- I'm gonna show you how to make
a free channel banner for YouTube
and even if you already have a channel banner,
I'm gonna show you some best practices
and some things that you need to keep an eye on
to make sure that it's an effective channel banner
and we're starting right now.
♪ That's just how it is ♪
♪ Ain't waiting' on me ♪
- What is going on?
My name is nick TuberTools.com, welcome to another video.
If this is your first time here
and you want to learn how to grow your YouTube channel,
make videos and all types of other YouTube related stuff,
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so you don't miss anything.
Okay so your channel banner on YouTube
represents you and your YouTube channel so because of that,
it is extremely important to make sure
that it is crystal clear what it is exactly
that you are offering on your YouTube channel
so that when people land on your channel page,
they can make the decision right out of the gate
on if the content that you're making is for them or not.
And again, the thing that I'm gonna be making this in
is 100% free so you can also make
your channel banner awesome using this.
So let's head over the computer
and I'll show you how to do it.
To make a really good looking channel banner
that's also effective,
I'm gonna show you how to make it
and then once I show you how to make it,
then I'm gonna show you exactly where you need to go
in order to use this awesome tool that I'm using
and it's 100% free.
So the first thing you're gonna do
is you're gonna go up to File
and then you're gonna go to Open and I'm gonna put a link
in the description to this template, it's just an image,
and you can open this and this is gonna give you guides,
and these guides basically make it so that you can make sure
that you are putting all of the important information
in a safe place.
So this area here in the middle,
this is what people see on a mobile,
when it goes a little bit wider,
this is what people see on a tablet,
and then the full thing is what people will see on a desktop
and then the entire image
is what people will see on an actual television
if they're watching on a TV.
So the very first thing that you wanna do
is you wanna go up to View
and then you wanna turn on the Rulers.
Now when you do that what's gonna happen
is you're gonna see these numbers pop up here,
just rulers on the top and the left
and what you wanna do now
is you wanna basically bring in your guides.
So you wanna just click on the ruler
and you wanna drag down and you wanna put these guides here
and the reason for this
is because this is going to be our safe area
that we're going to work in,
so we can delete this actual guide here
so that when you're putting it together,
you can work in a space that will help you
be a little bit more creative
without having to turn everything on and off all the time
in order to see what's going on in the background.
So once you have those guides together,
the next thing that you wanna do
'cause you know this is gonna be your safe area
is you wanna come down here to the bottom right
and you wanna click on New Layer.
What that's gonna do is this is gonna add another layer here
to where you can actually add a background,
so I'm gonna double-click on that
and then I'm going to title this Background
'cause this is gonna be our new background.
So the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to go over here
to the Gradient Tool and I'm actually gonna hover over it
and then you can see here
that if I go down to this option here,
I can turn that into a Paint Bucket Tool.
So when I do that, the next thing I'm gonna do
is I'm gonna come down to the colors
and then I'm gonna change this to something else.
Let's move it just kind of in this area here
and then I'm going to click OK to secure that color
and you know that color is secured
because you'll see it pop up down here
and then I'm just gonna click anywhere on the screen.
Now what you're gonna see here
is when I clicked on the screen, it turned it to gray
and that's because I have gray right here
but then I have that new color down here.
So if I wanna swap those around quickly,
I just click on these arrows right here to swap colors
and then I click again and then bam,
I've got the right color.
So if you end up making that mistake,
you can easily swap it right here.
Now the next thing that I'm going to do
is I'm going to import an image,
so I'm getting this image here off of Adobe Stock
and it's just a cupcake and in order to import that image,
basically what I need to do is I'm going to go to File
and then I'm gonna go to Open & Place,
and what that means is it's going to open it
and then place it in the document.
So I'm just gonna click on cupcake and I'm gonna hit Open
and then it's gonna bring my cupcake in here
and this is all gonna make sense here in just a little bit.
So once I have the cupcake in,
in order to change the size, I just grab the corner
and you can see if I start pulling it in
how it's distorting like that,
now if I don't want it to distort,
all I have to do is hold down the Shift key on my keyboard
and then it keeps everything in the right shape.
So then I'm gonna bring this up here
and again, I'm gonna make sure this is in my safe area
so I'm gonna bring it down into my safe area.
Once I get it how I want,
then I'm just gonna click on the Move Tool
up here on the top and then that transformation box
is gonna go away and then I can just grab this
and move it into whatever place that I want.
Now next I'm going to add text to all of this.
