to have one. So again, in this one, I would say that our main takeaways are first going to be contrast. Second, we want to evoke some meaningful emotion. And the last one, Ryan Trehan, that one was evoking some kind of fear. And this one, I'd say, is evoking some kind of curiosity because, again, a crow playing chess seems crazy. Okay, so now let's go ahead and go over one more set of thumbnail tests before we wrap this lesson up. Okay, I lied. We're actually going to go over one more after this one because I saw this one and I feel like it has a good mistake that you guys can all learn from. So, this video here is titled I tried the weirdest Open headphones. Now, we can see this first test right here is between this one right here and this one. Now, we see that this second one is the current thumbnail of this video. So it's the one that won on this test. I can tell you right now these headphones probably don't put that much volume to the outside world. But given these are open headphones, one is going to be curious about if this is actually going to be the case. So obviously, in the thumbnail, he, MKBHD, Marques Brownlee, he should go ahead and tap into these people's curiosity in getting them to click on this video because this is going to be one pervasive question that the viewers are going to have. But if they're open headphones, aren't everyone else around me going to hear so using this thumbnail right here is honestly just a missed opportunity to communicate this curiosity that he does in this one. And another thing to say on this same note is that if we look at this thumbnail, he does have a lot of dead space around him. Now, this doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, depending on what you're going for. But here, this space could be used very effectively. And we see him doing so in this thumbnail and using this dead space to be something that is effective. So the mistake and takeaway on this one is, if you can use dead space to communicate something more deeper about your video or appealing to some kind of emotion, then you should definitely capitalize on that. Okay, now for our final thumbnail review, and that is going to be this video from Mr. Beast, which is titled I Saved 100 Dogs from dying. Now, if we look at this thumbnail in comparison to this thumbnail, then one thing that we can see, which is first quite clear and apparent is that this thumbnail kind of communicates what the title is saying a little bit more effectively because here we see many, many, many more dogs than we do here. We only kind of see what there's five here, maybe this sixth one in the background, and again, another five here, maybe another 61 here in the background. So 12 Mac in this. And the title is 100 dogs from dying. And here we probably see well over 100 dogs. But if we look at the winner, we see that this is the one to have won and not this one that seemingly communicates this title a little bit more effectively. So why is this? Again, I think this comes to an appeal to emotion. This is because if you ask a bunch of people how they feel about these dogs, they're probably going to say, Oh, my goodness, they are so, so cute. And if you ask him about these dogs, you know, maybe you're gonna get similar answers, but not nearly to the extent of which you get the cuteness from these. And here, in the title, he's saving these dogs from dying. And this is the last thing that you'd wish upon these little puppies because they're just so cute. So the lesson here would honestly be don't try to go necessarily to your fullest extent of creating a thumbnail that directly necessarily communicates your title. Because, again, just because we want our title and thumbnail to work together very cohesive doesn't mean that we want them to say essentially the same thing or communicate the exact same thing. We want to take the opportunity for our thumbnail to convey a slightly different aspect or a different angle of our video than our title does. This is essentially something that speaks towards the balance of clickbait in your videos. All right. That is it for this lesson. I hope you garnered some good takeaways and good things that you know that you should probably stay away from and avoid in the thumbnails that you are creating. 7. Use Psychology to Get Clicks: Alright, in this lesson, we're going to dive into something that might sound kind of theoretical at first. Emotional psychology. But it's actually one of the most important things that you can learn when it comes to designing high performing thumbnails. Because here's the truth. People don't click because your thumbnail is well designed. Instead, they click because they feel something. That's what this lesson is about. Not how to make a thumbnail look clean, but how to make it feel unskipable. For that, we need to talk about emotions and how the human brain reacts to them on a subconscious instinctive level. So let's talk briefly about why emotion matters. People don't make decisions based on logic. They make decisions based on emotion and then justify them with logic afterwards. And clicking on a YouTube video, that is a tiny decision, a fraction of a second decision. If your thumbnail doesn't immediately trigger some kind of emotional response, curiosity, fear, desire, disgust, surprise, then it probably won't trigger a click, either. Now, the kind of emotion you want to use depends on a couple of things. Your niche, your audience, and the type of video that you're making. So educational, entertainment, story time, commentary, et cetera. But the principle is the same. You want your viewer to feel something and you want that emotion to then drive action. So let's go over the core emotions that actually work with examples and breakdowns. Emotion number one. It's curiosity. Now, this is probably the most used emotion on YouTube and for good reason. Humans are naturally wired to seek answers. If we see a question that feels relevant to us, we have to click to resolve the tension. It's essentially like an itch. And you can trigger curiosity with these things. Partial information, censored or blurred visuals, contradictions between the title and thumbnail and short texts on the image like This broke M or I'm t. Curiosity works best when paired with incompleteness. So you're showing something, but not everything. Or you're saying something, but not the punch line. The thumbnail shouldn't tell the story. It should tease it. So if you're creating curiosity, you should always ask these things. What's the question that this thumbnail is making the viewer ask? Is it strong enough to make them stop scrolling? Okay, now on to the next emotion, surprise or shock. Now, this is a strong one, but it can be easily overdone. You know those thumbnails that look completely insane, the ones with the people screaming or impossible numbers or objects on fire. That is, in essence, surprise psychology. It's designed to interrupt your expectations. You're scrolling through and suddenly boom, something absurd, ridiculous or unexpected hits. Surprise works really well for videos that are story based or transformation based. So think videos like I ate only gas station food for 30 days. Or this chest strategy shouldn't work, but it does. And thumbnails, you can trigger surprise through a few things. First, facial expressions. So wide eyes, mouth open, hands on your face. Now, I want to mention a little tidbit here from Mr. Beast. He actually says that after a bunch of testing, he never uses thumbnails with his mouth open anymore because apparently people find it cringe. So bear that in mind. You can also use wild visuals. So this can be before and after or some other extreme comparison. So jawing text. So this can either be through the words themselves that you're presenting or the way that you're presenting it. So the font or the style. But again, surprise only works if it's not expected. So if every thumbnail on your channel is screaming at the viewer, none of them are surprising, any. So, use this one sparingly and make sure your video actually delivers on the promise. Otherwise, you're just click baiting for a bad retention curve, as we've already discussed. Now the next emotion is fear and anxiety. Now, this one's sneaky but powerful. And fear doesn't always mean job scare. On YouTube, fear can be subtle. It could be fear of missing out, fear of making a mistake, fear of being wrong, or fear of wasting time or money. Click because they don't want to be on the losing side of a situation. So some example of fear type titles are these. Why you're wasting hours on editing. The hidden reason your channel isn't growing. Stop doing this in 2024. Now, for the thumbnails, they can show a few things. A serious or concerned expression, red X marks, literal warning signs or contrast between doing it right and doing it wrong. You can see this in a lot of Alex Hermosi's thumbnails, for example. He's targeting people who have a fear of missing out on finally starting or growing their businesses. And in his thumbnails, he looks like he's mad at you impending dooms on the horizon. Is also why negative framing works so well in text. You suck at chess, as we've talked about, outperforms how to win a chess, because it pokes at the ego and creates a small sense of threat. In a way, it's one of the core principles of marketing. It highlights the problem, which makes you want to seek the solution and the most available solution being your video. The important thing is, you don't want to scare people away. You want to scare them into clicking and then reassure them again with a solution. Now, the fourth emotion we're going to discuss is desire. Desire is about aspiration. People want something, money, freedom, time, approval, and your thumbnail shows them that the video might help them just get it. This is often used in finance channels, so through money stacks, ambos, revenue screenshots, fitness channels, before and after bodies, shredded transformation shots, things of this sort. Or in productivity videos, you'll see notion dashboards, 6:00 A.M. Wake ups, perfectly designed aesthetic calendars or routines. But desire doesn't always have to be flexi. It can also be about emotional desire, belonging, recognition, inner peace, or mastery. So use thumbnails that show the results that people want, not the process. Instead of showing the course, show the life after the course. Instead of showing the workout, show the body transformation. This is storytelling in a single frame. Now onto the fifth emotion, which is disgust or outrage. Now, this one's tricky, but if you use it right, it can get insane clicks. We're wired to respond strongly to things that break social norms or make us angry. Think about those videos with titles like This should be illegal. Why no one talks about this? Hor, this guy got paid $50,000 to do. Why? Discuss works well in commentary, news or reaction style. Thumbnails usually include these things, red arrows or aggressive colors. Strong facial expressions. So judgment, side eyes, straight up disgust. Screenshots of a tweet, price tag, or headline. Again, be careful with this one because you don't want to make people feel gross. You want to make them feel compelled to react. Now, the sixth emotion we're gonna discuss is nostalgia. Now, this one's more niche, but when it works, it works. If your audience grew up in a certain era or has a shared emotional reference point, then nostalgia can be huge. So a couple examples for these. Childhood shows. Only 90s kids remember this. Old Games, Old Tech or Old Trent. Now, these thumbnails usually recreate vintage design or reference something that emotionally anchors the view. Feeling here is comfort, familiarity, and identity. Now, not every niche can use this, but if yours can, it's worth testing. Okay, now for the fun part, combining emotional triggers. Best thumbnails don't rely on just one emotion. They stack two or three. So, for example, they can mix curiosity and fear with a title like, You're doing this completely wrong. And the thumbnail could look something like a bold red X over a common tool or interface. For example, a YouTube studio screen, a YouTube layout or a sales graph. And your face can be there looking shocked or slightly panicked. And the text can be something like stop now or cost me everything. And you can also have a slight motion blur or some red warning icons to add tension. The visual can feel familiar but unsettling, and it makes people wonder exactly what they're doing wrong. Now, another example is mixing, surprise, and desire. So your title can be something like he made 45 K with this stupid video. Now, for your thumbnail, you can have something like this. So zoomed in blurry screenshot of a boring looking video, like a screen recording or Google Doc. Big green numbers, like, for example, $45,000. Your face in disbelief or confusion. So raise the eyebrows, hands on head, and then you could have text that says, Wait, what or this question mark exclamation. The visual mismatch year creates surprise and the payoff, money, triggers desire. Next, you could also mix nostalgia and outrage. So your title could say they ruined your childhood show. And your thumbnail could show something like a side by side graphic with a classic cartoon character on the left, with his original style, and then the new reboot version on the right with a modernized or cringy style. And your face looking disgusted or betrayed, and then you could have text that says what happened or unwatchable. And maybe even an angry Emoji or a broken heart icon. You can see this thing happen quite often with Marvel or other cinematic adaptations of comics. There's literally people who have made their entire brand around how Disney has screwed Marvel and they make these kind of videos. So think of it like mixing flavors. You want the thumbnail to hit multiple emotional levels at once without overwhelming the viewer. And remember, this one is especially important for YouTube suggestion traffic as opposed to search based traffic. Here, you're going to be competing against a dozen other thumbnails in the same second. Now, one quick side note on faces. If you're going to be using your face or someone else's in the thumbnail, then your expression needs to match the emotional tone. So, this isn't stock photo smiling. This is exaggerated storytelling emotion. The brain processes faces faster than almost anything else on a page. And we're wired to feel something in response. So take the time to shoot expressions that match the emotion you're triggering. So shock, sadness, disgust, joy, suspicion, judgment, or triumph. And make sure you're cropping in tight. Your face should take up at least 30 to 40% of the thumbnail. Don't waste the real estate. Finally, let's talk text. Thumbnail text should amplify the emotion, not describe the topic. No one cares that it's a guitar tutorial. That's what the title is for. The thumbnail should say something like I had no idea or big mistake. Or secret solo. The goal is to make someone feel something and then make them click to resolve it. So here's the takeaway. Design isn't just about clarity. It's about emotion. Every thumbnail you make is asking for attention, and the only way to earn it is to trigger a real emotional response. If someone feels nothing when they see your thumbnail, then they'll keep scrolling. But if they feel curious, excited, anxious, outraged, or hopeful, they'll stop, they'll click, and they'll give your video a chance. That's the game. So as you start designing or reviewing your thumbnails, ask yourself, what emotion did this trigger? Is that emotion strong enough? And is it aligned with the video's actual content? If you can answer yes to these three questions, then your thumbnail is doing its job. 8. Design Thumbnails in Canva: Alright. At this point, we've talked extensively about thumbnail theory and tactics. But we've yet to go over the tools that can actually allow us to build these thumbnails. Now, in this course, we're going to be going over Canva, as we'll be doing in this lesson and Photoshop in the next. So in these next two lessons, we're going to learn the basics of how we can use the tools on these softwares to help us build thumbnails. And then following that, we're going to actually run through building some example thumbnails and we'll even go over some thumbnails that I've created for clients of mine. All right. Now that I've got that out of the way, we are now going to start in Canva, and we're going to see how we can go into a blank Canvas to actually start creating the basics of a thumbnail. So as you can see right here, I already have this preset right here for me that I could go ahead and click. And as you can see, this is now going to take me to a blank Canvas of 12 80 by 720 pixels. And this is the standard aspect ratio for YouTube thumbnail. Now, if you don't see this on your homepage, then what you can do is come over here into more and then come here into social media. And then it should be right here. A YouTube thumbnail, as you can see, 12 80 by 720. So if you don't see any of these, then what you can do is come here to a custom size, and then you could just type in 12 80 by 720. So now we are here in our 12 80 by 720 Canvas. And here we have a bunch of templates that we could use, and this is going to be something that we'll be going over in a future lesson. So for now, let us actually start creating something. So again, there are many ways that we can use Canva to actually create these thumbnails. Now, because there's so many things to go over, I'm just going to focus on the things that are going to be most important to us. So let's go ahead and start by importing a photo of myself. So I have this photo in my finder, and all I'm going to do now is drag it here in the frame. So now this is here, and I'm able to resize it to my own desire here. Now, what I want to do is get rid of this background because if you are going to be taking pictures of yourself that you're going to be using within thumbnails, all of your expressive emotions and all, you're going to want to remove the background that you're working with. So I'm going to go ahead and just come up here and click this button right here. Background now we can see that it did a pretty good job. So sometimes, depending on the photo you're using and the contrast between your subject and your background, it can be a little rough. So to edit this, what we can do is come here and click Background remover again. And now I can choose to erase or restore. So restoring would bring back parts of it, and erasing would get rid of these. And of course, we also have this brush size to change how big our editing tool is going to be. That one is super simple. Usually, you're going to have very small tweaks to make. So you can make it quite small. Then you can come down here to zoom in and make those little minor changes that you want to make. But for here, I think this is pretty good. So I'm going to go ahead and zoom out, and now we are going to X so this is pretty solid. But now, as you can see, I probably would not ever position myself like this in a thumbnail because as we're backing out here, I'm not very clear. And remember, we want to keep this kind of framing in our head that we want to back out to a far position so we can see it as many people will either on their laptops or on their phones where it's going to be super small. So to account for this, what I'm going to do, just as I showed you before, I'm going to drag here. And now I'm making my face much larger. Now if we zoom out, we can see that I am much more clear. Now, this wasn't a picture that I took to use as a thumbnail, and if it were, I would be much more expressive in some emotion. But as you can see here, not much emotion on my face. Okay, so the next thing that we want to look at are background colors. So if I select this background right here, we get to see background color right here. So I can make small adjustments, choose different colors, and I can even choose gradients. So these gradients in my experience have a lot of different uses for them but they are also a kind of tool that can easily kind of go south. So you don't want to overuse these gradients, and you want to use them in very specific context. And one of the thumbnails that I created that we'll go over later in this course is going to be using gradients in a very subtle way. So let's go ahead and keep this at a default color. So next, what I want to do is show you the text elements. So we can add in a text box with this button right here. We can go ahead and zoom in. And we can adjust the text to be whatever we want here. So, let's go ahead and type in something. So I went ahead and wrote this little text to you and I said, It's over. So this is referring back to the curiosity we talked about in emotional psychology. As you can see right now, we're able to enlarge this quite easily just by pulling the corner right here, and I can move it to be wherever I want on the page. Now, if I want, I can go ahead and select this whole thing and also come here to change the font. So one thing that's nice about Canva is that you're able to preview all of these fonts just by their name right here. So, one font that I can change this to that I use quite a bit is Helvetica now. Now, this is one that you can probably recognize because this is the default Apple font. So in most of their ads, you'll always see them using this font. Next, what I think is most useful for us is looking at the effects that we have for both text and our subjects. So text is pretty straightforward. We're going to select this, and then we are going to come up to effects. Now, there are three different effects that I've always found to be the most useful and the ones that I use the most. And that's shadow, neon and background. So with shadow, we have these different settings right here. We first have the offset, which is the distance. We have direction, we have blur, and we have transparency. So this is essentially just making it opaque or completely transparent. Usually somewhere in between the two. Lastly, we're also able to change the color right here. Next, what