Hey everyone, Jason here digital marketing consultant and certified Canva creator and
in this Canva 2.0 tutorial, you're going to learn how to quickly make awesome YouTube
thumbnails using Canva and just a screenshot or a standalone picture from your video.
So with that, let's go ahead and dive into my screen timestamp table of contents in the
description to skip around.
Now, of course the very first thing you need to do once you've logged into canvas is choose
the YouTube thumbnails canvas.
And you can do this by simply clicking on create design and then clicking on YouTube.
I already have it up to save us some time.
Now, the first thing you actually want to do is add a grid.
And what this is going to allow you to do is to easily format every single photo you
drop in and will automatically size to the canvas.
So what you're looking at right now is a blank design, but what happens when we dragged a
photo in, it doesn't always automatically resize.
So you see it drops in here and it doesn't really look like-- it then we're gonna have
to resize it whereas if we had a frame we could go ahead and click and drag and it would
automatically frame it up every single time.
Now, if you have a blank canvas, canvas sometimes does this automatically but it's not always
a guarantee.
So what we want to do is come over here to elements and then click on grids and just
click on the first one and now we have a grid also if you decide to do any filters, you
can actually apply the filters to this grid and then every image you drop in will automatically
have that filter applied.
So now, all we-- now that we have our grid the next step is of course getting an image.
So if you take in a standalone image for your thumbnail, you go ahead and upload it.
Here I'm gonna go through an example where I have a video that I want to take a screenshot
from.
So this is one of the previous vlogs, so I'm going to go ahead and use sketch you can use
whatever screenshot tool you like.
Windows has one that is built in and we'll go ahead and click and drag, close enough.
Go ahead and capture of course since I'm using a MacBook Air for this.
The dimensions aren't going to be perfect, but that's okay.
And then we can go ahead and drag this over to Canva and upload it.
So we'll go ahead and give it a second upload and now that it's uploaded all we have to
do is click and drag and it will automatically be resized.
Now, as you can see I was a little sloppy when I did my screen capture, so we'll just
click and make it a little bigger so that the extra stuff is not in there and we don't
have that little black bar at the top, so I’ll just bring it air and that's close
enough.
It's gonna be tiny on a mobile screen anyway.
And now, what we can do is go ahead and add our text.
So we have a couple options for adding text.
To save us some time I'm just going to scroll down here so you can see some previous examples.
So one of the basic; most basic things you can do is just add white text and then you
duplicate that white text and put it a little off-center, so that it looks like it has a
shadow, and it's very easy to read pretty much with any color background.
The next thing you can do is create a couple of boxes to frame the text.
So it's very easy to read, or you could just be really simple and do something like this.
So we'll go ahead and go through all three of these examples right now with this new
one.
So scrolling up here, first thing we're gonna want to do is come over here to text and choose
add heading.
We want the text to be super bold, and I'm just gonna go ahead and bold it.
I like to use the default font that they have.
I'm gonna go ahead and give it a headline, change the text color to white even though
it's gonna be very hard to read right now and then bring up the font size super big.
And because I’ve chosen such a silly long headline, I'm gonna go ahead and bring the
text down here and then bump it up a little bit more to see just how big I can get it
without it looking too obnoxious.
And I think that's about good.
So now all we have to do to make this significantly easier to read, is go ahead and copy it and
change the text color to black.
We'll click on position here and send it backward, so it's behind the text.
And now you can see it would be easier to read, but now we get to play with getting
it just about right.
So you want to center the two of them first, so you actually can't see the new one you
just made and then you can go to the left a little bit, you go to the right a little
bit, you go up a little bit, so you get the nice little pop there.
And then we'll click and select both of them and bring them into the bottom center.
And then that way it's a lot easier to read.
Now obviously, we probably want to do a little bit more with this, because the image in the
background is so dark.
Now, quick way we could fix that is we can come up here to filter and we can actually
start playing with these filter to try to make it a little lighter or darker depending
upon what you are looking for.
