We're about to run through exactly how to make a YouTube banner template, for your YouTube channel, just like the ones showing on screen now. In just a few minutes with free software and then how to make it look good across all devices. In this YouTube Channel Art Article. Hi, it's M U Sunny here from Shebagor360 where we help you amplify your business and brand with articles. If you're new here,
Custom channel art for your
YouTube channel is an incredibly important piece of branding. One of the first
things that potential subscribers see and it's a powerful way to instantly
capture their attention as well as communicate exactly why your viewers should
subscribe. So right now we're going to step through exactly how to create your
own free software and also throw in a few tips along the way to make sure
that it looks great on all devices. Make sure you stick around to the end,
'cause I'll also show you what you need to know to work in a call to action
that'll attract new email
subscribers that's baked
into your channel banner. Now just before we jump into the actual creating bit,
you can use a range of software, both free or paid but in this tutorial, we're
gonna be using Snappa, because it's simple, it's free and these same principles
we're gonna cover, you can apply to pretty much any software out there. Now,
just before we get into it, there is a link in the description box below,
taking you to this page from YouTube which is talking about the sizing and
the requirements and everything for your channel art. And if you scroll down
here you can see that there is a downloadable channel art template that you can
use as a guide to help you create your template. Now, this is gonna be really
important if you're not using the tool that we're using in this walk-through,
Snappa. Snappa actually has this built-in.
So if using Snappa you won't
need to download it, but if you're using any other application, it's a good
idea to download this and use it as a guide while you're creating your channel
art. Okay, so here we are in Snapper. Now, you can start up by creating your
graphic and typing in the size, 2560 by 1440. Or you can actually come down the
bottom here and they've already got one set up as a preset. 2560 by 1440, so
we'll select on that one. Now in here, there is a heap of different presets that
you can use and templates and things that are gonna get you up to speed quickly
and if you like the look of one of these and you wanna customize up one of
these then definitely by all means. You don't need to start from scratch
and you can see that if you
pick one of these it's going to be really simple to customize up and get it set
up for you. So you just double-click on here and you can see that everything is
customizable. Now, we're gonna close out of here, 'cause we're not gonna use
one of these prebuilt ones for this walk-through. To create a graphic. Go back
down to our YouTube channel art and we're going to start from scratch. Now, you
can see already because we chose YouTube Channel Art, we've already got that
template showing here and we can toggle that on and off with the little
button up here for YouTube safe zone overlay. So this is the whole image that
we are working with that we're creating, but you can turn on or off this
overlay to help you see what's gonna be shown on each device. So you can see
all this area at the top and down the bottom is only gonna be displayed on TVs.
This white area is gonna be
displayed on every device. This next area out here to the side a little bit on
either side is the tablet safe area. So they're the things that are gonna show
on a tablet right through to this very edge here. Which is the maximum desktop
safe area. So a desktop browser that is stretched out or maximized to its
maximum width is where that would display too. So the most important part
that we're gonna be focusing on is getting all the important content and text
and everything inside this white box because it's gonna be displayed on all
devices. Now, I'll turn this off and if you're not using Snappa, the first step
to do would be to import that YouTube graphic template. So in this case we go
to graphics,
and we will go to upload, upload an image. And
we would select that template that we downloaded. Once it's uploaded we can
click on that to add it in, you scale it up to the right size. Now you can see
that we've got those exact same areas there. Now it would be a good idea to
lower the transparency or the opacity on this so that it's not actually getting
in the way of your creation but you can just see it as a guide there in the
background and then before you save out your image, you'll wanna delete or turn
this off. So it's not visible and not gonna show in your channel art. Alright,
so because we've already got it built-in I'm gonna delete this layer,
I'm gonna select it, press
delete and then we'll get into creating our channel art. So let's go over to the background. We'll pull in a background image or a pattern or something first to
add some color to it, a bit of texture. So you see there's a heap of photos
that you can use in here. There are patterns and those sorts of things as well or
you can upload your own. I'm gonna go with a pattern, and I choose this wooden
effect that you can scale up and reposition if you need to by selecting
reposition background. You can move it around. I think it looks pretty good
there for what we're going to use it for. I hit apply. Now, I'm wanna come over
to effects. Make sure we got this selected. And we're gonna add an overlay
color. Now, our branding is primarily blue so we want our branding here to look
pretty blue. Something around that.
Obviously, we can come in
here and change the color. We can pick out Primal Video blue. And then adjust
the opacity or the level of the color that we're overlaying here. Probably want
it as a point where it's not distracting, but just something as a bit of texture
in the background. Now you can also add a little bit of blur to that as well
just to soften it off a little bit. Next up you'll probably want to add some
text. Now, this is where I would turn that overlay back on so that we can see
it. And again all your text you wanna have in that blue area, that center area
and we're gonna add in some text. So for us, our font is Oswald,
bold. Let's type in PRIMAL
and if we select on that we can come up the top to duplicate layer and that
will give us a second copy of it. And we can type in the video in this one. And
I'll probably make both of these a little bit bigger. So let's go on 85, 85.