I want to show you is neon because neon, we are able to whatever the text is, depending on the text color, we're able to make it glow. So let's go ahead and change this text color. Right here, let's say we want to make it purple. So we can make it purple here. And right now, it's a little pixelated, as you can see, if we zoom in. Once we would export this, it would just look like a normal glow. It won't be this pixelated nature that we see right here. So we can go ahead and select these and come back into effects. So we have this intensity that we can play with, and the next thing that we have is background. So background essentially just puts a background to our text. So that's super simple and straightforward. So now let's go ahead and come back here. Let's change this back to black, and let's just go ahead and have this little drop shadow. Now let's look at how we can use effects for subjects or just non text elements within Campo. So I have me right here. Now, if I want to change anything, I can come up here and edit, and now I am afforded all of these different little tweaks that I can do. Now, again, the most common one that I'll use here might be shadows. Well, one little gripe that I have with Canva in terms of shadows is that it doesn't work the same way the shadows work with text, because as we can see, as we change things, instead of changing the shadow, it just alters our subject around our shadow, which, hey, I think is a little weird, and this is my one gripe with Canva. But Jokers aside, we're able to edit this just the same way that we are with the text. So as you can see, we have these different things. We can change the angle, we change the blur amount here, we have distance, and we even have intensity. So you can make little subtle shadows here, but because Canva is weird and they want to have us move our subject and editing this, typically, what you have to do once you're done applying your blur is you then have to adjust the framing of your subject once again because they've shifted and you creating also one thing to mention while we're here is the glow effect. Now, the glow effect is kind of another weird thing is that it's undershadows. And when I was first working with Canva, I would always get lost on this. I would always say, where is the glow? But it's always undershadows. So if you ever want to come in here, affect a glow. You can put that right here. You can change the blur amount. We can even change the intensity right here and the size. But for some reason, my Canva is not liking this right now, so we'll come back to our drop shadow. So again, just making these quick little tweaks to it. Increase the blur amount, our angle is good, and our intensity is good. Let's just go ahead and decrease this distance. So continuing with these edits that we can do, if we back out of shadows, now what I want to show you are these apps down here. Now, what's nice about these apps is they make things that would typically be quite difficult to achieve within Photoshop, for example, quite easy and attainable with just a click of a button. One thing that I typically use to create curiosity in my thumbnails is this pixel fi. So now, as you can see, I can increase the pixel scale to make it a little bit more clear or I can decrease it to make it more pixelated. So let's say I'm going to have my pixel scale at 27. So now we have a pixelated subject. So just like that, you're immediately creating just a little bit more curiosity within your thumbnail because you can pixelify essentially anything, and people can be curious as to what that thing is. So, for example, what you can do is we can apply this pixelify and then I can come here into text, and I can add in a little text box. And if we zoom in, again, I'm zooming in here with just holding command on my keyboard. So you don't always have to come in here to do it manually. You can just hold command to do so. Now I can put in a question mark right here. I can enlarge this question mark. I can change the color of it. Let's say we want to make it white right here, and now it's disappeared, but we can put it right here, back over me. And we can move myself a little bit more here into the frame, pull back question mark on top of me, and then we can add some effects to it. So let's say we want to make it glow. We can do so right here. And if we want to change the color of it, we can do so again right here, and now the glow is a different color. So this is all super simple, super easy for us to go ahead and. Okay, but there's more effects for us to go ahead and look over. So let's get rid of this. And also, what we can do is just undo until before I put this pixelifi on. Okay, so now we are back here. We're going to come back into Edit. And also, what I want to show you are these effects right here. So, we already looked over shadows, but another one that's going to be quite useful can be blur. So blur essentially can achieve the same thing that we just had with Pixelfi but just a different style. So we can blur this entire image. I can make it like this, then we can exit out. So now we have a blurred image. Who is this person? Don't know. Now, again, let's go ahead and undo this. I can click here, come back into Edit. There's filters here. Now, this may or may not be helpful for you, but what's more interesting here is our magic studio. So we're able to create backgrounds from essentially nothing just with a prompt. Now, we'll be going over this tool specifically and other AI tools and how they can help us in our thumbnails in the later lesson. But I just want to bring this one to your attention right now. Also have magic eraser, which is another really fun one because if we can just color over anything within our image, and it could just make it disappear for us, which is super helpful. So we have magic edit. Now, this is another very useful one, which is akin to photoshops edit with the little Lasso tool that we'll also go over. So here, you can see it in action. It turned these little flowers into a whole rose. So, these can be super helpful. Now, the next thing that I want to show you is how we can color correct because oftentimes you want to do some color correction on especially your people within your thumbnail to make them stand out. So if we come here and to adjust, we're able to tweak all of these settings to make our subjects stand out against our thumbnail. So I can go ahead and do some tweaks here and then I'll come back to you. So now we can see the changes that I've done and how they kind of affect this thumbnail. So if we zoom out, you get to see that I stand out here quite significantly. And if you would see this on a feed, I would stand out quite significantly. Now, if I go ahead and duplicate this and then select it right here, come back into edit and adjust, if I reset all of my adjustments, now we can see the difference this makes. So this is how it was before, and now this is how it is after. If you want to see the tweaks I made on this specific one, I can come here, come back and adjust. So you can see the little adjustments I made here. Now, of course, this is going to vary from image to image. But typically, the formula that I go with, and of course, it also is going to depend on the style that you're shooting for. I typically have my brightness turned up, a slight bit of contrast, a little bit of highlights, shadows turned down, whites up, blacks down, a little bit of vibrance, and then always up in our sharpness and clarity. Okay, now, next what I want to show you are different elements that we can add. So one nice thing about Canva is that they have a bunch of elements and icons that are built right into the software. So you can search up for anything, let's say, an arrow. We have all these different arrow graphics, we have shapes, and shapes are nice because what we're able to do, if we go ahead and zoom in right here, we can tweak them. So we can make them a little bit longer. We can make them shorter. A little bit more freedom to edit them, different things right here. So we can change the kind of line it is. You can have it as curved right here. We can do this. So there's a lot of different edits that you can make, and you can even change the color right here, so we can make it red. So shapes are a great thing that you can use within Canva. So I can go ahead and delete. Graphics are a little different because what you can't do is really edit them to the same extent that you can with shapes, but oftentimes they're going to be much more detailed. So I can go ahead and turn this around here, I can change the color, make this bright red. I can make it a little bit larger. And again, I can use this right here to change the rotation. So there are so many different graphics and elements that you can use, and you have them all accessible just by this little search bar right here. So going back into shapes, useful ones are usually going to be the circle right here because this can encapsulate different kind of elements that you want to put in, maybe icons or shapes and circles, especially just have a bunch of uses. And we can also get rid of this. We have little lines right here. These ones are great because I tend to use these ones as dividers as we'll look at a thumbnail that I created in a lesson very soon after this one. So we can look at the stroke weight right here. To make this bigger, to make it a divisor between two little sections here. So maybe you have some red, don't do thing right here and some green desirable situation on the right. Another super important thing to know are layers. So what we can do is right click and look at layer right here. We click Show Layer. Here, we get to adjust the layers of our image. So right now, I just put this black bar behind everything right here. So we now see that the words and this graphic right here are now above this black bar. So layers are huge. Now, another thing that we can do is also change the transparency on really almost any element that we're using. Like I showed you in pulling in this image earlier, if you have any file on your computer and you want to bring it in and creating your thumbnail, it's super easy. All you do is drag it in and it will populate in a second. Okay. So now, as the text on the thumbnail states, this lesson is over. I just wanted to give you a quick little overview of Canva and how we can use it. Now, in the next lesson, we're going to be going over Photoshop, and following that, we're going to go over examples of thumbnails and walking through how to make them and breaking down some of the ones that I've made in the past. So I'll see you then. 9. Edit & Create Thumbnails in Photoshop: Okay, now we just went over how we can use Camva to build thumbnails. Now, the other software that me plus many other creators use is Photoshop. Now, of course, Adobe Photoshop requires the Adobe subscription. So if this is something that you're using and already kind of know the basics of, then you could go ahead and skip on to our next lesson where we actually walk through how we can build a thumbnail with Iman Gazi style. But for those of you who are new to Photoshop and want to use it for thumbnail creation, then this can be a good lesson. Going to go over the kind of basics of how we can use Photoshop for thumbnail creation because Photoshop is a very expansive software, and there are courses and I could even make a course on how we can use Photoshop to create anything that we want. And it's a large software, as I said. So if I went through every single aspect that could help us in creating a thumbnail, then this would be a very, very long lesson. So I'm going to do us all a favor, and I'm going to go ahead and point out the most important thing need to know, and we need to pay attention to to build kind of the most efficient thumbnail with the most minimal time invested into learning the software. The first step of this is going to be clicking right here in Nut file, and we want to make sure that our aspect ratio is set correctly. We want to make sure that we have 12 80 by 720. So this is set for YouTube standard thumbnail aspect ratio. We go ahead and start with this. Now, if you want to set a background color from the get go of your thumbnail, then you could do so right here, and we could set whatever color we want. Now for my sake, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to have it to be transparent. Now I can click Create. Now, there are similarities between Photoshop and Canta in that we're able to do some of the same things with both of these softwares. But each software kind of has its own pros and cons. Now, here with Photoshop, the kind of pro that we get with this and more than just the specific features that it has, what we're able to do is just so much more. We have a lot of control. But with that control comes a complexity that we kind of have to learn through this software. But we'll cover all of this as we move on with this lesson. Now that we are in this view, we are actually in our thumbnail working on it. There's a couple of things that I want to bring your attention to. First, we have our layers right here. Now, as I pull in something, as I'm going to do now, we get to see that there are going to be layers that are going to be created. Okay, so from off screen, I just now dragged in this picture of myself right here. So now I can click Done. And we see right here that it has now been auto filled as a layer. Now, the next thing that I want to show you is text. We can either click T on our keyboard or we can just go ahead and click the Text tool right here. So we can put horizontal type tool, and I can put in any text that I want just by clicking anywhere on my thumbnail. So let's go ahead and type in example. Now, I'm able to change the font right here, font size, color, and the justification of the text. Now, as we can see, this text example is on top of the image that I imported. Now, if I want to change this, I can just go ahead and drag this down. And now the text is behind this image of me. As you can see, my mouse right now is still in this text mode. So if I try to click and move anything, all that's going to happen is a text box is just going to appear. So instead of this, what I want to do I want to click V. If I click V, I'm now returned to my pointer tool. So then I can move things around. And as we can see, we have my example text right there. So now I'm going to now, another massive thing of thumbnail creation is going to be removing the background, especially if you're going to be putting in yourself and a lot of your thumbnails with whatever crazy expression, emotion that you're showing, you want to be able to remove the background. So to do so, we're just going to click this button right here, and it makes it super duper easy. Sometimes there's going to be imperfections. Like, for example, if I zoom in right here, I have some kind of little space, maybe that was the background behind me that I want to get rid of. In order to get rid of this, all I have to do is click subtract from mask. Now, if I were to click right now, it would get rid of everything because we can see this massive circle that I have. Now, what I can do to decrease the size is come up here and I can decrease the size of my brush to say this big, but if I zoom in, this is still much too big. So I'm going to have to decrease it to, let's say, three pixels. So now if I hold option, I'm able to zoom in, and I can just kind of brush over this to get rid of this extra material that I do not need. So now as I zoom out, we can see that looks much cleaner. Now, I'm going to go ahead and click V again to now go back to the selection. And now what I can do is grab these corners and I can change the size of myself. So let's say I'm going to put my face in the thumbnail. I might have it to be quite zoomed in as such, and all this editing I did down here wouldn't matter. So I could have myself defilled in like that. Now, let's say that I actually decide that I want to have a background color. Now, I could do this in a few ways, but the way I'm going to show you now is, I think probably the most kind of easy way that we can go about doing is if I come down here, I can click this plus button in the bottom right corner, and that creates a new layer. So now we can take this layer. We can drag it below the rest, so it really is the background. And then we're going to come up to the toolbar. We can click Edit, fill, and then contents. We're going to select this here, and then we can select a color right here. Let's say that I want to make this white background. I can do so. I click Okay, and Okay. And now we have our white background. But now that we have this white background, I see that there are little imperfections right here on my face. So how do we go back to change this background and remove from this mask this little imperfection right here? Well, all we have to do is come here. I can click this. I can come back and click subtract from mask. And if we zoom in, I'm able to color out these little imperfections. So now, with those changes, this looks much more polished. Next, what do we want to look at? Now, one tool that's commonly used either subtly or not so subtly, to create a kind of depth in your thumbnails is a drop shadow. How do we do this in Photoshop? It's pretty easy. All we have to do is, again, we have to click V to come back to our selector tool, and then I'm going to select M in this image right here. And then I'm going to come up to here. Now, to add a dropshadow, all we have to do come here into the layer that we want the job shadow to apply to. In my case, it's going to be the image of me. I have it selected, and then I'm going to come down here into FX. I select FX, and we can see a bunch of different things right here. So we can see some inner glow. We see gradient overlays, patio overlays, outer glow, which is another big one, and we see Job shadow. So I'm going to select Job now you can see it applied subtly. So there's different ways that you can blend this in. I, for the most part, will stick with a multiply. And then we can change a bunch of things here. First, we can change the opacity. We can change the angle. So usually, I'll have the angle only ever kind of casting a shadow away from the center of the thumbnail. So to do that, we can have the angle to be mean, it depends where you're going to have your subject. So all this is going to be kind of subjective, but you can always play around with this, and you can do this by adding distance. We can also change the spread. We can even change the size of this the size is essentially just the blur. How blurry is this going to be? So I'm going to have this angle set to be this angle, so it's casting the shadow to the left because we see if we set it right here, we see now the shadow is going to the right, I'll have it here, and then I can make it to be a little bit bigger. We can decrease the opacity so it's not very strong. Then the distance, we can keep, let's say, around here and the spread, we can have that stay at 0%. So once you have all of this done, then you can click, Okay. So now we see that there is a little bit more depth to our thumb. Now let's go back to our text to illustrate another aspect of Photoshop. So I have my text selected here. I'm actually going to go back to my V tool so I can move it around. And I'm going to change the color here to be black just so I can see it for now. Now, oftentimes in the thumbnails that I create, there's going to be some we elements within the thumbnail that are going to would naturally cast some light onto other subjects. Now, of course, there isn't actually any light that's being casted within Photoshop. So this is an effect that we have to create. So first, let's go ahead and make this text, Neil. To do this, we're again going to have this selected right here. We're going to come back into our effects panel, and then we are going to apply an outer glow. On next step, we want to increase our opacity to around 75%. We can see this when we have everything else done, as well. Next step is going to be choosing our color. So our color here, we want something to be bright here. So let's go ahead and do a right red. I can click Okay, here. We next want to change our spread. So our spread, usually you want to have this 0-10%, but I'm going to go ahead and have this at ten, and we can see if we want to change this. Now, next, we're going to have our size. Now, our size, we have to increase this one quite a bit to around, let's say, 65. So we get to see our little preview of here. So now let's take a look at how this is. So I'm like, Okay. Now, we just applied this, but we don't see this for some reason. So if we come back here into our outer drill, we see this preview, so we should assume that we would be able to see it right here. This isn't the case. And that's because of our background layer. So if I go ahead and get rid of this, we see that the glow still remains. But this is because the white here and how Photoshop operates, the white being too bright, it kind of takes away from glow. So if we wanted to change this background to say, B black, so let's go ahead and edit this and I can fill. I can come back and select color, and I can change it to black, we now see the glow return. But what if you still want to have this glow on a white background? Well, there's a couple ways that we can do this. First off, the way you can fix this is coming back to this and coming to the outer glow. If we want to enable a drop shadow, then we get to see that there is a slight. Because of this, we can then change up some of our settings right here, and then this will also help us see the glow a little bit more clear. But another way that we can go ahead and do this if I go ahead and cancel the effects that we just did is if I want to duplicate this. We're going to right click on the layer and then come up here to duplicate layer. I can click Okay. Now, on the lower layer, what I want to do is change it to the color that I want it to glow as. So I can change it to this red right here. Now we have these two layers stacked on top of each other. If I move this, we can see. Now what