So I'm gonna come over here
and I'm gonna click on the Type Tool
and then here what I'm gonna do
is I'm actually going to change the color again,
I'm gonna swap that around
and then I'm gonna change this one
actually to a purplish color.
So here we're gonna go purple
and let's go to like a dark purple maybe,
something about like this, and then I'm gonna click OK.
And then here we are going to put the channel name,
so for the sake of this,
all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click, oops,
I'm going to click on the screen and then once that's there,
I'm just going to put Cake Cookers,
right, that's gonna be our channel name for this example
and then once I have that, what I'm gonna do
is I'm actually going to highlight this
and then I'm gonna go up to Size
and then I'm just going to make this bigger.
Now the cool thing about this is while this is selected,
I can also go over to this one
and this is gonna let me change the actual letters
and what the letters look like,
so as I start going through this,
let's see if I can find something nice and fun
that would represent Cake Cookers.
There we go, for this one I'm gonna use Fascinate,
okay and then I'm gonna click
on the Move Tool there again to unhighlight that.
Then I'm gonna bring this down to here.
Now I'm gonna add another line of text
and the reason and this is part of the best practices stuff,
the reason I'm gonna add another line of text
is because I want to explain to people what it is
that they're actually going to get from my channel.
So here I'm gonna click on the text again
and then I'm going to just click anywhere on the screen
and then I'm going to put
learn to cook delicious cakes, okay?
Now if you notice the channel name,
you know because of the lettering on here,
it's a little bit, I don't know if fancy is the right word,
but the text that's on here now for the channel name,
it's a little bit more logo-ish
but the text on the tagline here
is something that I definitely want to make
as easy to read as possible because this is the value
that they're actually getting from the channel.
So here I'm just gonna change this to Exo
and see what this looks like.
So in order to make this work,
I actually had to bring it down here a little bit
and then when I go up to do it then it's okay
because it was going and this is something
that I just noticed when it goes off screen,
then when it's off screen,
it becomes to where you can't select it as easily.
So I'm gonna come down here and you know,
I'm just gonna change it to this, just to make it easy
and then I'm going to take the size down, there we go,
and I'm gonna click on the Move Tool
to basically get that into place.
So as you can see here, this is a little bit bigger
than my actual logo itself
so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to,
again, click on the Text Tool
and then I'm gonna make this just a little bit smaller,
yeah, that'll do the trick there.
And then I click on the Move Tool to commit.
Now one thing that you might see here
when you are doing this is let's say that you have it
and it's off like this
and you're trying to get it centered
and you wanna make sure that you nail the centering,
what you can do is you can actually hold down your Shift key
and you click on the tagline
and then you click on your channel name,
and then you go up to the top here
and you're gonna see alignment options.
So I'm just gonna click here to center horizontally
and then right there it's going to basically
lock that into place for me.
Now another thing that I'm going to do here for these
and you're gonna understand why here in just a little bit
is I'm gonna come down here
and I'm actually gonna make a new folder,
and then I'm gonna make sure that the channel name
and the tagline are both in this folder.
And this will also make sense here in just a little bit.
I'm gonna change the name of this to text.
Okay, so now we have our basics,
this is our you know Cake Cookers
and then learn to cook delicious cakes.
So what I'm gonna do now is remember
how I selected the color down here?
So what I'm gonna do now
is I'm actually going to double-click on Cake Cookers
and then it's gonna bring up
these Layer Style options for me.
So the next thing that I'm gonna do now
is I'm gonna click on Color Overlay
and then bam you can see it changed it to red
but I'm gonna make this a more of a purple color
and I'm just gonna see how that actually looks.
So since this is something that I did recently,
it's already in here,
so I'm gonna click on that and that looks good
so I'm gonna click OK.
Now for learn to cook delicious cakes,
let me click out of this first
and then for learning to cook delicious cakes,
I'm gonna do the same exact thing.
When I double-click on this one,
because the text is filling up the entire space,
it's not really letting me do it,
so I can right click and then I can go to Blending Options
for that and then what I'm gonna do here
is I'm going to do Color Overlay again
and then I'm gonna click on that
and then one thing that's really cool here
is let's say that I want to just match the color
that's coming off of this cupcake,
or maybe the color that's coming off of that cherry there,
what I can do is I can just click on it, boom,
and then you can see it changed the color down there
to the color that I want
and then I just click on OK to commit.
And if I wanted to I can do the same exact thing
with the Cake Cookers if I didn't want that to be purple,
then I can always go in and change that as well.