You can see here just clicking through it's very, very easy to change up the entire look
and feel of the thumbnail.
Of course you do want to make sure that whatever you do choose, that you come down here to
the zoom and you go ahead and put it down to 25%, so you get a good understanding of
what it's going to look like on a mobile device.
And even going down to 10%, if you're thinking about what is it gonna look like as a suggested
video on a mobile device.
Now, there are a lot more things we can do with this one, but I think that gives you
enough to play with and some ideas.
So we'll go ahead and zoom this back up here.
I'm gonna duplicate it and this time we're going to add some elements in the background
so we square it off.
So we'll have our two lines of text again, but this time we want to separate our elements.
So we want the top and the bottom to be in a separate text box, so I’ll go ahead and
delete the top from this one and then I’ll delete the bottom from this one.
And yes, it's very hard to see, but we'll fix that in a second.
We'll come over here to elements and click on the square and we'll use it as a background
to help make the thumbnail text significantly easier to read.
So I'm just going to be real plain and do black and white, you saw from the examples
earlier you can play with the colors.
And then we're going to go ahead and have the position go backwards, and that way we
can click and drag the text on top of it.
And something to note just in terms of saving time is actually putting the text box a little
bigger and then putting it in the corner, that way it's easier to click on the text
box and drag it to the size that you need.
And then you can go ahead and resize it down to however you want.
So I'm gonna click, now that it's about the same size.
Center it a little bit and that's good enough.
Let's go ahead and select both of these and rotate them a little bit.
Close enough, so let's go ahead and duplicate this we'll make this one black as well.
Of course, we could change it up with blue or something but let's go ahead and be nice
and fast.
We'll bring this down and we'll say that the content machine is gonna go right here.
So position will bring the text forward.
So it's in front the black box and then we'll go ahead and make the black box the full width.
So you can see here, I'm trying to select the black box and I can't; so I'm gonna have
to drag it down a little bit just make the black box so much bigger and then that way
I can bring content machine to the bottom left corner there, bring it all the way in
until the text box is the exact size of the text.
Now, because I made this one bigger I can click and drag and then go ahead and bring
that down.
And after a lot of clicking, we have it centered.
Now obviously, it's very easy to read the headline, but it's-- it doesn't work too well
with the placement of the actual image in the background.
So we'll just be playing again and bring the headlines down here, so it's easier to read
in the context of what the thumbnail image is.
So we can bring it down here, bring it centered and then go ahead and click and drag and that
way we have a little bit of an overlap, but it's very easy to read and of course if we
zoom down to see what it would look like on mobile, you can see behind the scenes content
machine that's significantly easier to read than this one of course.
Now the only other thing that I would recommend playing with when creating your thumbnails
is, trying out some of their icons.
So what you can do is come up here and search for some icons, so let's say this is about
YouTube or video, so let's go ahead and search YouTube and see if they have any icons for
us.
They have a couple of free ones.
So we could go ahead and click, take this icon and we could try and be clever and move
it in between to replace one of the letters here or we could just take it and put it in
the top corner.
And rotate it a little bit.
And that's all there is to it to creating your thumbnails quick and easy using Canva.
So just dropping in the image, using that frame and adding some text and you are good
to go with your thumbnail.
So here we go through the other examples we had before.
And of course, you can create thumbnails without your face at all if you just want to do the
exact same thing with a background image you can do something that looks like this, following
exactly what we did.
So thank you so much for watching.
I hope you got some value out of this video.
And more importantly, some ideas on how to create your own thumbnails using Canva 2.0.
Comment below if you have any questions and hit that like button and subscribe for more
design tutorials just like this one.
Over on my channel, I'm documenting the entire process of what it takes to be successful,
building and marketing an online business and of course making great thumbnails for
your YouTube videos, it's just one small piece of the bigger picture.
So until the next one, keep building the business you love.