we're going to do is we're going to come to this layer. We're going to select it. We're going to come over to filter and then blur. Then we can select Ossian blur. And then it's going to come up with this warning. All we have to do is convert to a smart object. Now, as you can see, we have this blur that we are able to now tweak and make either a stronger glow or a weaker glow. So again, to be able to edit this have to do is come here into the filter that we applied. So just double click the Goshen blur, and then we can make this essentially not appearing, but if we pull this back, we can change how the glow appears. If you want to have it, let's say, around this distance, also, what you could do is apply this, and then we could kind of tweak the transparency of it. So if I select this one and come to opacity, I can then decrease this to make it a little less potent. Now, let's go back to what I was talking about earlier. And what I was saying is that we want our light right here as this glowing little example. We want it to act like it is essentially casting some kind of light onto our subject. The easiest way to do this is if we would come here, what we want to do is, again, we want to create a new layer. So now we have this layer too. And we want to put this layer right on top of our subject, where we want to cast this kind of makeshift glow on, and then we're going to right click the layer, and then we are going to create a clipping mask. So, creating a clipping mask essentially allows us to make edits that only affect this subject right here. Why are we doing this? Why don't we just edit within this layer right here? Well, I'll show you because what we're going to do is come over here into our brushes right now. So we have our brush tool right here, and what we want to do is we want to increase the size of our brush. And we want to make it to be quite large. Now, hardness, we want to make sure here, in this case is 0% because let me show you what 100% hardness looks like. If I decrease my size of my brush and have 100% hardness, then we can see if I select the color right here, let's say, blue, we see how that looks. It's just circles being drawn on. But that's not what we want. We want to have the hardness to be 0%. Our circles kind of look like their little spray paint. So this is going to help us because if we increase the size a little more to kind of create that airy look, and we select a red that matches the color of our glow, what we can do is click outside of our subject, and we can have little bits of the brush the affect the subject. So now you can see this. Essentially looks like this light is glowing onto me. It is, is just little brushstrokes that I've made onto myself. Now, if I would actually do this, I'd probably make it a little bit more subtle. So this all just consists of you essentially clicking on this little borderline because you don't want to get too close because then it's just going to completely come on you. And if you go too far, it's just not even going to apply. So you have these little subtle kind of glows that you can provide and you can make onto your subject to make it all a bit more cohesive instead of, like, a chaotic image. Now, the next step that I want to show you is how we can change the colors, how we can color balance certain aspects of our so, one thing that we've spoke about in this course and something that happens in many thumbnails is the fact that the background is darkened. So the way that we can do this and the easiest way to go about this is you want to select your background layer, whatever it may be. It may be an image or it may just be a solid color like this. Now, what we can do to darken it is we can hold Command plus hue. Now, this opens our hue and saturation. What we can do here is now change the lightness. So now we can darken our background to say, Pee about this. We can also change our saturation here because it's white, it doesn't matter, and we can also change the hue. But for me, saturation and lightness are always my go to changes. So we can go ahead and save that there. Now, if we want to color balance subjects like ourselves, what we want to do is click our image, and then we're going to come over here into filter and then camera raw filter. Okay, so now I have made all my adjustments. So you can look at what I did here. We're going to go over this again in our next lesson when we actually go through how we can create an Iman gati style fem Nil. But this is just another quick little overview for you. So I adjusted the vibrant here. I did almost everything in the light. And if we come down to detail, you can also see adjustments on the sharpening. So if I click Okay, we can see now I am a much more vibrant figure here as I was before. One thing that's quite apparent from the changes that I've made is after doing this, we see that my hair here is a little bit more blue than I would like. So a quick fix to doing this is if we come here to this layer, we can right click it, and then we can convert it to a smart object. So now that it's a smart object, I can now come back into our camera raw filter. Now if we click K on our keyboard, we can see how it's selecting only my hair right here. Now what I'm able to do is make adjustments on only this selection. So if I want to make it darker, I can decrease the exposure here. I can play around with it. Probably want to decrease highlights as well. I'd put down shadows that definitely would make it darker as well. I can come down here, maybe put the temperature away from blue because it's quite blue still. And then I can also come down here and decrease the saturation. Making these small little tweaks, we see it going from this, which is super blue to now this, which is now darker. But we can still see that I'm standing out compared to the original version of this. Now, there's going to be two more things that I want to cover in this. So the first one is going to be our shape tool. Now, we can use our shape tool to draw on any part of our thumbnail. Right now, I have to create a new layer first, and I have to make sure that it's not a clipping mask, so I'm going to drag it up here to the top come back here, I'm able to draw wherever. And now you can see that if I can come over here, I can now change the color. I can select from here a whole range of different colors that we can use. Now, something I use a little bit more frequently than this, instead of the rectangle tool, if we right click this, we have an ellipse tool. And if we come over here and we hold shift while drawing this, we can create perfect circles easily in just a few seconds. So sometimes you want to have these to maybe encapsulate some icons. But as you can see, these circles have this outline to them. This is part of the stroke. If you want to get rid of this, we can just click this button right here. And now if I click out of this, we see that this is now standing on its own without any border to it. I've been going over a lot. There's one more thing that I want to mention to you guys, and this one might be the biggest thing that we are able to do within Photoshop, which is why I'm going to have a later lesson that's going to be completely dedicated to it. But for now, just to get you a little bit excited, I want to show you how we can use generative AI within our thumbnail creations. So the first step is we're going to come over here to our Lasso tool. In this Lasso tool, what I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure we have empty layer selected right here, so our background, and I'm going to draw something like this. Now, from here, all I have to do is come here into generative fill, and I can type in anything I want to then be filled in this space. So I went ahead and typed in Hobbit Style House Deep and Woods. Now I can click Generate, and now we have some results right here. Now, we can click through, and we can see some different results, but usually this is going to work best on something where the AI has already a kind of canvas to work with. So edits things a little better than it just generates them out of nowhere. But I kind of just first wanted to show you this just to give you a little bit of something to be excited about in our following lessons. This has been a long enough lesson, and we've already covered a lot here. Now, if you have any questions because Photoshop is, again, an expansive platform, expensive software, you can go ahead and ask them in the Q&A section, and I'll be there to answer any of your questions because I know it can be complicated and a little overwhelmed. But now it's finally time to put these little skills that we've learned on Photoshop into actually creating a viable thumbnail. So let's get right 10. Create an Iman Gadzhi Style Thumbnail: Lesson, we're going to be going over how to make an Eman Gazi style thumbnail on Photoshop. So let's go ahead and get right into it. And the first step of this is going to be clicking New File, and we want to have our aspect ratio set to the default thumbnail size, which right here, I already have set at 12 80 by 720. So now we can go ahead and click Create. And now we're going to be brought into our Canvas. To start off creating the stumbnail, we first need a subject. Now, what I did is I just went into one of his own YouTube videos, and I grabbed in a screenshot, and now I dropped it in here, so we should see it right here. So now what I want to do is first, I want to crop out this play button right here, and I want to crop out the top. Or what I'll do so it doesn't mess up with anything. I'll just remove by the sides and then we can come down a little bit on them right there. Done is I've cropped him out to now have none of that extra stuff here. So now what I'm able to do is if I click V here and I select it, I can now click Remove Background. So now I have him alone. As you can see, we have some stuff here that we want to refine. For example, right here, I'd want to go ahead and subtract from this mask, so I can just use this and kind of color off these edges right here. And once I'm done with this, I'll come back to you. Okay, so I went ahead and fixed those edges. So right now, it's good. It's solid. He is now separate from the background, and we have him as our subject. So I'm going to go ahead and click V again and select him, and now I can drag him into our thumbnail. So now I'm gonna go ahead and back out and we can resize him to this shape. And typically, in his thumbnails, we'll have him centered in the frame looking essentially directly at you as the viewer. So I can make him a little bigger here and I can pull him down. Want to resize this at all later, we can do so. But for now, I'm going to keep it like this. Now, the next step of this is we have to select our background. Now, this is something I also already have selected. So I'm going to go ahead and bring this in, and this is just an image that I downloaded off of pixels. So all I searched up here was just a living room. So I pulled this background right here from just that simple search. As you can see, this background isn't going to be something that is necessarily going to be very important because we are now going to make some small adjustments to it, and you can see that the exact kind of specific background isn't going to be something that you have to kind of harp on over. So another thing that I want you to notice is what I did here is I changed the order, so I put Iman ahead of the background that I what I want to do is I want to resize him a little bit more, and we can have him like this. So now it's time to adjust our background because typically in Iman gati style thumbnails, we always have dark background. Now, along with also having a dark background, typically, the background is something that's also not very focused. It's kind of just there as the name suggests, it's just a background, and there's not much focus to it. So a kind of way that we can emphasize this is if we select it right here, select the layer, we can come here into filter. And then from here, what we're able to do is come down to blur and then we can select a Gashenblur. And now, to edit this Gassen could have out of 4.9. We could have it lower. I think this range of 4.95 is thinning. So we can go ahead and select this. Now we have this, but also what we want to do is darken it. So to darken it, what we want to do is click Command plus Hu. And now from here, we're able to adjust multiple things. We can decrease the saturation, decrease the lightness, and adjust the hue. For the most part, you're just going to be sticking with the saturation and lightness. As we already kind of established, we want something that's going to be quite dark here. I'm going to pull the lightness to be probably, let's say, around here, I can also decrease the saturation because, again, we don't want this to be a focus at all. So I went ahead and pulled it there, and now we have it good. Now, another thing that I can also do is kind of increase the size as well to get rid of those little white edges that we saw there a second ago. Now it's time to add in our next step of this. But first, before moving on, I think it's always a good point between these little checkpoints that we go ahead and zoom out to kind of see how it would look on a small scale. So somebody looking on their computer screens, and it might be very small or their phone. And I think right now it looks pretty clear. We get to see Iman's face quite clearly. Now let's move on to the next step, which is going to be adding in some text. Go ahead and come over here to the text tool, and then I'm going to type right here. So as you can see, my last used text was quite big here. But essentially, what I want to make this text is to say 8,000 something a week. So essentially, it's going to be $1 amount per week because we always see Iman putting in dollar signs on his video. So let's go ahead and put in a random number right here. I'll say dollar sign, 8,248. Why am I not just putting 10,000, 9,000, 8,000? It's really a small choice to make, but having such a specific number can make our viewer a little bit more interested as to why are they putting such a specific number? And right here, what we're going to do is put a Bsase here and put week. So this is going to be 8,248 per week. Right now we see this is way too big. So I'm going to go ahead and click out of it, click V. So now I can go ahead and resize this. Right now, we have this dollar amount right here, and we see it saying per week. But obviously, we don't want this to be covering Iman's face. So we're going to come over here, and all I'm going to do is drag it one layer behind. So now we have also, one thing that I want to change from the text is I don't want this per week to be as big as it currently is because it's just not that important and we don't need it to be this big. We want the dollar sign to take more of the attention. So I'm going to do is I'm going to highlight this, and now I'm going to decrease the size of this, let's say to 16, I I can go a little bit bigger than that. Let's try 24. I think 24 is a little better here. So now what we want to do is again resize this. And I want this to essentially take up the entire space from left to right of the here, I have this going across the entire span of the thumbnail. Now, next what I want to do is I want to do something with this text right here because it's kind of a little boring. So what I want to do is I want to come over here into the gradients. Typically, we're here on the color. I come over to gradients, and as we can see, we have this massive library of different gradients that we can go ahead and choose from. I'm going to go ahead and click through, and once I find one that I like, I'll come back to you. Alright, so I went ahead and went with this gray gradient right here. As you can see, compared to the others, this one has, like, a little bit of a metallic shine to it, and it's a little subtle. So I don't want this right here to be doing too much. I kind of just want it to be clear that this is a high dollar amount per week, and I don't want it to be too much noise. So I think this gradient accomplishes just that. Now, next what I want to do is edit Iman himself. Us right now he's not really standing out as much as he could. If you look at Iman Gazi's thumbnails, typically, you see him edited to be more vibrant and it's kind of just like a subtle tweak that he makes that makes him stand out kind of on that YouTube feed. You see him super clearly. To do this, what we're going to do is make sure that he's selected. We're going to come up to filter, and then we're going to select Camera Raw Filter. Okay, so I went ahead and adjusted it to stand out just a little bit more to make it kind of sharper. So you can go ahead and look at the adjustments I made right here. I also adjusted the color a little bit right here, and then I upped the sharpening right here by about 35. So from here, I can click Okay. And now we can see the transition right there. So I'm going to undo. We can see how it went from this to now this. Here, he's standing out way more as compared to before. Now the next step of what I want to do is I want to add in a little bit more color here. So now what I want to do is I want to add in a little bit more color. So to do this, what I want to kind of create an effect of is I want this text to kind of shine a light on it. What I want to do is I want to have, like, a white kind of accent that's going to be glowing to do this, it's pretty easy. All we have to do is come down here and we want to create a new layer, and then we want to make sure that this layer is on top of him right here. And then we are going to create a clipping mask. So you can see the arrow that comes from that. So now, this mask is only applied to this layer, shown by that arrow. So now what I'm able to do is kind of play around with what looks best. So I'm going to select this brush right here, and I want to increase the size to be quite big. And I want the hardness to be at zero. I would increase the hardness to 100%. That means it would only ever put a color right where I select it. So let me show you this. Now I have this blue. We can see that it is just selecting where I click, and the edges here are super duper rough. If I decrease this hardness, and we see, it's kind of accents that are added. So that's exactly what I want here. So I'm going to select the white, and I want to add little bits of accents to him. Makes it kind of look like the text is shining down. So you can adjust the size and kind of play around with this and see what looks best. Just for the sake of time, we're going to just go with this. And then also using the same kind of tool or principle or whatever you want to call it. What we can do is select black right here. And sometimes the edges when we're bringing in subjects that we cut out from a background are a little bit rough. So what we can do is I can go ahead and increase the hardness a little bit and maybe decrease the size. And I can click around here. So now, as you can see, as I zoom in, once had these yellow kind of ridges to them. If we now add this, we can see that they now are turning black. Now, this might be a little rough here, but this is kind of getting into the nitty gritty. If I want it to be a little less rough, then I can decrease the hardness here, and we can see just by clicking here, making a couple clicks, we get to soften out these edges. Now, with that being done, we essentially have what is now a pretty solid Iman Gazi thumbnail. Now, maybe you could add a little bit more elements in here depending on what the video is about, because remember, we want to have this to be very much related to our video title, but we could do some easy quick things. Again, with how we kind of added all of these accents, we could do that to our background go ahead and add in another layer, and then I can drag it to be on top of our background right here. I can make it into a clipping mask. I can go ahead and select our brush, right now, I have the brush set to be quite large, but it's actually going to be quite helpful here. Because what I can do is now from a far distance away, I can kind of add these subtleties of color here. I can change the color. Let's make it this blue and just add these little nodes of kind of I said, just these little splashes of color to maybe just add a little bit more contrast on the YouTube Feb. So there you have it. This is our Iman Gods thumbnail. So let's go ahead and export it, and we can look at it in full screen, and then I'll zoom out and we can look at it as we would see it on the YouTube page. So now we have our thumbnail right here. See Zoomed in here looks pretty good. And we can also put it out quite a bit, and it's very clear what's happening here. We see that there is this large dollar amount. We see that it's per week, even though this font is smaller. We also have the little color accents, but we can see him very clearly, as well. Now, if this was an actual thumbnail that he was making for one of his videos, he probably would have something that's a little bit more expressive of a facial expression here, but, you know, I just pulled that in from a YouTube video. So there you have it. This is our Iman gaze style thumbnail. 