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How to Make Thumbnails for YouTube Videos 2023 (Free & Easy Tutorial)
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May 9, 2024
Learn how to make eye-catching thumbnails for YouTube videos in 2023 with this free and easy tutorial. This video walks you through the process of designing captivating thumbnails that attract viewers and boost your click-through rate. Using free design tools, you'll discover how to choose the right images, add text overlays, and incorporate branding elements to create thumbnails that stand out. Ideal for beginners and experienced creators alike, this tutorial covers essential tips for optimizing your thumbnails, including size, color contrast, and content relevance. Get ready to improve your YouTube video's visibility with simple yet effective thumbnail design techniques.
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How to quickly and easily create a YouTube thumbnail that gets clicked on using Canva
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That's what I'm going to walk you through step-by-step in today's tutorial video. Before we hop into Canva to create the thumbnail, let's talk about the steps that happened before that
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The first thing you need to think about is your video idea. So coming up with an idea that'll be interesting to your audience
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Once you have the idea, you need to think about what the thumbnail is going to look like
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Many YouTubers will not create a video if they cannot think of an amazing thumbnail
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that's going to get clicked on. If no one clicks on your video and watches all the content that you put hours and hours
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into creating, it's not really worth creating that video. So then it's time to record the video and take a photo for the thumbnail
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So what I end up doing is getting set up to record a video. Like today, I'm talking about thumbnails
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I'm going to be on my computer. I'm going to finish the tutorial video
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Then I'll move the microphone out of the way. And then I'm going to make a bunch of faces, which I will then take a screenshot of to
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use for the thumbnail image, and then add all the design within Canva
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So now that we've finished recording the video and took a photo for the thumbnail, it's time to open up Canva and create our design
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There's two different Canva account types, Canva Pro, the paid version, and the free version of Canva
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We use Canva Pro. There's a couple of reasons for that. I'll show you later on the video. If you want to try Canva Pro for free for 45 days, you can use our affiliate link down
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below in the description. Also, I'll put a link to sign up for the free version
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By using our affiliate link, we may earn a commission, but at no extra cost to you
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Now let's hop on the computer and create a thumbnail. Whenever you want to design something in Canva, what I recommend doing is going to the search
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here and typing in whatever you want to create. So you put in YouTube thumbnail, and there we go
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So for most cases, we end up starting from scratch. Although they do have 14,000 templates, you could take one of the templates, edit it with
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your photo, your text, your colors, be good to go. Just be mindful that some of these are not the world's best designs
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For example, this text down here that's really small, no one's going to be able to read that
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as they're trying to watch a YouTube video or deciding which YouTube video to watch on
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their phone. So in general, we would have five words or less, and you can see some of these have tons
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of text. To create something from scratch, you can do that right here
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Create a blank YouTube thumbnail. Click there. And we have a blank white design with the correct dimensions
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What we end up doing is clicking here and changing the background color
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So what we're going to create a thumbnail for today is for our personal finance channel
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Greater Than Enough, about credit card mistakes. So what I would do is I did some research on what that video should look like
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So someone a little bit worried of making mistakes, you're going to say credit cards
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on it and show some credit cards and something else related to mistakes
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So let me just show you how I visualize that in a thumbnail
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So the very first thing we need is a photo of me. So that would be in uploads
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You can upload a file. Okay, so an image like this could work. It's me kind of being judgmental of me like, really, I hope you don't make these mistakes
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So the very next thing we're going to do is get rid of the background
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So this is a feature only available for Canva Pro. Another option here is to use the frame
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So here's what the frame looks like. In the tutorial video I'll link to up above, you can learn more about how to use circle
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frames like that. But to remove the background with Canva Pro, BG Remover, wait a couple seconds and it'll
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be gone. Also, we have a video on removing the background that you can use things like remove.bg
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The image quality isn't going to be as well, although it is free
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Then we're going to make the image larger. Move me to the side like that
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So something like this. Then what's next? So what we'll do, click on me, edit image
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What we usually do is create this glow around the person in the thumbnail
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If we click on it again, you can make adjustments. So you can see it better
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Let's make it white. And so the blur is the thing that I don't like that's right there
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Also it's transparent, so it looks gray. So something like that and make it thicker like so
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So something like that. The other thing that you could do if you're not happy with the particular image is if