Move it off to the side here. And we'll make these look like our Primal Video
logo. So I'll change the color to white for both of these. And I'll also add in
box around the background of each of them. So do that,
we'll go-to shapes. We'll
choose a filled-in shape. Let's make this one here black. We'll resize it down
till it fits behind it. We'll move that layer back behind the text, so you can
see how the text is on top of it. And I'll reposition the text so that it fits
in there. And adjust the size of the box so that it fits where we want it. And
we'll do the same, we'll select that box and we will come at the top to
duplicate, so we've got two of them, let's put the video back. And let's make this
one here our Primal Video blue. Let's go to popular. There it is, saved down
the bottom. Pick up our background. Again we're gonna drop it down below
the text, so we'll keep pressing this.
There we go, till it's behind
our text. Change the scale, change the sizing so that it all fits and
reposition. That's pretty hard to see there at that point. So we'll probably
darken this background a little bit more. So I'll select on the background, come
up here to effects and we can probably darken this down, cool. So you still
have a see a little bit of that texture in there and if we turn off this layer
and that's currently what we're working with. Doesn't look like much so far.
Alright, so we got our logo in there, so people know where they are but they
need to know what they're actually going to see on this channel, so it's a good
idea to write some text about your channel,
and what people can expect
on there. So we'll come back over here to text. Actually, we're gonna duplicate
this text, select our text box here, hit copy or duplicate layer. So we already
got our fonts and everything in there. So we'll start with that. Amplify. And
then use a separate box, duplicate that one. And you can also use your keyboard
shortcuts to copy and paste. So control C or command C to copy. Control V,
command V to paste. You duplicated your layer that way too.
Your business and brand with
video. So that's our tagline. So we create a lot of videos around. And we can
resize some of these to make it stand out. Something like that to move that up
over to the side. Amplify your business and brand with video. I can create to
make some of this standout. We can add some more of our branding. Which our
branding is typically like you'll see here. This is our logo with plain text
with a background color in a box behind it. So create another shape, box, drop
it in and select it to change the color, we'll go to our blue again.
And let's move it over here
behind amplify. We will push it down behind our text. And resize it up so that
it fits. And we use the keyboard arrows to move that around. Amplify your
business brand with video. Actually might move these across here. So it's just
a matter of picking these elements up, moving them around to see what works for
you and for your brand or the branding that you're looking for. Maybe I'll
center these. Alright so someone that's viewing this on their mobile phone this
is what they're going to see, this little section here. They can see our channel
name and a bit of a tagline around what we've got. If they're viewing this on a
tablet or other device, they're going to see a lot more. If we turn that off,
this is what it would look
like if they were looking at this on a TV. So there's a heap of extra area in
here that you can get more advanced with and do more creative things with. And
specifically in this area here on the desktop. You can actually add a more advanced
call to action. Now, I'm gonna cover that a little bit later in the video but you
can have clickable buttons that are displayed on your YouTube channel around
here that are only visible or only work on your desktop. So by knowing where
these safe margins are you can make sure that you're only including those
clickable buttons or references to those buttons in those areas. Again, I'll
show you this in just a minute. That looks pretty good,
but it's still probably a little bit plain. So
we could actually add something else in here. Another shape. Let's go another
square, drop that in. Make it really big and let's put it about here and we
drag it down, and we get this rotation too, let's drag that around so we're
able to create an angled line and make it bigger so that it fills our entire
area. So this is what we've currently got now. We're going to move this behind
all our text. So it goes right to the back. So now we're able to do something a
little bit different that stands out a bit more. So we change the color on
this. Dark gray is another one of our colors. Let's go custom and go across to
gray to make it a little bit darker. Something like that and we can also drop the
opacity on that as well, so we're able to see some of that background come
through a little bit in there as well.
Okay, so if we were looking
at this on TV, you would see this entire area. And on the different devices, you
can see that you're now cropping in on that. So super simple, just using a
couple of different elements to pull this out and to make it look more engaging
for the viewers and all of this is just super simple. Obviously, if you wanna
add in other photos and those kinds of things you can come up here to graphics
and you can import them and maybe even photos of you depending on the type of
channel that you've created. It might be a good idea to get your face on here
somehow or show pictures or images of things that you cover on your channel.
But for this tutorial, we'll leave it here. And I'll turn off that safe zone.
And we're going to export this. And I'll show
you how to upload it to your channel. So go download. And here you can choose
either web optimized JPG or High-res PNG. I'd probably go High-res PNG to get
a better quality image. Go through, it'll generate it and let you download
it. And you want to save it somewhere on your computer. Let's go, YouTube
banner. Save it on the desktop. Now you want to go over to your YouTube
channel, I've just got a test account here. Once you log in, go over to
customize the channel and then at the top of the channel here, you can choose
channel art, add channel art. Select a photo from your computer,
find the one that we just made, YouTube
banner. And this gives you a preview of what this looks like on desktop, on TV, and on mobile. Now if you do wanna crop in, which you probably don't need to if
you followed this process, but you can also resize and reposition things in
here as well. So back out of that and hit select and then you can see we've got
our channel art added in there. Now if you're using YouTube to grow your
business then your channel art can be a great place to work in a call to action
to a lead magnet or even to an email subscribe button. On desktop mode and only
on desktop mode, YouTube lets you add in a custom link
with a title. Right under the channel art. So
if you get a little creative you can work in a simple call to action that'll
draw a lot more attention to that call to action, but the key to remember when
doing this is that the links only appear in desktop mode. So you want to make
sure that your call to action fits inside the range for desktop but outside the
range for mobile if possible. Now if you stuck around for that last part then
you already know the value of growing an email list for your business.