11. Create Alex Hormozi Style Thumbnails: Alright, in this lesson, we are going to be going over a walk through of how to create an Alex Hermosi type thumbnail. Now, if we're looking through his page, I've kind of already started on a kind of thumbnail that Alex Hermosi would use in looking at these two compared to this. Now, that's not what this lesson is going to be ones here are very simple. Now, as you can see, we have big text, usually just a couple words. We have three right here and four words right here, and there's just one word underlined. So I can go ahead and create, let's say, this one right here you've been lied to in just a second. So I just now changed this text and I removed the shadow that I had. So I put this text as the same as it is here. Now what I can do is change the spacing, change the line spacing to make them closer to each other. I can make this much bigger. I can then change the alignment to be on the left, and I can flip myself right here and switch me over to this side and this right here. And then I can add in an element right here I can put in this line, so I can then shorten it. I can make the line red like this, and then I can adjust the stroke style. So I can make it much thicker. Let's say, back to it, it's about this thickness, and I can drag it out to be a little longer and then put it right here under light. Then I can go ahead and also zoom out for a second here and make myself a little bit bigger. Now, we have a very, very similar thumbnail that we do right here, and I can also add in a little period. So this one here is essentially the same thumbnail we have here, but I want to show you what's a little bit more Alex hermosi characteristic is these types of thumbnails that we see right here. So the way I would describe these is essentially having very big text, which is always limited, so only just a couple words. And his face right there centered in the middle usually with some serious expression and a strong vignette around the whole thumbnail. And what I mean by that, what a vignette is, if it has dark edges right here, and it kind of fades into the center, which is the light. So as you can see right here, this is now dark, kind of blacked out, but we see his face is bright. So if we come back here, I already pulled a screenshot of one of my lessons, and we can kind of work with this. Now, I'll show you how we can apply a vignette. Now, to do that, we're going to come into edit. We're going to come into adjust, and then we're going to scroll down all the way to the vignette setting yeah. Now, you can see if we make it negative, we see whites coming in. But if we make it positive, it makes everything darker. Now, one thing to mention here is that my setting, how I record my videos, it already kind of gives a natural vignette effect because it is a dark atmosphere that I do record with. Now the next thing that I want to do is go to the magic studio within Canva to go ahead and use this magic eraser to get rid of the lights that are showing on my eyes. To do so, it's super simple. All you have to do is color in the parts that I want removed. And then the magic eraser is going to go ahead and do its work and getting rid of these little things and making them blend into the picture. Okay, so now, as we can see, the magic eraser has done its work. And for the most part, these little effects are not really to be seen. So as you can see here, it kind of is a little wonky here. But when we zoom out, it's really not something to be noticed whatsoever. So I'm fine with how it did with this. So let's go ahead and try to encapsulate this thumbnail right here. He says, Brutal negotiation tactics. So first thing that we're going to have to do now is put in the text. So I'm going to go ahead and click T, and now I'm going to input the text right here. So I now have this text right here, brutal negotiation, and then I can duplicate this to keep it the same size. Then I'll put in tactics here at the bottom. Now, looking back at his, we can see around tactics right here at the bottom, especially is that they do have a quite distinct shadow around them. So I'm going to come here to tactics. I'm going to make it a little bit bigger, as well. And then I'm going to come into effects shadow, and then I can go ahead and increase the blur to a max amount, increase the transparency, and I need to change the color to be black. And pull this transparency up even more. Now, if we come back to here, we could see, again, that here, it's still even darker than what we have right here. And we have all of our settings essentially maxed out here and making it as dark as we can. So another way that we can make this a little bit darker is another hack that we can use. So that's going to be duplicating these and stacking them on top of each other. So as you can see, each time I add a duplicate, the shadow here becomes a little bit Um, we can also add in a similar shadow right here. So I can increase the blur all the way. I can bring down the offset, change the color to a black, and then increase the transparency to max, just to make it stand out a little bit more. But now, what I want to show you is how he does this little effect right here where we see the letter go behind his head. Now, as you can see, this image that I pulled here from a lesson of mine doesn't really work that well. If I were to put this behind me, then we'd see here that most of this N E and G would then just go behind me and not really be able to be seen. But still, for the sake of this example, I'm going to show you how we can go ahead and do that. So first, what this is going to take is taking our background image or kind of the whole thumbnail right now and copying it, and then pasting it again. So now we have this one laying on top of everything below it. So now what we're going to do. So now what we're going to do is make sure that it's positioned in the same exact place as the background photo. Then we are going to remove the background. So now, as you can see, we have the same setting. Everything around me is the same, but we now have this lettering going behind my head because I removed the background from that front layer. So now I can move myself, and you can see that I'm still there behind me, but this new image on top is making it look like this text is essentially just going behind my head. Now what we would have to do is come here into layers, and then we have to bring me below all of these tactics to make sure that this one shows up right here. Then we can zoom out to look at it. And here, essentially, it's very, very similar to what we see right here with Alex Her Mozi. Now, I could make this dropshadow here to be a little bit more accurate. So filling in kind of behind the word to be a little bit more full because right now it's kind of following along the lines. But for the most part, it's pretty good. And then another change that I could make is choosing a better picture where the word wouldn't be covered by my head for the most part. Then the last other change that we probably could make here is maybe increasing the vignette to make it a little bit more darker right here. Now, if I wanted to go ahead and do that super quickly, what I could do is grab in a Pex square. So right here, I can make this kind of across my body here, across my chest and behind the word tactics, I can change the color to be black, and then what I can do is come into transparency right here, and then I can just decrease this transparency and I can pull it all the way across the screen to make it fit a little bit better. So go back before that point. So yeah, essentially, besides those little tweaks, this one is, I'd say, pretty accurate. Now, let's go ahead and try to make this one. Now, luckily, since we already have our vignette applied, this one is going to be quite easy for us. So we can get rid of a couple of these tactics and just stay with the bottom one. And then I can also get rid of the text behind here. So now, all I have to do is pull this text right here. You can kind of center it to be a little under my chin. Again, it would be ideal if I have a better framed image than this one. With here, my image was too high. Now with this thumbnail, my image is too low. But we can just act like right here is going to be a fine placement. So now I'm just going to go ahead and put the text. So he says, Yes, really, period. Now, we can also leave the drop shadow because it kind of works with what he's doing right here because all of this bottom area, everything besides his face is dark. So we can keep that, and now what we have to do is change this really to a yellow color. I think that's a pretty good one. Now what we need to do is grab in a line. So now we can use this line. It's already about the length of this. We can extend it just a little bit. And then what I want to do is change the line type to be so now that it's curved, what I can do is bring this curve down a little bit. And now that curve kind of resembles a little bit more accurately the curve that he has here in his red underline as a very slight and subtle curve there. So now what I want to do is increase the stroke weight to make it be a little bit more similar to what he has. I think a stroke that's about this wide is fine. And then I can also round out the edge points so they're not just squared off. Now what we have to do is change the color. This red works. I probably want to have something that's a little bit more vibrant, so that one there works a little better. And now what I want to do that end of the line under the wide. So let's go ahead and do that by right clicking, go into the layer, and I can send backwards. So now I can adjust the line to be a little bit closer to the word and maybe get rid of a little bit of that curve now we can go ahead and zoom out to see how it would look. I think this is pretty good. One thing that I would definitely do, though, is make myself stand out a little bit more. So I can edit, come here, and to adjust, and then I can do some tweaks here. First, I would definitely up the brightness. Now, with contrast, I could about leave it the same here. This is already a pretty dark environment. Now, with highlights, I can decrease it just a little bit to make kind of the surrounding elements a little bit darker. The shadows, I can also increase that a little bit to make my face pop out a little more. Whites, I can also increase. And then Blacks, I could just keep the same them. Now, vibrance, I can increase that one just slightly sharpness. I also want to increase clarity. I can also increase a little bit, but not much. So now we have a thumbnail where I stand out much, much more. If we want to go ahead and compare this to my beginning photo, I can just reset the adjustments. And as you can see right there, it's really night and day. So, looking at this one and comparing it to Alex Hermosi right here, we can see this one is pretty good and pretty accurate. So there you guys have it. This is an Alex Hermosityle thumbnail. And as you can see, a lot of his kind of thumbnail styles are very easy for us to create. And there's thumbnails that if you have the pictures, they can really be ones that you create in just minutes. 12. Create a Diary of a CEO Style Thumbnail: Lesson, what we're going to be doing is going through a walk through of how to create a diary of a CEO type style thumbnail. Now, some of you might not know Diary of a CEO, but it's a podcast. And as we can see, all of the videos here are essentially following this same kind of style where it's him on the right, it's his guest on the left, and it's some kind of text that's going to be click baiting someone viewer in to this video. Some kind of appealing text in one way or another, and we always see one part of the text is highlighted red. Now, why I'm walking this one through is because it's a very simple yet effective thumbnail style. This is something that we can create in just minutes. Right, so let's come here into Canva, and now we are going to select this YouTube, 12 80 by 720 pixels. Now, what I'm going to be creating a thumbnail is of the diary of a CEO's podcast with him and Alex Hermosi. So I'm going to add in a new page here so we can do some editing. And what I already did is I grabbed two screenshots from that video from that podcast, and now I'm going to import them Okay, so I have the first one here, and now I can go ahead and grab in this other one that I took. And from here, I can just double click on the image to now pop out all the texts and everything that wasn't included in the original video footage. So I have this. I can click Done. Now from this point, I can use the background remover to try and get rid of this background. So we have now done this. Now the next step of this is I want to go ahead and turn this background to be black. So I can come up here to this background color, and then I can go ahead and select the solid black here. And then now I'm going to size this up to take up about this amount of space. Now, let's go ahead and move into Alex Hermosi right here. So I'm going to do the same thing as I did before. I'm going to crop this out right here, and we can crop out the bottom, as well. And just to give it a little bit less work, I can also pull in, so it doesn't have to analyze all the rest of that piece of the footage where we don't need. As we can see now, it had this right here. Really, when I pull this in, I'm going to have it zoomed in where this chair is going to be cut out anyway. But just to show you guys, if I want to take this out as well, I can come back to this background remover and I can select erase, and I can just color this one out right here. Now, of course, I probably want to get as kind of precise as I could, so I might decrease the brush size and then zoom in a little bit to continue this, but this isn't even going to be part of my thumbnail. So I'm just going to go ahead and leave it as such. Now I can copy this Command C, and then move into here and paste it in. So now I can make these bigger and pull him out a little bit, and I can also move our diary of the CEO host, move him out. Right now, let's just go ahead and zoom out. We can see very clearly that we have the host of Diary of a CEO, and we also have Alex Hermosi right here, clear as day. And I like pulling from these videos because if we go back to see his style, it looks like they are having a conversation kind of within the stumbnil. So these two parts that I pulled kind of give that same vt because we have their eye lines kind of going to each other. So now it's time to zoom in and add in some text. So I can come over here into the text, and there's some default text styles that we can use. So we're all kind of on the same page. Have this, and I think the text that I'm going to put is going to be something compelling, something probably about money because that's what Alex Komosi works in. And I'm going to type something up, and I'll come right back to you. Okay, so I went ahead and typed this one up right here. I said, they're lying to keep you broke. So now what I want to do is I want to enlarge this. I can even center it a little bit right here, maybe pull Alex a little bit. Off. Now what I want to do is I want to change the font to match his right here. And from the looks of it, it looks like it's a Helvetica font. So let's go ahead and try out Helvetica, and then we can go on to adding a red text block. So to change the font, I just have this selected, I come up to here, and I can make sure that Helvetica is typed in, and we can use Helvetica now, and it's probably a bolt. So we have this now selected. Now what I want to do is I want to create a red text block around the word broke. Broke is going to be the word that I'm kind of highlighting. Do this in two ways. Number one, I could go ahead and come over into elements right here and grab this square. I can change it to color red. And then I can right click here, go to layer, and I can click Send backward, so it's behind this. And then I can resize it to outline this word. The alternative that I could do is grab any piece of text right here, come into effects, and then select background. And then I could change in the color here, and I could do a little bit more with it. So I could change the roundness of it. I can change the spread. But as you can see, these effects only ever apply to the entire text block. So if I were to do this for this thumbnail example, what I would do is take out broke from this text block, and I would have it alone in its own text block. But because I already showed you the other way, this way is no longer necessary. So now what I want to do is I want to kind of change the framing a little here, and I want to change the sizes of things. So I want the text to be a little bit bigger, and to do so without infringing on the two, I'm going to make them a little bit moved out to the side, because if we come back into his thumbnails, we get to see that you never really see the full face of anyone. You can always see that a part of their faces are always cut off. Usually their ear is not even visible. So I can pull Alex out to here and I can even pull him out here. And now I'm left with these two elements. Because I didn't link these and I didn't do it the second method, what we have now is we have this kind of moving separate, but I can fix this. Now that we see that this is selected right here, the red rectangle, I can hold Shift, and then I can also select this text block. So now we see that both are selected and I can click Group. So now when I move them, they are going to move together. So I'm going to make them a little bigger here, and again, I'm going to center it. And now what I want to do is I want to back up we see this is looking good from a distance. I'm going to drag it a little bit down because we don't need it to be that high and maybe even a little bit higher than that. So this is good framing. Now the last thing to do if I was the diary of a CEO host, all I would do is add in his logo right here. So I'm going to go ahead and grab that and then put it back in, and then we will essentially be done. Okay? So I pulled in his logo right here. Now I'm going to zoom in. It's a little car, and I can input it right about there. As you can see, I just pulled a screenshot, so there's a little bit of a black edge around there you have it. I put his logo right there. Let's now look back at his. And I can even make it a little bit smaller because it's usually something that's a very subtle addition that he has on his. So let's zoom out. Now, let's move back over to his page. And comparing this to these, it's pretty fitting. Now, one last kind of tweak, one last change that we can do is change the color balance on both of our subjects right here. Right now, you can see they're a little kind of dry. They're flat. They don't really stand out very much. So just like we did in the Iman Gazi walk through, what we can do here on Canva is select, we can click Edit, and then we can come to adjust. And here we can do some tweaks to make them stand out a little bit more. Okay, so I now have adjusted both of these. So you can essentially see the kind of style I was going for is very similar across the two. And with that came very similar adjustments in the colors. Now, we can look at Alex Homose for example, and I can undo. And we see how his color is very much different than it was with this version. Now we see him standing out much better. So now let's do one last check. Let's zoom out here. We see that both of them are very distinct, and we see our text very clearly here. Even with this logo being as small as it is, it's still a nice, subtle additive. So, there we go. Here is our final and finished thumbnail. 