- We're constantly talking about how small creators
need to make good thumbnails
to get video clicks in the first place.
What we don't do enough of though
is actually show you how to make the good thumbnail.
So that is what we are going to do today.
Now I'm no professional thumbnail designer,
but I have made a couple of decent thumbnails in the past.
But be that as it may, even I got to a point
where I needed to do one of two things.
Either A, I could take some courses
because my skills just weren't up to snuff,
or B, I could hire some help.
Well, since vidIQ is a whole company
with an actual budget, I chose B.
Meet John.
He's our thumbnail designer here at vidIQ,
and has graciously allowed me to pick his brain
so that we can get you more clicks on your videos.
So real quick, John,
tell everybody a little bit about you, your background,
and I'm gonna explain why your background
is relevant to this conversation in a minute, but go ahead.
- So, well, the better part of my twenties
I would say I was a touring musician,
and only recently did I start to get involved in YouTube.
I would say probably the past two to three years,
when doing YouTube you kind of have to learn these things
and that's kind of how I got started.
- So basically your background
wasn't always making thumbnails for YouTubers?
- No, not at all.
Actually, I, and I think it was about three years ago
I started an animation channel on YouTube,
and through that I knew that I had
to kind of better my skills as a YouTuber.
So I started looking into how to make better channels,
just how to get bigger in general.
And of course, you learn a really important lesson
and that's thumbnails are important.
So you gotta learn how to make good thumbnails,
what works, what doesn't.
So I really started honing in on that skill.
- Design skills aside then,
what did you find to be the most challenging aspect
of making a good thumbnail that people clicked on?
- Whew.
The most challenging thing,
and it's still challenging today,
is finding out what works.
Honestly, there's no real answer to that question.
The only way that you truly learn what works
is by testing it.
There are things that you can improve as far as your design,
your concepts, learning the psychology of it,
but you're not gonna know what works until you try it out.
- So to recap, John's background
hasn't always been making YouTube thumbnails.
And even with some prior skills
as a high-end graphic designer who can make animations
and do all kinds of amazing things,
there were still a lot of challenges
John had to face and overcome
to start making thumbnails that actually won the click.
And I can speak from my own experience
as having no graphic design skills
that if you understand the concepts of making good thumbnail
you can still get clicks, and we're gonna prove it to you.
Let's talk about actually physically
constructing a thumbnail.
And as I understand it,
you have set up an entire lesson for everybody.
So hopefully take away maybe some of the intimidation
of putting together a thumbnail.
- I did record my process on how to create a thumbnail,
but the thing is you don't really need fancy software
to make a a good engaging thumbnail.
You could do it in in paint if you wanted to.
I don't recommend it, but it can be done.
Understanding the basics and the psychology
that's the most important thing
because if your thumbnail generates curiosity
and makes the viewer ask a question
and want to know the answer
and want to click to get the answer,
then you've already won.
Personally, I use Adobe software
like Illustrator and Photoshop,
and as I go through this process I am using Adobe software,
but it really can be done on anything.
- All right, let's see the process.
- Today, I'm gonna take you
through my whole thumbnail design process.
So let's get sorted.
The first thing I do when starting a new thumbnail
is I ask myself, what would make me click?
Today's thumbnail is for a video titled,
"Channel Fails We See Again And Again."
And I've already got sort of an idea
of what would catch my interest,
so that brings us to the concept design process.
So the concept needs to be clear and concise.
It needs to get its own point across, allude to the video,
and be understandable within two seconds
what I'm thinking is we use a YouTube analytics graph
that we're all so used to seeing.
And we have the Shorts logo down here.
Let me just try to, try my best here. (chuckles)
Okay, so yeah, there's the Shorts logo.
It's instantly recognizable,
and it's another clue that this video is about YouTube.
Now, another use of psychology
is focusing on FOMO or fear of missing out.
And when I think to myself,
what would make me click this thumbnail?
I thought that I would click it
if it teased some information that I wasn't yet aware of.
So I thought maybe drawing a plummeting graph
right above the Shorts logo, like so.
Kind of gives an indication
that there was a problem with the short.
And then maybe the words most common mistake
with an arrow pointing at it.
Something like that.
And then as a viewer,
when I would see that I would ask myself,
"well, what's the mistake?"
"I hope I'm not making that mistake,"
and so I would click it.
Now let's talk about text for a second,
and then we'll take this bad boy over to Photoshop.
If you need text, it needs to stand on its own.
Meaning it needs to make sense by itself.
It should never repeat the title,
and the less words the better.
It can be a quote, it can be a date,
it can be a before and after.
As long as it's conveying information
instead of cluttering, you're good.
Personally, I like to keep it under four words
because texts can easily be a waste of real estate.
So choose your words carefully, pun intended.
(audience laughs)
So we have this, and I have to design some of these elements
in Illustrator and bring 'em over to Photoshop.
So let's go ahead and speed that up.
Okay, so we have our graph.
Now I need to add a little Shorts logo here.
Bam.
So I wanted the Shorts logo down here.
Now I need to get the arrow.
Now I need to make sure that these elements
don't get in the way of each other
because the more busy a thumbnail,
the harder it is to understand.
The composition of the thumbnail is really important
to keep clean and simple.
Okay, so I'm gonna move the arrow somewhere over here
and then I'm gonna want the text, most.
Ooh, that yellow looks kind of nice.
Yeah, let's, let's kind of go with the yellow
and see how that feels.
So I need to arrange the text
to where it's not in the way as well.
I like to keep the text kind of squared up with itself.
That's a personal preference.
That's just something I like to do.
Now, font choice is also pretty important.
You don't want your fonts to be too crazy, too fancy,
and you definitely want them to be legible.
Now color is really important,
but it's also really easy to mess up.
You want the colors to contrast, but not clash.
Let's pick a color that would clash with this red.
I won't know until I see it,
but let's just go ahead and pick through.
That's pretty bad.
You'll know when it starts to hurt your eyes.
Yeah, see that?
That's terrible.
And from far away, nobody would ever be able to read that.
So that's the kind of thing you wanna avoid.
Ugh.
Anyway, let's pick the colors for this thumbnail.
Now I want it to pop.
I want it to really stick out
and I don't feel like we have that yet.
I do like the yellow.
Let's go ahead and make this yellow as well.
On YouTube, the little icons at the bottom are also gray,
so let's go ahead and overlay that with a gray.
A gray, not yellow.
There.
And it needs to go under the graph,
the arrow needs to point right at it.
I'm thinking we make the graph red
because it's not a good graph.
It's a bad graph.
There we go, there's red.
That's red-ish.
That really pops, I like that.
The red, the yellow, looks good.
I'm not so sold on it being lined up
with the lines on the back.
Let's go ahead and give it a little twist.
Okay, I'm good with this.
So now the last thing we gotta do
is zoom all the way out to 10% and take a look.
And if it makes sense, then you did good.
So there you go.
There's my thumbnail creation process
to take you from this to this.
I typically like to spice things up a bit more
with the concept and color,
but this one it really called for the FOMO aspect.
So I hope this helped.
(triumphant song)
- Everything we've covered so far
is a really good place to start.
But if you're still struggling with other elements
of the video creation process,
you're gonna want to click this video right here
which will take you to a tool
that's gonna take a lot of that YouTube work
off of your plate.