If I wanted it to just match
what's happening in the cupcake,
then this gives me the ability to do that.
And to be honest, I kind of like the brown better
than I liked the purple so we're gonna roll with that.
Now the important part here about having this text
all grouped together is now that we have the text
in terms of how it's actually gonna be in there,
and I'm gonna show you some really cool stuff
to do with the text here in a minute also,
but what I'm gonna do to actually center all of that up
is I'm going to also take my cupcake
and I'm gonna move this into that folder as well.
So what I'm gonna do once I have cupcakes selected
is I'm gonna go up here to Transform Controls
and that's gonna turn that on
and that's gonna allow me to grab a corner of this,
and remember I'm gonna hold the Shift key
in order to keep the size right,
in order to bring this in to give me a decent size
and I'm happy with that there.
So we're gonna click on the Move Tool
and then I'm gonna turn off the Transform Controls,
and then I'm just gonna move this
into a relatively even position here.
Now the next thing I'm gonna do
is I'm going to take this entire thing
because it's all put in there together
and I'm gonna click on that top text folder
and I'm gonna hold down my Control key on my keyboard
and I'm gonna click on Background.
Now I'm gonna go back up to my Alignment options,
I'm gonna align it center
and then you can see it just aligned the whole thing center
and I'm going to align it vertically as well.
And that doesn't work because of that option
that I have right there at the stem,
so instead of aligning it vertically that way,
I'm just gonna hold down the Shift key
and then I'm just gonna scoot this up just a little bit
and I'm gonna have to eyeball it
or technically I could draw like little squares
to you know measure it all out or whatever,
or I could take this out the cupcake
and that's what I'll do,
select my text, select that background again,
align it vertically and then I'll move my cupcake back in
because the cupcake really only mattered
for the centered version,
and we'll scoot this up a tad just to accommodate.
Okay so now what we're gonna do
is we're gonna take this text
and we're gonna start doing some fun stuff with the text.
And you know what?
Looking at this, it looks like it's still off-center
a little bit so just for the sake of the visuals,
I'm actually just gonna tap this over a few spots,
may or may not be accurate, but when you're doing yours,
you're gonna need this to be accurate
but for the sake of the demo,
if it's a few pixels off, not a big deal.
So the next thing I'm gonna do
is I'm gonna go in here for Cake Cookers
and I'm gonna play with this a little bit.
So one of the really cool things about this
when you right-click on the text over here on the right
and then you click on Blending Options
is it gives you all of these other things you can do too.
So let's say I wanna add a drop shadow to it,
then I just click on Drop Shadow
and then when I click on the word Drop Shadow,
it's gonna bring me an entire menu for the drop shadow
so then I can kind of pull that back a little bit,
I can change the direction as well,
I'm gonna change this to 135.
So I'm gonna pull back the opacity a little bit,
I'm gonna turn the spread all the way down,
I'm gonna take the size all the way down,
and then I'm just gonna put
a little bit of a distance on it, just a tiny amount.
There we go, just so it has a little bit there,
just to add a little bit of style
to what's going on there with Cake Cookers,
and I'm gonna click OK there.
And then I'm gonna do the same exact thing
with the learn to cook delicious cakes,
but I'm gonna show you a trick.
So one thing that I can do here is I can right click
and then I can come down to Layer Style
and then I can click on Copy
and then I can actually paste that style
to learn to cook delicious cakes,
and then what's gonna happen
is it's gonna give me the same colors that's on Cake Cookers
so I'm gonna have to go in
and I'm gonna have to change them back again,
but it makes sure that I nail the actual style itself.
So I'm gonna click on the Blending Options again
and then I'm going to come back over here
to the Color Overlay, click on the color,
and then we're gonna click on that cherry again for this,
click OK, Drop Shadow,
and here I'm actually gonna change this
to that cherry as well
just so we're representing that same color,
but you can see because this is a thinner text,
it actually looks a little bit funny that way,
so I'm actually gonna bring this drop shadow into a five
and we are going to see what that looks like there,
it's a little bit better,
we're gonna take it to four,
and with this you can just type it into your keyboard
and it'll make the change.
Okay there we go.
And then I'm gonna click on OK.
Now there's a bunch of other things that you can do too,
so for example, if I go into Cake Cookers,
I go to Blending Options,
if I wanted to, I can also add strokes around it
so if I wanted to put you know a little bit of a pink
around it or something like that,
or if I wanted to sample this background color
just so the drop shadow helps it stand off,
then I can do that.