13. Make the Viral Review-Style Thumbnails: This lesson, we are going to be going over a walk through of how to create a review type style thumbnail, like these Ryan Trahan thumbnails. So the one star says Lock window. These ones are both from the eye tested one star hotels. Now, we are going to create right here is going to be something I just made up on the spot, actually, with the help of Chat GPT right here, we are going to design is a thumbnail for a video that's one star casino. So as you can see, I did enlist the help of AI in creating this thumbnail. I said that I'm creating a thumbnail that is of the style one star Yelp review. Like Ryan Trehans, I tested One Star Hotels, and his thumbnail was a one star Yelp review that says Lock window. My thumbnail is going to have a dark silhouette figure with a hoodie as the subject. What should the theme be? Something akin to one star hotels. I want it to be mysterious and potentially dangerous. The themes, it didn't tell me casinos, but I decided that I wanted that to be the theme. So I eventually told it, and I said, I think I'll do one star casino. So then it gave some thumbnail ideas. And then I said, I just want you to create the background for me. List your ideas again and we can go through and have you make them one by one. And after doing that, I then said, Go ahead and make me the Roulette ritual. So the Roulette ritual is described right here, a roulette table under a spotlight in otherwise dark room, the red chip pile forming a pentagram shape, and then this is what was resulted. So if we click on this, we can now see that this is the design. I'm going to have a dark silhouette figure. I actually already have it right here. And there is some little effects that I am going to want to get rid of it. Like, as you can see, there is a little glow. So I'm going to have to go ahead and get rid of but it's going to be essentially this figure on this because ideally, it would be a picture of me, but I don't have a picture that would very well fit this. But I'm going to have a picture right here, this silhouette. I'm going to have that background, and then I'm going to have a one star review of Yo. So, that is the guideline for this. So let's go ahead and actually get into now I pulled this in from one of my other thumbnail designs, and where I got it from is I just typed online dark silhouette, and then it came up with this image right here. What we can do to get rid of the glow is I can come into shadows. And for now, I'm just going to put in no glow. So we just have this figure right here and I can zoom out a little bit. Next what we want to do is import the background image that we had Chachi PT create for us. So I have it in right here. Now what I want to do is I want to send it to back. And now all we have to do is resize this for the thumbnail. So right now, I have to drag it to be a little bit bigger. We can see how we want to change things. I might want to move it to the side a little bit, and then what I can do is just select the background itself right here and make it go black. So now it kind of blends in and looks like it's all this image, even though we just put in a black background right there. So right now, this is how it's looking. So we have these two images. We have our background, and we have our silhouette right here. So now what we have to do is create our yelperfuw. The first step in doing that is I'm going to come over into elements, and then I'm going to grab this rounded shape right here. And I'm going to change the color and make it, let's say, just fully white right here. So now I can take it and I can drag it to make it roughly the size of the thumbnail that we want. So now what I want to do is I actually want to go into this one right here. This template, I want to pull in, and I want to add it to a new page. And what I want to do, the reason why I'm pulling this is actually because I want to just grab this little picture right here. So here I can just paste it in just to make it look like it's actually someone's yelp profile that is going to be making this review. Now, but we want to have the one star from Yep. Now, we could create this in Canva, but it might take a little bit. One way that might be a little bit faster for us is to just steal it. So what do I mean by this? Well, I'll see you in 1 second. Well, we are trying to model this after Ryan Trahan. So why not just take the one star review from Ryan Trahan so we don't have to make it ourselves. Well, right now, I'm here within viewstats and I can just click this to get the full rendered resolution thumbnail right here. What I can just do is click Command four, and then I can just take a little screenshot right here of these five stars, I can come back here into Canva and then just paste it in. Now I have this one star review, and it only took me a couple seconds. Now what we have to do is add in the text here. So I can just go ahead and click T on my keyboard, and now I can type in text. And I was thinking of putting something like you can't lead. So now I have it typed in right here and now I can enlarge it and I can drag it here. Now all I want to do is change up the font right here. So now I went ahead and changed the font to aerial, and then I also played around with the line spacing and the letter spacing letter spacing is essentially indistinguishable. You can't really tell much difference there. But the line spacing, I brought it in quite a bit, just so you could see them very clearly, and it could be big texts that both still fit in this little review that I created. And we can see here if we compare it to Ryan Tre hands, it's very, very similar. Also made the profile picture for our woman here just a little bit smaller just because it doesn't really matter that much like what she is or who she is. It's just the fact that we see that there is, like, a little person there, and her reaction, if we zoom in right here, her being happy kind of contributes absolutely nothing to this thumbnail. So I wanted to make that small and kind of just if you notice it, you just notice the fact that there's a picture there. You don't really see anything of her expression. So if we zoom out now, we can see that this is a pretty clear thumbnail is we see these kind of chips stacked up in this little demonic orientation right here, and we see our figure right here. Now, typically, I don't like to leave these figures to be as they are. I would usually like to add in, like, a question mark with a little glow. So I can try that. And then I'm also going to try importing image of me that we worked with when we were going over the basics of Cama. I now added in this little question mark right here. And if we zoom out, we see that this makes for a little bit better of a thumbnail here, in my opinion, because this is just adding into the mysterious and almost scary aspect of this. We see that you can't leave. We see this little demonic shape right here, and we see a question mark over this mysterious individual. We don't know who he is. We don't know if he's part of the casino. This is the person that's not letting us leave, there are a lot of questions here, and I would say this is a very attractive thumbnail. No, ideally, if this was actually something I was creating for a YouTube of mine, then I would have my face and I would look scared or concerned. Now, what I do have is an image of me that we worked with in the beginning of this when we were looking at the basics of Kamva. This could really be a perfect split test, for example, if I were to use that image or let's say, a similar image where I look scared and this Oh, let's go ahead and actually pull that in, and let's see how it would look. Okay, so I went over and copied it. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to delete this page. I'm going to come over right here to these three dots, and I'm going to duplicate this one, and now I'm going to get rid of both of these, and then I'm just going to paste myself in here. And the way I could do it is I could have myself right here, and I could come up to this flip, I can flip horizontal and put myself right here to essentially directly replace our little hooded mysterious man. I can maybe even make myself a little bigger here. So I Again, my expression here doesn't match the kind of vibe of this thumbnail, but it could potentially work for a split test because there's really no harm in testing out these assumptions, especially if I didn't have any other image, and this is the only thing that I was working with, then it wouldn't hurt to test this one against one. One thing that I would say that goes against this is that there's not too much contrast between the dark background and our dark figure, right? Our dark figure doesn't really stand out against a dark background because they both are dark. But because this is supposed to be something scary, supposed to be something mysterious, and I think this could potentially work, and I think this would perform quite well on a video that's visiting one star casinos. There you have it. These are two variations of our I tested a one star casino. 14. Watch Me Create a Thumbnail From Zero: This lesson, what I want to do is break down two thumbnails that I created for one of my clients. As you can see right here, we have the two right here. Now, I want you guys to look at these two and I want to ask you, which do you think performed better? Now, let me tell you that both of these did perform pretty well. They had a ten X outlier value compared to the rest of the things on that channel. But one of these performed still a little bit better than the other. Now, although it may not look like it, it's actually this one was the one that performed the best. Although this one looks much more complicated, this one here, being as simple as it is, still performed a little bit better. So let's go ahead and break down how I created these. Now, we can start with this one because it is a little bit more simple than the other one. As you can see here, there are a couple different elements, but only a few. I'm going to go ahead and undo everything. Now, if we want to start right here with the basics, we can look at this background. Now, this background is what I took from my client's assets. This was a background that they provided, but for my thumbnail, I wanted to have the background to be a little bit more darker to create this contrast. What I did was add in this black square above it. What I did with this square is I just adjusted the transparency, as you can see right here. When I added it in, it looked like this, and then I dropped down the transparency to about seven. Now next, let's look at this text right here. This text here, as you can see, is grouped. What I did here, let me show you as I ungroup it is I just typed in this text, suck at Caton the font is Montserrat, and what I did is I grouped in this blue Caton right here over this, just as a way to create a background right here and make sure it's still lined up with everything. Now, as you can see, we come back to look at this, I wanted to match up this background blue color with a supporting color of my subject. What I mean by that is, of course, this glow that you see around the subject right here. If I go here into Edit, we can go into shadows and we can see this glow is how I created this subtle little glow around the subject. Now one thing to mention was the title of this video was something along the lines of the player or the person who mastered this Caton might have been Katan's biggest expansion. It was something like that. Now, this thumbnail was supposed to support the title in giving this story of underdog because the video was about someone who mastered this expansion. Now the thumbnail is this saying that you suck at Katan. Who doesn't like a good underdog story? Of course, this is going to invoke some curiosity in the viewer because they want to see how is it that this person overcame this title given to them that they sucked at the game. But yet they mastered this biggest expansion of the Okay, now moving into the subject itself. Now, this subject is one that I pulled just by searching dark silhouette of a man. Then this one popped up and as you can see, it had some more elements in it, but I didn't want that to be shown in the thumbnail. What I did is I zoomed in and I positioned that little table to be off screen. What I did was add in this question mark right here. I'm going to ungroup this and I'm going to do is click out and show you a couple of things right here. Now, as you can see, there was eyes in this when I pulled it. Obviously, I didn't want these eyes to be shown. What I did is I just grabbed a shape here. It's a black rectangle, and then I first use that when we're zoomed in here, we could tell that rectangle is there. Once you zoom out from a distance, it's really indiscernible. You can't see it really at all. The next thing here is this question mark. Again, this was another super easy thing that we could use here. What I use here is I went into graphics and what I did is I searched for a question mark. Another maybe easier way that you could go about just clicking T and then you bring up this text and you just type yourself in your question mark, and then you could add a glow to this, you can even change up the font to get that thumbnail that's perfect for your needs. I went with this question mark right here, which was essentially an image. Then to add the glow here, you just come into edit, come into shadows and then we have the glow option right here. Again, this one was a very simple thumbnail. I just wanted to show you this to illustrate that you can have a thumbnail that performs super well, even though it's super simple. Now let's move on to this thumbnail right here. Now, you can see this one here had its own fair share of iteration. The title of this video was I ranked the top ten board games of all time. We can see the process that I went through in creating this. These ones were my first few iterations of it, and then through split testing, it was actually found that it was better to have monopoly here as the best under this question mark instead of the overrated. My thought process in this was that monopoly is one of the biggest, if not the biggest board game ever having it under the overrated could invoke some anger into some people and I get them to rage bat them into clicking on the video. But it turned out that it was actually better to have monopoly under the best. No worries because I still got my fair share of rage bathing in this thumbnail because I put a little chess piece in here and chess is probably actually the biggest board game ever and also I had risk, but then eventually, I also added the board game Caton. Now let's actually get into how I created this. Here, with the Monopoly Man, this one again was just a PNG that I downloaded online. Here I just imported him in and then the only thing I really did to him is, first off, I got rid of the background that was here. It was just a white background. Then what I did is I added in a drop shadow on him to make him stand out against the background a little more. You can see the effects that I applied to that drop shadow right here. Then lastly, what I did is I came into the adjust and then I up the vibrance by 100%. We can see if I put it down to normal versus now, this stands out much more and just better. Now, next what I want to talk about is the money in the background. Now, this one was supposed to act like monopoly money, but if you look a little closely and maybe not that closely, you can see that it looks a little funny and that's because yes, this one was an AI generated image. Actually, instead of one AI generated image, it was two separate ones that I just mirrored and put on top of each other to create this little corridor where our monopoly man could stand right in between them. Now, this one here, if we look from a distance, you can't really tell it's AI generated, and even if you could, it doesn't matter because here I'm just trying to communicate something here with the monopoly man reining in his money and it works. Now the next thing that I want to mention on this end is going to be our background gradient. Now what I'm going to do is duplicate this page and then what we're going to do is move these little pieces out of the way to then be able to see this gradient. This is the actual background of this thumb here for this red gradient that I put on, this one was a separate square that I added. Let's go here to this background color and we can come here into the gradient. The gradient colors just used these two colors, which was black and this light mint green. Then I just put in a linear gradient. I felt that having the black on the bottom is just what works best. We can come here, look at it as it was. I can come at this. If I change this in any direction, it just in my opinion, did not look nearly as good as having this from the bottom up, making it look like there's this light on the monopoly man that's coming from the top and then just having the money that's compiled on the bottom, making that one not really as much part of where people are going to be looking. Having this dark I felt worked well. Next, we also have this text right here. Again, what I did is group this and you can see that right here, this text is separate from right here and where I actually had the effect of having the background. Now, I added in this text on top of it. Let me go ahead and go back here. I added that because I wasn't able to have both a shadow and a background so adding in this text on top, I made it look like it was a shadow, even though it wasn't are the little tricks and hacks that you can do to get around some of the things that you want to accomplish that the software you're working with just doesn't really allow you to do. So next, if we move over here, we can focus in on the overrated side. Here, it's a little bit more simple. I only have three elements here of board games. Again, this piece right here was something that I AI generated because here I just wanted to have a king's piece from chess. I felt like if I went to AI, I could create something that is a little bit more in my vision for what I wanted for this thumbnail, especially because it was something that was very simple. It was just a king's piece from chess. It wasn't necessarily this intricate image that I needed to have been created. This was a perfect task for an AI image generator. As you can see, what I did here is I just removed the background. Now, if we show the original image, I can tell you that the original image did not have the monopoly man behind it. Right here, there's just I guess a little glitch going on, but no worries. Now aside to that, I didn't touch this chest piece at all. I just enlarged it and positioned it right here. Now, if we look at the caton and the risk box, both of these, I just added in a slight dropshod or to just to again make them stand out against the thumbnail and not make it look so flat. Another thing that I did is I added in this divider right here. Now, this divider, all it is is just one line. This is because I didn't want to have such a rough transition from the best over here to the overrated side. I felt like this white line worked pretty well. Again, I've shown you how to put in these lines. You can just select this element here, and then you can just tweak it, move it around to then fit the length right here, and then you can address the strokes weight right here, make it thicker or thinner. It was about that size. To then add in this gradient on this side. The red, if you move this here, we can see that the line is now pinned to the square, so it's going to move wherever I move this square. But we can see that the actual background here is green, but I just added in this square. If we click on it, we can come see that the color that I adjusted right here is actually, in fact, the gradient and it consisted of only two colors. Again, you can see the different types of ways this gradient could have been applied, but I wanted to have something that was consistent with this one. I had my ta to bottom gradient. There you go. This is how I created two very successful thumbnails for my client. This one here being a little bit more complicated also with the help of AI. Still being a relatively simple construction. There's nothing in here that required too much explanation on my end. It was more of just developing this vision and then executing it in a way that was most effective. I'll see you in the next 15. Create Thumbnails with AI: Talk about the elephant in the room and something that is exploding right now. That's AI. Now, we're seeing massive advances in how AI generates images. The tools are getting better literally by the week, but that also means that what works today might look totally different six months from now. So in this lesson, we're going to cover how to use generative AI for thumbnails in its current state. Some things we speak about are going to be evergreen, and they're going to be tactics that you can use forever, and some of them are going to naturally change as AI gets better. So we'll discuss what it's good for, what it's not, and how to get the most out of it without relying on it, doing the entire job for you. Here's the first big idea. AI is an amazing tool for brainstorming your thumbnail ideas. Now, this is something that essentially will never get outdated. If you're stuck creatively, AI can throw you dozens of concepts in literal seconds. That's like having a supercharged idea machine that can visualize what's in your head before you even fully know what you want. And not only that, but you can use it to prototype your vision. So we can imagine that we're Ryan Trehan here, and we want to create a haunted hallway for our one star hotel video. Well, we can type it out into HAGBT or Adobe Firefly, and boom. Now we've got something that at minimum can work as a reference image. So from there, you can recreate it a little bit more refined and more to your image in Photoshop or Canva with your own spin. Now, here's where most people get it wrong. AI is not your full thumbnail designer. Not yet, anyway. Where it shines right now is in supporting roles, like creating stylized backgrounds, atmospheric elements, props or textures. So this is stuff that adds depth and intrigue, but doesn't need to be pixel perfect or personalized. If you try to use AI as the main subject of your thumbnail, like, a person or a product shot, then chances are it's going to look off or worse, just plain fake. And as we know, fake does not convert. This is especially true now where trust and authenticity matter more than ever. So, the sweet spot right now, you want to use AI to enhance and not replace. So let it support your thumbnail composition instead of carrying it. And that's exactly what we're about to do in the next part of this lesson, where I'm going to walk you through the most useful AI tools. Now, before we do that, the last thing that I want to note here is another way that we can use AI to help us in our thumbnail creation process. That's using AI as our graphic design consultant. Now, although AI in its current state isn't able to create everything that we need in the thumbnail in a pixel perfect manner, what it can do and what it already has right now is a deep knowledge of the softwares that we're using to create our thumbnails. I'm talking about having a deep knowledge of how we can use Canva in Photoshop to turn our ideas into a reality in our thumbnails. This is honestly probably one of the most effective ways that I've used AI to help me create thumbnails. Because sometimes, no matter how good you are and how much of a pro you are in Photoshop, there can always be some things that you don't exactly know how to pull off. And in those situations, simply talking to Chachi BT about giving it your idea and then having it translate it into a walk through of how you can execute this idea and let's say, Photoshop is a very effective and great way that we can use AI to help us. Okay, but that's enough of this theory section. And the next part of this lesson, what I'm going to do is walk you through both Adobe Firefly and Chachi BT and using Dali to help us in creating these thumbnail designs. So let's dive in. Alright, so we are now here in the two softwares that I want to discuss right now. We have Chachi Bit here, and also we have Adobe Firefly. So what I want to start this walk through with is what I just ended in telling you, and that's using AI as your graphic design consultant. So many times I've came to Cha GBT and asked it how I can do specific effects on Photoshop, for example. Now, let's say we're creating this thumbnail, and what we want to do is add motion blur to a specific subject in our video in our thumbnail. So we can just go ahead and type it in the question right here. So we see the question here, how do I add a motion blur to one of my subjects in Photoshop? And following this, the response is a detailed breakdown of how we can do this step by step. And the great thing about having HAGPT is that if you ever get stuck on one of the steps or you're kind of confused on how you should go about applying it, then you could always continue to ask it to clarify, and then it will do so. And you'd be able to then execute all those steps very easily. Now let's go ahead and move on to another use case of Cha GBT. And that's going to