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you go to edit image right here, edit image. And then if you click on adjust right here, you can also go through and adjust all of
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this with the image. So if we want to make it brighter, more contrast, more saturation, something like that
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So the next thing that we want to go and add is text. So if you just hit T, you will get a text box and you can start typing
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So credit card. Also what we want to think about was, as I was mentioning before, very little text, really
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easy to read, large. People are going to be viewing this on their cell phone
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What we want to do now is use our font. So we usually use Open Sans Extra Bold
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And to change the size. So what I think for this, this should be on two separate lines like this and probably
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about as big as possible. Something like that. What I end up doing some of the times is not trying to have this be the exact same size
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font but take up the same width. So I may just highlight mistakes right now and make that larger until it is basically
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as wide as credit cards like so. So something like that. So whatever you have highlighted at the time, the options to change it, you'll find along
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the top. What I think is bothering me right now is the line spacing
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So there's too much space between credit cards and mistakes. So I'm going to decrease that to something like that
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That I think looks better. And then what else do we need to make this just very clear that it is about credit cards
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and mistakes? So the first thing we need to go and add some credit cards
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So Chase Sapphire Preferred. There. OK. So that I think is four different credit cards
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How I think I would design this, I mean, you could come up with whatever you think would
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look the best, is I'm just going to arrange them in a kind of two by two
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And then I think with the mistakes video, a lot of times there's some type of extra
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So one thing that's interesting here when you're trying to size stuff up so it's the
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same size. So if I line this up along the left hand side, for example, I grab the corner
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You can see right now it's going to align with the right side of the city card below it
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So we know the left is the same and the right is the same. And so now this card and this card should be the same size
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The same thing here. These ones have the same height, so they should line up
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So we have three of them. And if we put that there, grab it by the corner, it's kind of covering my hand up here
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So how would I want to think about this? I could move me over a little bit more like that as an idea
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One thing you can do here. So if you highlight a handful of things at once
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So what we could do with this, if I go to group now, this is going to be one image
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Essentially, you can ungroup it later. But if I do that, it could be something like this, I think would work
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And then so something that has to do with mistakes. So I'm thinking red, like a big red X
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So for that, what we do is go into elements. You can see I was playing around with this earlier
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But if there's something you're looking for, just type it in, just type X and enter
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And you can see we have quite a few different options. It's not this is all of them
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I was trying to scroll and see if there are other. So graphics, you can scroll along the side like this
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So maybe this would be one option worth checking out to test if you know if something like
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that makes sense that covers up the cards quite a bit. And the other thing you can see if you see the dotted line right now, it is aligned vertically
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with these cards. And if I move it now, it's also aligned horizontally and vertically, meaning the X is right in
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the center. So it could be something like that. Or if I wasn't quite sure if that was my favorite one yet, I could check out some of the other
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options and see what they look like. So here and then so again, anytime something is editable, it's going to change up here
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So what will happen is here, it's black right now. And so I can choose other document colors, default colors, or right here, I can basically
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choose anything. So let's do something like that. So we have that option
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Or another thing when you're creating thumbnails is zoom out a bit
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So look at it. For me, I think that looks better. Let's get rid of this one
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We can make it bigger again. We can either make the cards bigger, we could move me over
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This is trial and error, whatever you think it looks best. Sometimes it makes sense to show this to a couple friends
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So what I'm going to do here just as a last minute thing is let's just make this a touch bigger
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There is our thumbnail. If you're okay with this design, what you want to do when you're done is click on share
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download, download, wait just a second. And there is our YouTube thumbnail ready to upload to our YouTube video and publish
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If you're just getting started with Canva, we have a bunch of other tutorials. I know I went through this pretty quickly
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So check out all the other Canva tutorial videos right here alongside
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Also, if you want to grow your YouTube channel, we have a bunch of videos for YouTube beginners
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I'll link to that playlist below. Hope to see you in another video.
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