You can see here if I click OK on this,
if I bring the size of that stroke down, let's say to a two,
then you know, it gives just a little bit
of a different look there
just to make it a little bit more fun
and then in that situation,
I would add a little bit of drop shadow to it
just to separate it there a little bit more,
but you get the idea.
But all of these options here,
they do some really cool things, you can add inner shadows
so it looks like you're kind of seeing through it
a little bit just to add
just a little bit of extra texture to it,
just to kind of make it you know look a little bit cooler,
but keep in mind when you're doing this stuff,
it's really important to make sure that you don't overdo it
because if you don't have any design experience of any kind
with all of these options,
you almost get inspired to use everything
'cause there's so much cool stuff that you can do
but it's a really good idea to go simple
because you can never overdo things
when you are going simple
but it's really easy to overdo things
if you're not going simple.
So other things that you can do
and I'm just gonna show you just a few other features here
that are really cool that I think that you'll enjoy
in case you wanna do them,
I know a lot of people are adding things
to the background now behind text,
so one thing you can do if you're making thumbnails
with this as an example
is I can come down to a New Layer here
and then I can also come over to this area
and I can click on the Shape Tool
and if I hold that down, if I long press it,
then I can do a rectangle, I can do a circle, a line,
I can even go up to Custom Shapes which is cool.
So if I go up here,
then I have all these different icons that I can use
and things like that which is also really fun.
Unfortunately, for cooking cakes,
the only thing that it looks like on this list
is maybe the the knife and fork
that I would be able to use there
but everything else for the most part,
you know, is definitely some fun stuff
that you can use to make your graphics more fun.
You can add different stars to it
and things like that as well if you wanted to.
But what I'm gonna do here is I'm actually
going to just click on the Rectangle Tool
and then another fun thing that you could do if you wanted
is if you wanted to put like a little square around this,
so that you could you know help it stand out
or draw more attention to it, then you can do that as well.
So as you can see there, I added that shape
and we're gonna have to change the color on this, right?
Because we don't want it to be that specific color
and then here let's change this to a brown,
let's change this.
And then what we're gonna do now is I'm gonna click on OK
and then I'm gonna go back into the text
and I'm gonna do something fun here
on my learn to cook delicious cakes,
I'm gonna go back into the Blending Options
like we were doing before
and then when I go to the Color Overlay,
I'm just gonna select this background color and then bam.
And then I'm gonna click on OK and then OK here.
And then another thing that I'm gonna do is one,
it looks like I need to bump this line down here
just a little bit, there we go.
And then another thing I'm gonna do here in this situation
is I wanna add the same drop shadow to this block back here
so I'm gonna go in here and I'm gonna copy that
and I'm gonna rename this and then I'm gonna go here,
right click, Layer Style, Paste again
and then we're gonna do the thing before
where we just go in and we resample the colors
just to make sure that we get the styling down correctly.
So I'm gonna click on that
and we're gonna go up here and do this,
and then I'm gonna go to the actual color,
I'm gonna click on that and do that.
And then for this one,
I'm actually gonna turn that inner shadow off
because we want it to look nice and clean
and then I'm gonna click okay.
So what you do there
is once you have the banner actually made,
then what you can do is you can go up to File
and then you click on Export As
and then you just click on JPG.
Now here's an important tip,
this is really, really important.
So what you can do here is you have a quality setting,
over here on the right hand side, okay?
Now when you upload this to YouTube,
YouTube itself might add compression to this
which means it's gonna make the image
look a little bit worse than it should
and especially if you have it at 100%,
it's going to do that,
so I recommend that you actually take it down
to you know 75-85% and before you close this out,
make sure that there's no compression.
So when you first load it up into YouTube,
you might see a little bit of compression,
if you do, then refresh the page,
make sure that that compression is actually a constant thing
and then as long as everything comes through okay
then you're good to go, but if it doesn't,
then you wanna make sure that you come in,
make any adjustments to your export quality
and then save it again and try again.
The website for this is Photopea.com and that's P-E-A,
and you can use this to make thumbnails,
you can also use it to make channel art,
or any other art that you need for your YouTube channel.
Okay so now that you have your channel art in place,
it's important that you learn
how to effectively get views
coming into your channel on a regular basis.
So watch this video right here,
it's gonna tell you step-by-step exactly how to do that.
And to learn more about growing your channel,
making videos and all types of other YouTube related stuff,
start now by subscribing and clicking the bell
so you don't miss anything.
Thank you so much for watching, I'll see you next time.