be developing both video ideas and thumbnail ideas. So let's go ahead and say that we want to expand our one star series. So we can ask ha GBT about what other things can I test? Okay, so I just typed in this prompt. I tested one star series on YouTube. I just did hotels, and I want you to help me come up for other ideas I can do next. So let's go ahead and input this. And now we can see it give us some more ideas. Okay, so right here, we have all of these ideas that were generated in just a couple seconds. So, let's say that we want to go ahead and run with this idea right here. I tested one star barbershops. So here, the kind of idea in a thumbnail could be something that just naturally arises in your head. I would imagine if I would post this video, it would be a picture of me, and I would have a super messed up haircut. Maybe I'd even just be bald. And of course, we could have the one star and the review and the text just as we walked through in the prior lesson. Now, just as we did in the lesson where I created my own review type style thumbnail, what we can do here is have generative AI create us the background of this thumbnail. So this isn't having it create us a main aspect of this. It's not something like the review, and it's not going to be something like the subject. Instead, it's a supporting detail. It's the background. So it doesn't necessarily have to be perfect, which is in itself a perfect job for generative AI to do for us. So I'm going to go ahead and type in another prompt here, and I'm going to tell Chachi BT that we are going to go with this one. And what I want it to do is to create me some prompts that I can then input to have it create me this background. Alright, so I went ahead and typed in the prompt, right here. I said, I'm gonna go ahead with the one star barbershops video. Now, I want you to help me with the thumbnail of this video. Specifically, I want you to help me prompt the background for my thumbnail. Give me a few prompts, and we can go from there. Okay, so now we have a few different prompts for the background thumbnail. So now what I want to do is first, we could have ChachVT create this, but one AI image generator that I think does a little bit better in this is Adobe Firefly. So what I'm going to do is copy this. Now I'm going to come over here into Adobe Firefly, and then I'm going to paste it and click Generate. Now, as you can see, we have a few options right here. Now, what I want to bring your attention to is this left panel here because this is where all the magic happens. So first, we can change the aspect ratio. Now, I would change it to wide screen. Now, this isn't exactly the aspect ratio of a thumbnail, but if you pull it into Canva, then you can kind of adjust it, and you can always cut out the edges of the thumbnail or cut out the edges of the image to have it fit into the thumbnail, I should say. This, what I would do is keep it as a photo because we wanted to at least look semi realistic as a barbershop in the background. And then if we scroll down the references in style right here and composition, this one is essentially going to entail you giving it some image, and then it's going to copy the kind of composition. So how that image is laid out is what it's going to then create images based off. Most of the time when we're doing this for thumbnails, we're not going to have any reference composition right here. But for styles, this is essentially saying, how is it going to create the image? How is the image going to look? What style is it going to take? Now, again, this one isn't something that I've personally used much myself. But if we scroll down to effects, this is something that I have used quite a lot of. Now for this, what I would personally do is I would come here and I would go through. And for the kind of thing that I'm trying to go for in this thumbnail, I would probably have it set at hyper realistic. So we have that right here. And now that we have the aspect ratio change and this effect change, we could regenerate this. And sometimes these effects can help, and other times, maybe not. If I look at these ones, I could say these ones are more realistic than what these ones were produced. We look at this one right here and right here, they look pretty good. For example, this is one that I could definitely see as a potential for using in a thumbnail, because this chair right here is probably going to be out of the way because I would imagine I would have my review right here in the top left, and I would have my subject, which would likely be me right here on the right side. So this one would be something that works. And we could see it's grimy, there's dirt, doesn't look very nice. Maybe you'd want to create something a little y. This would all entail just going through and using these prompts. And then the ones that come out your favorite kind of go in a little bit deeper and expanding those prompts to make them a little bit more specific and more tailored to what you want in your thumbnail. Coming back into Firefly, what I want to show you is this generative film. So as you can see, I clicked those three dots, and I came here into this generative film. And from here, what we can do is we can change things up here. Let's say that I didn't want to have this chair right here. I just wanted to have this kind of background here with the grime and all this. What I could do is come to this remove, and then I can just color out this chair and then once I'm done doing that, I can then click Remove, and then we can see what it comes up with. So, right here, we have three different variations, and this one is pretty good. We can see right here the little remnants, but that was just my fault because I didn't color it out. This is a very, very useful tool. And other one, for example, I'm going to go ahead and reset this is expand. So sometimes you want to add in a little bit more or for whatever reason, you want to just change up how this looks. You can do is expand, and then we can click Generate here. And now, again, we have different variations right here. This third one is the best in my opinion, but if we wanted more, we could always click this and it would generate more. Sometimes expanding just gives us a little bit more leeway in being able to zoom in and kind of crop and position stuff within our thumbil. Then the other tool that we have here is one that I showed you in Photoshop very briefly, but it's this insert tool. So what we're able to do is kind of draw in an area, and what we could do is insert in something specific. So I just colored in this area right here and I put in skeleton, and now I'm going to generate. Sometimes the prompts that you put in, it's going to say it's against their guidelines. So hopefully, that's not the case for this you can see this one wasn't the best in creating this skeleton right here. And honestly, that one is not very surprising because that is a very specific and it would be a very detailed thing. Now, if you would want to have this skeleton here, I would probably just recommend adding that into the original prompt. So it creates something that is going to be of the style of everything else. So now let's just go ahead and cancel this and reset and exit. And now, whenever you're done with your design, you could just come up here and click Download. Now, this is essentially a full breakdown of Adobe Firefly and how we could use ChachiPT. Now what I want to do is go into Canva and go into their AI tools a little bit deeper. Now, we're back here in Canva on this review thumbnail that we created. What we want to do to use the AI tools within Canva is all we have to do is first select what we want to change. So I'm going to go ahead and change this background. So I can select it right here and I can click. Now, from here, most of the AI tools we see come right here in the magic studio. Background remover is something that we're already very familiar of, and background generator works in contrast with that. So instead of removing a background, it's going to generate a background for us. Magic eraser here, it works a similar way as Adobe's generative fill and removing specific things that we decide that we want removed. So let's go ahead and do this to remove this little roulette wheel here in the I could do is I could brush over it, or I could go ahead and use this click right here. And using the click, it identifies two separate parts of this image, the front right here and this background right here. So I'm going to select it, and I'm going to click as and let's see how well it does. Okay, so there we go. We now have it disappeared. So it out. Now it's no longer peeking out around the edges right here. So I did a pretty good job. Now we can come back here. We also have magic Edit and magic Expand. So again, magic Expand also works very similar to how we had generative fill with Adobe. And if we want to expand it, then we can do so. So let me go ahead and zoom out. And now if I wanted to, I could go ahead and expand this. It would then expand in creating more. Now, here, there isn't much to expand. Any expansion that would happen would really just be black space. But this is really just for your kind of knowledge here and being able to know that this tool exists, and it's here for your use. And the same thing with magic Edit, it works in being able to highlight certain things, and then we give it some commands, and then it's going to add or change something. This here in the magic edit, it's not going to be amazing. So I would only ever have this kind of do very, very small tweaks in your thumbnail. Nothing like, extremely massive, like, changing this entire thing right here into let's say you don't want it to be this roulette board here, and instead you want it to be the wheel, like, I wouldn't have it do that because it's just not going to come out very good in the place it is at right now. Okay, but that is essentially it. These are all of our rundown of our AI tools. So we went over Chachi BT. We went over Adobe's AI features. So everything that we went over in Firefly is also going to be applicable in Photoshop. And finally, we've covered Canvas AI features. So remember, the landscape of AI is going to be ever changing, and who knows? Probably in the very soon future, we're going to see AI being able to create full thumbnails from the idea to the eventual execution. But until then, AI right now works best in a supporting role. So go ahead and continue to let it act as your brainstorming machine or your graphic design consultant. That's it for this sussin. I'll see you in the next. 16. Use YouTube's Native Thumbnail Tester: In this lesson, we're going to be going over YouTube's thumbnail test and compare feature. This one is going to be a quicker lesson because there's really not too much to discuss here, so I'll give it to you quick. Now, when we're here on YouTube uploading a video, we have three options for our thumbnail. We can either upload a file. This is just going to be whatever thumbnail that you create on Canva or Photoshop and you can just upload it here directly in or you could select Auto generated, and what this essentially does is it looks through your entire video that you just uploaded and it pulls a screenshot of what it thinks would act as a good thumbnail. The third option that we have here is the test and compare feature. Now, this is where we are going to be working with within this lesson. This is the feature here that allows us to split test our thumbnails. Let's go ahead and select it. Now we get to see that we are able to upload up to three images. We can upload three different thumbnails that we want to test. Of course, you don't have to upload three different thumbnails to conduct this test. If you want, you could just go between two right here. I just now uploaded these two thumbnails. This is just a variation of the thumbnails that we created in this diary of a CEO style thumbnail. In here, I have lying highlighted and over here, I have the word broke. Ideally, if you're going to be posting your video for the first time, you probably want to test out two more starkly contrasting concepts of a thumbnail instead of something here which is as similar as having these highlights. If you really don't have many ideas for your thumbnail and you're just deciding between these two little variations of essentially the same style thumbnail, then you could go ahead and use that for your first here. But if you have two bigger ideas and you have the facilities to create those two different thumbnails, then you should start out with those and then continue to run these tests as the video is uploaded and exist on YouTube because we're not able to do this just once. As I'll show you later, we're able to run more tests with this. Once you have this all done, then what you can do is click Done, and then right here, as we can see, there is the test now running once we would go ahead and publish this video. Right now I've actually uploaded this test video, and what we're able to do is once you come into the analytics, you can then come to the details of your video and then to check the results of this test, what you're going to do is come down to the thumbnail section and then we can click these three dots, the options. Then we have these three options right here and what we want to click is View Test. A, nom, you can essentially get the full idea of how these tests are going to look. You're going to have all of your thumbnails that you're testing right here and you're going to have the watch time share right here. One thing that you're immediately going to notice, it is prioritizing one certain metric here and that's watch time share. It's not click through rate, it's watch time. We talked about this earlier in the course, but we used to see YouTube essentially placing a full prioritization on click through rate. But because of that, clickbait was born and honestly just perpetuated. All of these thumbnails became crazy. Now, what they're prioritizing, at least in this test is going to be watch time share. What this is telling us is that we want to make sure that our thumbnails essentially give viewers an idea of what our video is going to be about. We know this and we've covered this, but I just wanted to review it again if any of you were confused about it. So once this test is going to be complete, we're going to see the watch time share in a percentage between these two. Then we are going to see one of two different options when the test is complete next to one of these thumbnails. We're either going to see a winner badge or we would see a preferred badge. Now, the winner badge is YouTube telling us that a specific thumbnail is clearly the winner. That means that there was a statistically significant outcome of our test that made it the case that one thumbnail was clearly better than the other. The other option is a preferred batch. Now, based on my other description, you could probably guess what the preferred batch means. It means that there was not a statistically significant winner in this test, but we see a slightly better statistics and slightly better metrics coming from one thumbnail than the other. But again, it's nothing that's huge. At any point within the test, you could always stop and set one of the thumbnails. That means that everyone is going to see the one thumbnail that you choose. Because right now while the test is going on, we see that these are essentially going to be split 50 50 between the people that are seeing it. That is essentially the YouTube thumbnail split tester. But now what we're able to do is we can click Stop test and then it's going to set one of our thumbnails as the thumbnail. We can go ahead with then we can also come back to here, even though that one test is stopped or it was completed or whatever the case may be, we could click it, we could view test report again, and then we could run a new test. The current one that we ran is now going to be deleted or we could accept that and we can click New test, and then we are brought back to this very familiar screen from the beginning. So you can run as many tests as you want, and depending on what you're testing for, the tests can take different amounts of time. If you have two thumbnails like I just had that were very similar, then the tests are probably going to take longer, maybe up to two weeks. But if you have two thumbnails that are starkly contrasting one another, then your test could be completed in a matter of hours. Also depends on how many impressions your thumbnails are going to be getting, how big your channel is is probably going to affect this as well. But the typical range is going to be between a couple hours before you can seek some statistically significant results and all the way up to two weeks. This is something that you should just keep in mind. Well, that is it for this lesson. 17. Optimize Your Thumbnails With TubeBuddy: This lesson, we're going to be going over another tool that's going to help us not only with our thumbnails, but our YouTube game in general. So, this extension that we're going to be working with is going to be Tube Buddy. And yes, you heard that right. I'm calling it a browser extension because that's where most of the utility of this software is going to come. So because of that, this walk through of To Buddy is going to happen on YouTube because we're going to see all of the kind of integrations that Too Buddy gives us with our YouTube. Okay, so we are now here in YouTube, and you can see a couple places that this shows up. We first have it right here, and this is going to be the main UI of two Buddies. So, the very first thing that we have here in the UI are quick now, Quicklinks don't really have anything to do with Tube Buddy itself. They're mostly just kind of shortcuts that help us to get to the places within YouTube that we're going to kind of frequent. So you could access your YouTube studio dashboard, as you can see right here, and I can come back here to the Quickink and I can access just other parts of my YouTube. Where the software gets interesting is when we come over into extension tools. So the very first tool that we have at our disposal is this keyword explorer. So here, we can essentially use this VDIQ and we can put in keywords, and we can see what statistics they have on this keyword. So let's go ahead and put travel backpacks. I'm going to go ahead and now explore just this keyword. And right now we get an entire score of this. So we see the overall score is a poor, ten out of 100. We see the search volume is excellent. So a lot of people are searching for this. Then we see the weighted competition. And the weighted competition essentially compares how well to Body thinks that this niche, this topic, is going to perform in the kind of realm of your channel and the audience that you've garnered. Lastly, we have optimization strength. And this one is essentially measuring how well optimized the top ranking videos in this niche are ranking. So how well optimized are their videos? That entails their thumbnails, their titles, their descriptions, their tags, everything that goes into a video. Now, something helpful with this keyword explorer is the related searches because we see right now, this one is a poor with a ten out of 100. But if we go through the related searches, then we could see different, sometimes better results for these keywords because most of the time they're going to be a little bit more descriptive and a little bit more long. We see this one is 29 out of 100, still not a good score to go with. Now, of course, what matters here, as we've discussed in previous lessons, is the kind of traffic that you're hoping for. If you want to have traffic that is going to be based on these keywords, then of course, you want to have a high score here. But if you want traffic to just come from the YouTube homepage, so people just randomly kind of coming upon your videos and clicking them, then these metrics aren't going to be as important. Okay, this was great, but we still have a lot to cover in to Buddy. It is a very expensive software, so let's not get harbored on one thing. Let's move on. Now, next in our extension tools, we have the SEO Studio. Now, the SEO Studio is great because with just our target keyword, it's going to help us in building not only our thumbnail, but also our title description in tax. So let's go ahead and put something in. I went ahead and typed in workout routine for building muscle mass. So let's go ahead and click Start, and we can see that the SEO score here is 62%. So it's going to help us here, and as we are putting in our description, we are going to be checking off things that can improve our SEO score. Now, if we move on, we have tags here, and it's going to populate suggested tags. And right now, for some reason, there are no suggestions found, but usually you'll have some tags here that you could go ahead and import. But next, which is a little bit more relevant here is we have thumbnails. So this one is great because it helps us kind of get inspiration for our own thumbnails. Because if we go through here, we get to see while performing videos within this niche that we put in here in the keyword. So the benefit here that it gives us is quite clear. It helps us in the entire process of posting our YouTube video from title, all the way over to our thumbnail. Alright, now let's move on. Now, Niche Insights and Related Video Manager are both tools that are going to help us in kind of getting inspiration and kind of understanding our niche and our topic in our competition a little bit better. Moving down the list here, we also have Best time to publish. So, this one is going to be a metric that's going to be garnered and kind of analyzed as you post on your YouTube, and it's going to be able to tell us where your audience is most active on YouTube. So, of course, this is then going to kind of inform you as to when the best time for you to publish your videos. Another cool tool that we have here is suggested shorts. So what this tool essentially does is it scrapes your YouTube videos, your longs, and then it breaks down into small parts, which shorts that it believes through its software is going to be the parts of your video that will best perform as shorts. So this is great because it just kind of helps you repurpose your content, so you don't have to spend that extra time in doing so. Okay, now we are going to move over to website tools. Now, here, this is when we're actually going to move off of YouTube and actually go into Tube Buddy. Now, of course, there is a lot here, so I'm going to try to quickly run down what I think is important. Now, the first thing and I think what is most useful are the AB test right here. Now, here we're able to manage AB tests. Now, in a previous lesson, we saw that we were able to AB test on YouTube and the thumbnails. This allows us to do is not only AB test our thumbnails, but also our titles as well. And not just that. We're able to do our titles, tags, and descriptions. But of course, the kind of biggest benefit that we're going to get from this is being able to split tests on our titles. So what this does is it manually changes out or I should say, automatically changes out the titles of our videos, and then it's going to compile all of the statistics. So click through rate, engagement rate, and watch time. And using all of these, it's going to then de which is the best combination of your tags, title, and thumbnail. Now the next thing I want to go over is down here in our data and Insights tab. So first, we have a health report. So this is essentially just going to go through your YouTube, and it's going to analyze how well your YouTube is performing. And down below this, we have channel valuation. Now, channel valuation is something that's kind of fun. It's a cool little tool that has integrated. And what channel valuation does is it evaluates your account through the views that you get and the retention, and it tells you how much you should charge sponsors for having them either shout you out or make an entire dedicated video for their brand. So if you're new in this space of getting sponsored, then this kind of gives you a good little foundation to work off of, gives you a good little ballpark estimate. Now, next, moving on from data and Insights, what I want to show you is the launchpad. So the launch pad is essentially going to be a checklist of everything that we want to have within a video to make sure that it's kind of doing everything it needs to and therefore going to perform the best it can. So if you're going to post a new video, then this launchpad can kind of help you make sure that you're checking all the bases, and you could also use it on your past content as well. Okay, now moving on, we're going to go all the way down here. This is kind of like a nice little extra thing that we have with Tube Buddy. And this essentially allows us to download all of the resources on our account. So we're going to be able to download our profile pick. We can look at our most recent upload here. You can even have embedded link into if you're going to put into your newsletter or whatever other kind of marketing messages you're going to put out to. So this pulls your most recent video. So you're going to embed it into anywhere. So for example, we have this channel page with subscription pop up link. And if we want to go ahead and copy this, we can now open a YouTub, paste it in, and they're going to be brought to the page right here, and then we can see this pop up confirm channel subscription, and then we could subscribe. So that's more of just like a fun little additive that we have with Tube Buddy. Now, the last thing that I want to show you are going to be canned responses. So if we want to add a canned response right here, we can go ahead and name it whatever we want. We can put in a response here that let's say you have a common question on your YouTube videos, and in the comments, you want to have a quick way to reply to them. That is what these canned responses are used for. So I just have this canned response I typed in here and we can click Save. Then now through our browser extension, when we are on comment on YouTube videos, we are able to use these canned responses to quickly fill in. Okay, so now that I showed you the extension and the website here, I want to show you how we can use this in practice. So let's go ahead and go and act like we are going to be posting YouTube video. Okay, so I'm now here on this example video. So what we have is first, a title generator. So I'm going to just make up what this video is about because as you can see, it's just a two second clip. But let's say it's about some specific niche topic. I said that this video was about Linked in Cold Ouch. So now I can click Generate Ideas for our title, and we can see all of these ideas are now populating. So, let's go ahead and let's use this one because people love templates. With the description, it doesn't give us a convenient generator as it does with our title. But as we saw before, we have our SEO studio, and you could go ahead and put in your target keyword here. So I'll say Cold Outreach for Linktn. And then here in the studio, I could go ahead and write out my description. Maybe I'll have ChahPT help me out, and then we can see how our score is going to improve by doing so right here. Next, we also have our chapters. So To Buddy is going to help us in giving us this little checklist about what our chapters should include. So now, because this is only a two second video, I'm not able to fulfill all of these conditions, but you see them right here, and they're super clear. So now let's go ahead and move on to our thumbnail. So now, by clicking this button right here, creating thumbnail, we now get to go into Tubudy's thumbnail generator. So let's go ahead and build out a thumbnail. I'm going to go ahead and use a solid color here. Let's say we are going to use a black background here. I'll click Continue. And now here we have to decide the layers that are going to be within our thumbnail. So let's go ahead and put in some text right here. I'll say LinkedIn cold Outreach. I'll say LinkedIn templates. Let's say I make this white and then click Add Layer. We get to see here that's now been brought in, and we can do things like this. We can add in more things Emojis images. Now, this is more of kind of cool thing to play around with, but using Photoshop and Canva, especially with Canva templates, it's going to be much easier than kind of going through this, and it's also going to be much more effective. But I still wanted to show you guys this given the nature of the course. So now let's just go ahead and click Continue. And now it's letting us preview this among other videos in this same niche. So as you can see right here, this thumbnail would not do good against these. But again, of course, if I was creating this thumbnail for this video right here with LinkedIn Cold message templates, then I definitely would use Photoshop or Campbell. So here we can just click Save and publish, and then I'll click Okay. And then let's go ahead now and exit out of this from here, another thing to look at within the thumbnail region is the thumbnail analyzer. So now another thing to look at what it does is pretty self explanatory. It analyzes the thumbnails that we go ahead and upload for it. So let's go ahead and upload a thumbnail that we already created. So right here, I uploaded our diary of a CEO type thumbnail, and we get to see improvement was 155%. Now, another thing that we're able to do is just with this click of a button, we're able to run the AV test between the thumbnails that we have uploaded because it's all for this specific video. But instead, I can just click Use Selective thumbnail, and I'll click Okay here. And then in just a couple seconds, it should populate here. Okay, so there we go. So now the last thing that I want to show you here is these best practices. Now, this is essentially just a checklist for us. So it tells us these best practices that we should have on our videos. Most part, they're all going to be things that you should have in all of your videos. Doing them isn't going to guarantee your video performed well, but they're all good additions to have. Alright, so I know I just went over a lot, but Tubudy is a large software that covers a whole multitude of aspects on YouTube. My best advice for it is to just try it out yourself. You don't really have anything to lose, and it can kind of help you at least guide you in the right direction or help kind of just confirm your suspicions on whether one thumbnail is better than the other, or one title will be better than another. Alright. That's it, but we still have a lot to go. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 18. Test Thumbnails With This AI Software: In this lesson, what I want to do is go over this software, thumbnail test.com. So it's a software that is completely dedicated to testing both thumbnails and titles. Now, the software is super straightforward, but before we get into this, I want to let you know that this software here to go over everything that we'll see in this lesson is $30 per month at the time of recording this with that $30, we get tools that aren't afforded to us with the basic YouTube studio software. So once you create your account, you're first going to be brought here, and this section is going to be populated with all of your YouTube videos. So, this isn't only going to help you form your future uploads, but it could also help you go back and refine your previous uploads. So let's go ahead and get started with this. Here, I'm going to select this video. It's only a two second video right here, but we're going to go ahead and move on with this one. I'm going to click Next, and now it's going to ask me what I want to test. I can either test just my thumbnail, my title or both. Now, for the sake of this lesson, I'm going to go ahead and select both just so we can see the full extent of this software. Now we're going to click next, and here we have our combos that we are going to have added. So right here, we have four different options. So as you can see here, we can either have it set where we're going to be testing one combination of thumbnail and title alone, or we can have combinations of many thumbnails to just one title, or we can have it set at one thumbnail and many different titles. Or lastly, we can just have it as automatic where we'll just of the thumbnails and all the titles, and then thumbnail test system is then going to put all of them together, and it's then going to give us the best combination of the two. So for this, I'm going to select the automatic. So now here, let's go ahead and upload some thumbnails that we've created. So again, I'm going to be using these two variations of essentially the same thumbnail, and then here we can create a couple different titles. So now I have these three titles right here, and now I'm going to click Generate combinations. And we now have all six of these combinations that we're going to go ahead and work with. So now we're going to move on to the next step. And this step is going to be essentially deciding all the settings that are going to go along with this test. First year, we have our test type. So this is essentially what the test is going to be based on. We can either have it time based. So, for example, run the test for two weeks or we could have it set at metric based, which is then going to say end the test at, let's say, 10,000 views. So let's have the test type set as time based, and just having this unchecked, we'll have it as every single day of the week. Next, we have the test format. So there's two different formats that they have here. It's default and consecutive. Now, default is essentially going to run the test in repeating order in one day's link. So, for example, we have these six thumbnail and title combinations. Now, if we assign a letter to each one of these ABCDEF, then in one day, what's going to happen is all of these are going to continue to cycle per hour. So hour one is going to have this one. Our two is going to have this one, hour three is this one, hour four, hour five, hour six, the hour seven is going to come back to this first one. Now, if we have it set at consecutive, then what would happen is over the course of this test, so this is going to be run for 24 days, then it's going to divide this 24 into six. And then what's going to happen is that each one of these is going to take a designated time period within them. So if I have consecutive selected here, and we have this running for 24 days, then that's six and 24. So that means four days per each of these variations. And they're not going to be repeated in the cycle. I recommend is if you have a new video that you're posting, then you should have it at default. But if you have an old video that you're going to be updating, then your test format should be consecutive. So let's go ahead and keep this at default and then continue on here. Now, for test speed, we have essentially when these variations are going to switch. Do you want them to switch daily or do you want them to switch hourly? Now, in terms of what's best, I for the most part, would have hourly selected for new videos and then daily selected for older tests that you're going to be now, obviously, the longer the better because the longer you're going to be running, the more metrics and statistics that you're going to be compiling. But if you're only going to be running a variation of two different thumbnail tests, then you could have a smaller day range. But if you're going to be running something that's a little bit more robust, like what I have, I have six different combinations, then you're going to want to give it a little bit more time to garner all this data. Now, next, we have the auto set winner based on a certain metric. This is going to be a metric that we can choose to have the winner selected now on YouTube's own feature and the YouTube Studio, it's based on watch time, and we're not able to change this or see any other data. That's why I love thumbnail test, because we're able to see so much more than just the watch time. Of course, this is going to be an automated process. So whatever you select here, let's say it is watch time, it's going to automatically select the winner. But of course, we're always going to be able to go back and look at all of the data associated with each one of our tests because we could have watch time be slightly lower on one variation compared to another, but literally every other metric here is blowing it out of the water. So that allows us to then make a bit more of an educated decision as to which variation we are going to have as the winner to that. Now the next thing that we have here is autoset placeholder variation. So this one is essentially just choosing a specific variation that we want to have when this test begins. So instead of it just selecting whichever one, we get to set which variation we have as the beginning of this test. And then, lastly, we also have this delay after publish, and I always have this one set to zero digs. So now that we are all done with this, we can now click Run Test. So now we have the test running, and as you can see, we have all of the combinations here, all six of them, and we get to see all the metrics associated with all of them. So if you ever see that any one of these is outperforming, all the others, and let's say there's five, six days left in your test, then you could automatically select that one as a winner. If you also see that all of them are kind of close, but you see one or two that are really underperforming compared to the others, then you can come up here, click the three dots, and you could remove any variation. So just like that, the variation is permanently removed. So, just as I said before, if one of them is outperforming all the others, then you can come here and also set this option as live and end the test. So I set it, and now we see the test is canceled and the variation is now live. So there you have it. This was an overview of thumbnail test.com and how we can use it to test both our thumbnails and our titles with much more data than we could ever get in YouTube Studio. 19. Use Canva Templates For Efficiency: Okay. Now, this lesson is going to be dedicated solely to the templates within Canva. If we look here, I'm going to go ahead and back out to our homepage in Canva. So again, we're just going to click the YouTube thumbnail right here, and then immediately when we're brought in here, Canva opens up these templates for us. Now, this is one of the main benefits that we get when using Canva as our thumbnail design kind of software. Because if we look here, we have so many that we can choose of course, there are going to be some which are going to be better than others, but it's all going to depend on the style that you're kind of shooting for and the way that you can kind of see your own thumbnail vision come alive in any of these given templates. So, for example, we have this one right here. This one could be a good start for, like, a reviews type style thumbnail. So using this template, it would be super easy to kind of just get rid of this and add in the one star review and then put in the text right here. And, of course, you could go ahead and replace yourself right here. One thing that's kind of nice and kind of funny about this one is that the woman and the hand are actually two separate images right here. So if you're a woman, then you could just get rid of this. You could put in your face right here, and you could even just keep this hand. And, of course, this can also be used for different styles as well. Like, say, you're going to put in a text message. So this can be an angry text message from whatever, if that's going to be the style that you're going for. Now, if we come back here, we can see that there are so many others to choose from. Now there are some that I definitely would probably avoid. And this is just going to come from what you've learned throughout this course and what you will continue to learn as we move on and just, you know, the principles that you know of. So, for example, we have some very kind of basic ones that you probably shouldn't choose. I'd say the most notorious of which being this one right here, I'd probably just stay away from this one in general. But if we look at this one right here, this one is a pretty decent one that we have. And if we go ahead and right click right here, we go to our layers. We can show the layers. We see that there are many different aspects to this. So right here, we can get rid of this. We can get rid of this. Maybe you want to go ahead and change these icons right here, so we could get rid of these as well. Right here, and just changing the text and replacing the subject, so putting yourself in, you could have a decent kind of starting point depending on what your vision. Not only that, but going through these templates, they can give you kind of inspiration as to how you can use the different aspects in Canva to your kind of toolbox of kits and toolboxes of kind of editing and design knowledge that you can apply everywhere. Like, for example, if you didn't know that you could do this kind of effect, which is kind of like a spotlight, now you know that this is a possibility. So you could go ahead and copy these and bring them into other designs of yours. Another really nice part about Canva is that, depending on the templates that you choose, you also get to see kind of recommended ones pop up right here. For example, here is another, I think, great kind of baseline for a thumbnail that you could create. We see here that this is following our principles quite well. There is quite a bit of contrast. We see that he is standing out from the rest of his thumbnail. We're seeing colors in the background. He's also quite zoomed in here. So we see his face very clearly, especially if we back and see what's going on. Maybe you'd want to enlarge some aspects of this, and of course, probably get rid of this little app right here. This is a pretty decent kind of starting point for a thumbnail, and given the fact that we're able to edit this and move different aspects of this around, it's pretty great. So really, solely for this functionality, I do recommend getting Canva Pro because it affords you so many different options for these thumbnails that you could explore. So with this honestly, endless inspiration and the knowledge and the tools that you've learned throughout this course, this is a great investment. So with this endless inspiration, coupled with the knowledge that you've garnered throughout this course, the investment in Canva Pro and being able to access all these templates can really be valuable one. And now, unfortunately, this is not sponsored by. Another thing that I want to show you along with this is if we come over here into brand, we get to have a certain brand guidelines that we can then apply directly into these templates. So, for example, if I have a certain color palette with my brand, then what I can do is come in here and edit it. So let's go ahead and get rid of these. And let's add in a nice little purple right here. I can save changes right here. Let's edit in, and I can add, let's say, a nice gold color right here. Have these two colors. I can now click Save Save changes. And now if I click this, we get to see how the brand colors were assigned immediately to these. So this changed here, the text block and the text itself also change in color with this little underline. Now with this thumbnail specifically, it probably wouldn't work where you'd put your brand colors here into this because we'd want this to kind of look like it's a normal social media post, so a white background with gray to black text. You can always test this out on the different thumbnail templates that you're going to go ahead and choose. If it doesn't work, you go ahead and click this and you don't like it, then you could always just come here and undo. Another thing to note here is that as you apply, you can always click again to then reshuffle and kind of invert the colors that are going to be applied. So if you have multiple colors here, each time you click, it'll go ahead and cycle through how the colors are applied to the thumbnail. All right. Well, that is it for this lesson. I'll see you in the next one. 20. Create Your Own Thumbnail Builder: This lesson, we are going to be going over Figma for our thumbnail creation. Now, Figma is a unique platform because it allows us to do a lot of things. But the one thing that I think Figma does the best is going to be in our asset consolidation. Now, what do I mean by this? Well, if we come here into a Figma board, what we're able to do is we can come here to our frame tool and we're able to draw frame, and we can change the dimensions to be that of a YouTube thumbnail. Now just putting in these values 12 80 by 720, we now have our thumbnail frame right here created in this Figma board. So here, we're given a lot of freedom to be able to design our thumbnail right here, similar to the tools that we can see in Canva. Now, I spoke on asset consolidation. What do I mean by this? First off, what we're able to do in Figma is create libraries, and we can create libraries of all of our assets. So what does this mean? Who is this well, if you're working with maybe a team and you have quite a few people that are going to be working on some nails, then it might be helpful to have some kind of brand guideline to go off of. Now, you can formulate this kind of guideline that has little templates to use in a couple ways. First, you can create a library. And looking in at these libraries, we're able to see a lot of assets that we could go ahead and use. These assets are specific to iPhone and so if you're ever going to be creating any kind of thumbnail that is going to be incorporating, let's say, an iPhone element, then using Figma is already a good start. And right here, we have toggles, we even have wallpapers. What I want to show you real quick is how one of the clients that I worked with actually used Figma to create this kind of brand guideline. So right here, this is a board that was titled YouTube Thumbnail Builder. And as we can see, they have background examples. So these are all backgrounds that anyone could pull if they're working on a thumbnail for the company. Go ahead and grab any one of these, select it, and it could come here into Export, and then they could export this background. If you move over, there's some more examples right here. There's even some assets of the company right here. We have arrows to use. We even have texts, and down here, we have more backgrounds. This one is a very specific use case. If this is something that is going to be useful for you and your brand, if you have a lot of things or guideline that you want to stick to or a lot of assets that you want to go ahead and consolidate in one place that is very accessible and kind of just easy to see. Right here, we get to see everything. This isn't a folder on Google Drive where you'll have to go through and kind of sift through all of the stuff where you're going to be having to find your specific thing. Not grouped together, very organized, sometimes, and you have to click on them and download. No, none of that Figma. In figma, we see everything as it is, and as it would look like if we pull it into our thumbnail. So let's go ahead, for example, and let me export this background right here. We have two options of using what we just downloaded. We can either pull all of those assets into, let's say, Canva or Photoshop to design it, or while we're already here in Figma, we could go ahead and edit it here. Because we're here, let me just go ahead and show you a little walk through of how we can use this. So I can go ahead and drag this in. Right here, it's fitting within my frame. And if we come down here, we are afforded a few different tools, a lot of them being similar to what we see in Canva. Now, for the most part, it might be easier if you want to kind of just get familiar with Canva to go ahead and just pull all of these assets into there and kind of just use IgMa as a library and kind of just an organization space for all of your assets. But still, now that we are here, we can come down, we have these shape tools. So if you want to build in circles right here, and if we hold shift, we're able to lock in the dimensions to make it fit well. And we can click on any of the elements that we create, and we can add in different effects to them. We can change the dimensions, change the opacity. We can change in the fill color as well. And along with these, what we also have are gradients right here. And making the gradients and figma, they're actually super easy. Honestly, I would say that probably out of all the softwares that we've discussed gradients Figma is the easiest and most straightforward to do. So if we want to do, let's say, a blue right here to a pink right here, we're able to do so. Now, also, if I move this background out of the way and we come back here to our frame, we're also able to do the same thing here in editing if we come over here into our layers under file, elect the frame, we could also change the appearance of this here. But I'm going to go ahead and go back now by heading Command Z to this background that we're using right here, and I can get rid of this, and I can put in text right here. And if we draw in a little text box, we can type in whatever text we want. So I can go ahead and put in example, and then I can up the font, let's say to 96, and then we can change the font right here. So let's go ahead and put in a Montserrat. I can make it extra Bold. Now we have this right here and we can do similar things. I can come here, change the color of it as I please, but we are also afforded the same effects that we can see in Canva and we can see in Photoshop. Like, for example, we have this drop shadow. So let me go ahead and get rid of this background right here. And now you can see this drop shadow taking effect. Able to change things like the blur, the spread. Let's go ahead and up this to ten. And changing the position here in the X and Y is essentially just changing the angle of our drop shadow. So, as you can see, it's pretty similar to how Canva is. We can drag things in. We can adjust the effects on things. We can change the colors. Now, if you want to use this as a library, then what you need to do is essentially use any one of these frames as places where you're just going to import in all of your assets. So instead of having this right here as a thumbnail, what we can do is put like a little title right here. Let's go ahead and draw it right here. And I can say, this is the background section. So I put in background right here, and then I can even get rid of this frame entirely. And then I can pull in this background right here. And now, if I zoom out, I can then add in more backgrounds. And then right here, this entire space acts as like a whiteboard. And we have these sections that are going to consolidate all the different assets in my business or whatever it may be for my even here, we're able to change things like the page color. So if you want yours to be fully red, you can do that. If you want it to be white, it's just as easy. So there you have it. You can use Figma either as a library or two as a thumbnail editor or three, it can really be both for you. One more thing that I want to show you in this is that if we create this frame again, let's go ahead and make this the same dimension as a thumbnail. So we have our frame right here, which is a thumbnail size. If we were to, let's say, pull in this background within our frame and add in text right here, example, then one thing that we have to keep in mind is that the way we export individual elements is going to be slightly different than how Rk want to export. Let's say this entire frame as a thumbnail. If this background was just kind of sitting here as it was before, then I could click it, and then I could come down to export. I could click that plus, then I can export the background itself. Because this is a frame and it's going to have multiple layers to it, we have both the text and the background itself. The way we have to go about exporting this is a little different. What we have to do is come over here into layers. We created this frame to encapsulate everything, to encapsulate all of the elements of our thumbnail. Now, to export everything, we have to select the frame instead of just selecting the text or the background element. We select the whole frame, and then we come down to the export module, and then we can just export frame one, and then that is all good to go. This is Figma in a nutshell. Again, as I said, this can be a library. This can be your thumbnail editor, or it can be both. 21. Outsource Thumbnail Creation?: Assen, I want to talk about something that can be quite exciting. And that is not creating your own thumbnails. There's countless reasons which would lead you to wanting to outsource the thumbnail creation. For example, your opportunity cost is too large. So the time spent on thumbnail creation can be better spent on other tasks. Or you're having to create too many thumbnails. So you're uploading a lot of content and you can't really keep up. Or you're out of ideas. You sit there scratching your head forever every time you have to post a video. Or maybe it's just not your thing. Even when you do have ideas, it takes you forever to figure out how to make them come to life, even after watching the best thumbnail creation course around. Luckily, there are ways to not only outsource but systemize your thumbnail creation process so that you not only create them faster, but you preserve or even improve your quality. So the first thing that you need to know about is freelancing sites. There are two main sites where you can go to find freelancers, and those are fiber and upwork. There you'll find countless people who are pretty well equipped to create professional thumbnails. No, hold your horses. This doesn't necessarily mean that you have to pay them insane amount. There are, again, quite a few reasons why someone would be willing to charge less than you'd imagine to create thumbnails. Some of them are obviously the flip side of what we mentioned. So they're skillful and design comes super easy. Now, you'll also find plenty of freelancers who are just starting out, and they need their first gigs and reviews to start standing out amongst the crowd of other freelancers. With those people, naturally, it'll be much easier to find affordable prices. Also, keep in mind that these sites give you access to the entire world, which is mind blowing, if you think about it. This means that you can work with people from countries where the cost of living, salaries, et cetera, are super low, and it can be a win win for both of you. Now, there is a cat. I'm saying all of this because thumbnail designers and thumbnail agencies have a reputation of being quite expensive. That's because those people have not only the technical skills of bringing to life a specific concept, but also the theoretical ideas that we've discussed extensively throughout this course. This means you can pay for someone who can make you a thumbnail that is tailored for what works on YouTube. However, the beauty of your unique situation is that you now have the knowledge of what works on YouTube and you can outsource only the technical aspect, which again, can be quite affordable. Not only that, but now that you have the experience of creating some thumbnails, you'll even be able to give your designer specific ideas and feedback that mention technical aspects. Like, Hey Bartholomew, don't you think that we should add a dropshado there with, let's say, a 92 degree angle and about a 66% spread? So now I'm going to hop on Otwork and show you the process of finding a freelancer that is compatible with you, your brand, and your style. Then I'll talk you through some delegating and standardizing principles so you can systemize your thumbnail creation process. So we are now here on upward. So the first thing that we want to do is we want to post a job. So once we click that, we are then going to be brought to this page. And here, it's going to depend on the kind of project that you want to post or the kind of freelancer you want to hire. If you want to have them on for longer term, then you could select that. But for here, I'm going to select a short term project. Now I'm going to it we're brought onto the official first part of this, and that's going to be titling our job post. But one thing about upwork that kind of makes a little bit easier on us is that we can come down here and we can post this job using AI. So now we're brought to this page, and all we have to do is type in a description of what we need. So I'm going to go ahead and do that and get back to you. So I went ahead and just typed in this. I need someone to design thumbnails for my YouTube channel. Now, here, depending on your channel, you can be a little bit more specific as to what it is that you do, but we can go ahead and move forward with just this. Now we're on to choosing our budget. For a thumbnail specifically, I'd probably do a fixed price. Also, what we put here isn't necessarily going to be set in stone because you're probably going to be talking prices with all the people that are going to be applying to your job. There's two ways that we can approach this then. You can either put a higher budget than you'd actually be willing to pay just so you can have a lot of people apply to your position, and then you can negotiate down with them, or you could go ahead and be a little bit more transparent and put what you actually would be willing to pay. Now, that leads us with the question of how much should I expect to pay for a thumbnail? On the very lowest end, you could go all the way down to $5. But on the highest end, we could go $50 plus. I would say that you really should never be paying more than about $30 per thumbnail. And really, it can be lower than this. So it depends on who you're finding and how you can negotiate down and what price you can agree upon. Because if you have a longer term project, so you find this freelancer and you want him to create thumbnails for your next 100 or so videos, then obviously you can command a lower price there from him per thumbnail. So let's just say a middle of the ballpark, $30, we are going to set for this. Now we can click Continue. And now in just a second, Upwork with its AI has now created this entire listing for us. So first, we can look at this description right here. If we want to, we can change it with these little AI shortcuts. Now, the wording itself isn't something that is going to be that important, something that I would care as much about. But instead, what I care about is what we are going to be commanding from our freelancers. One thing that I like from this AI generated description is that it says, If you have experience in graphic design and a portfolio, showcasing your work, I would love to see it. So I like that I ask here for a portfolio, but one thing that I also like to include are examples. So what do I mean by this? Well, in upwork, we're going to have a lot of people that are going to be applying to our job and oftentimes, there are just going to be people that are going to be using HGBT to create their descriptions or their proposals to our job post. And what I like to do to kind of weed out all the people that are kind of just applying for as many jobs as they can is I like to ask something of them. So usually this is going to entail some kind of small version of the task that I'm hiring them. No, this one does good because it's asking for a portfolio, but I would like to take that a step further and ask them to create an example thumbnail. So let me go ahead and type something up, and we'll talk about it. Okay, so I've now added in this part right here. I said, To be considered for this job, please create a custom YouTube thumbnail based on the following instructions. The title of the video is This cold email got me a ten K client. Said the thumbnail should not include any faces or people. Use bold, easy to read text with a maximum of five words. Visually convey a sense of money, business success, and curiosity. Do not repeat the title exactly on the thumbnail, create a visual hook in step. Make sure the design uses strong contrast and vibrant colors to make it stand out. So here, this can essentially be you describing your brand and your style to these freelancers to see kind of from the get go, how well can they understand and kind of encapsulate that in the thumbnails they're creating. Now that this is All Good, what I'm going to do is click Save Changes. We see that it's added here. Now, sometimes depending on the job posts that you are posting and using the AI feature, it might mess up some of these. But here with this YouTube thumbnail, everything that we've done, it all looks good. And if anything is ever messed up on your end, you could always click these little edit icons to change whatever you need. So now, all that is left to do is to finalize our job post. And then from this point, all you have to do is post as standard for free. Even if you have the money, I wouldn't do a feature job post. The free ones always work just fine. Now we are on to the next and final part of this walk through, and that's going to be inviting freelancers. So you have a certain amount of invites that you can use. I would always recommend that you essentially use all of them. So you can scroll through, and you can remember the things we mentioned earlier in this lesson. If they don't have much experience on their account, if you see that they don't have much money earned or they don't have any reviews associated with their account, then those are the people that you can command a lower price from. Now, the people that are more established, you can maybe trust that they'll do the job a little bit better, but you might have to pay for that trust. So you always have to kind of balance these two things out. But again, you can talk to many freelancers, and I also recommend that you don't just go on with the first person that you find. Actually, do your homework here and talk to a bunch to see who is going to be the best fit for your brand. So now you have a pretty good sense of how to find a designer who is competent and aligned with what you're looking for. Awesome. Let's talk about a few concepts to make sure that you squeeze the potential out of your new collaborator. The first thing I want to cover is how to properly delegate. Alex Tremozi talks about the process of delegation or training as a three step formula. Document demonstrate and duplicate. I love this model, and I use it all the time. So let me walk you through it. The first step is to do. Here, what you'll do is actually go through the process from absolute zero to a finished thumbnail, and you'll make a checklist of every single thing that you did. So if you went to View Stats, include that. If you rewatched a lesson from this course, include that. Include everything that allowed you to create a thumbnail that you think matches your standards. Because in a way, what you're able to do in your position is upload all the information on how to create a thumbnail that works for you into your collaborator. So you want to include all the things that you did or that you would generally do in the checklist. Now, this is maybe a harder step. You also want to include assumptions and learnings that have become a part of you as you've created this document. So if you learn from testing thumbnails in your niche that thumbnails where you're not the subject, but something else is performs better, then include that in the document. Again, you're uploading all the information that they need to create a great thumbnail for your brand. And if there's a certain brand image that you want to preserve, add that. If there are certain colors or color combinations that you think work better, then add that. This is where testing a lot and watching the results closely is going to help. Give you an idea, something that I might want to include in the checklist like this is text works better when it's provocative and framed in the negative. For example, win at chess is not as good as you suck at chess. I might also add to come up with texts like these, you can just give ChatGBT the titles of the videos and say, come up with ten short provocative phrases framed in the negative, which I could use for thumbnails. Hopefully, you get the idea. You want to give your creator a checklist to go through each time so that they can't avoid creating a thumbnail, which has a high CTR. Okay, now the next step is demonstrate here, I love using loom. You can just go through the process of either creating your thumbnail or coming up with a concept and use Loom to send it to your collaborator, so they can see exactly what it is that you do. This is a pretty straightforward part of the process. You're basically just doing your own checklist and having them see you do it. Lastly, it's duplicate. Here, you'll ask them to actually go through the motions and come up with something. And don't be afraid if the first couple attempts or drafts are way off. It's a small process of adaptation. I've trained a lot of editors and designers, and depending on the project we are working on, it could take quite a bit of effort to become some of them were tremendously talented, but tweaking certain assumptions, beliefs, or patterns of behavior can be hard. But if you follow this system, then it should be pretty easy. Now, here is the beauty of the process. As you go through and create your super document, you'll have created a super document. This is a document that you'll be able to use in the future as you change or add designers, and it's a process that you can use for virtually anything that you have to outsource. Also a process that a lot of top tier creators and entrepreneurs use. You may have seen when Mr. Bass production guidelines were leaked. It was basically the sort of thing that I'm describing here. My friend, that's how you outsource your thumbnail creation and fly any process in your business or pipeline. Hope you enjoyed it. I'll see you soon.