Ross Zeiger shows how to make YouTube thumbnails in Descript using AI instead of Canva. Pick a style preset, add up to 5 words of text, and generate four variations. If the AI messes up your face, import a reference thumbnail from your channel and regenerate.
Almost as important as your video itself is the title and the thumbnail that you give your video, because if you don't get the click, then all the effort you put into your video doesn't even matter. In this video, I'm going to show you how you can make your thumbnail entirely in Descript, so you no longer have to leave and go to a third-party tool like Canva to make your thumbnails. Whatever thumbnail you saw on this video is the thumbnail that I'm about to create with you live right now. So to do it, come up to the AI tools button on the right side, and this whole menu pops up. And if we scroll down to the publish section, there is a thing that says generate YouTube thumbnail. Click on that. And the first option it presents us with is thumbnail title. So this is gonna be the words that appear on the thumbnail. Now, best practices here are to have maximum of 5 words, ideally 3 or less, if any words at all. But I'm going to just put in "Make music in Descript." So this is the text that's going to appear on the actual thumbnail I'm about to make. Below that is the thumbnail style, and we have a dropdown. So go ahead and click on that. And you have 6 presets here. So Bold and Pop, Clean and Minimal, et cetera. And you can see a little preview of the general style. So the Talking Head one is pretty plain. It's got, in the example here, a black background with white and yellow text. This one uses an image in the background. So choose the style that feels appropriate to your channel and your video. I'm also gonna show you how you can do a custom style, but for now I'm gonna go with the talking head. This is my preferred style and what I've done on most of this channel. So I'm gonna click on that and now it's set. Below that is content, so you can describe any details you want. And notice there's a white, uh, thing down here that is actually a frame from my video. It automatically puts in at least one frame from your video. As a reference so that it'll use that in the video or in the thumbnail. Um, I can click this little X to get rid of that if I want, and I can click on this little paperclip and I can say select frame, and I can scroll through the video and find a moment where I'm showing the workflow that I'm doing, for example. And I can say use frame, and it drops that particular frame into the reference here. This will make more sense when you see the finished result, but it's going to use that frame of my video in the thumbnail. And then I'm going to say, this is a Descript tutorial about how to make AI-generated video in Descript. And then I'm gonna hit generate and it's processing that. And there we go. It comes up with 4 variations. And just like that style that I picked, it uses white and yellow text. And then it put in, like I said, the exact music or the exact lyrics that I told it to, make music in Descript. Now I see right off the bat, it changed my face significantly. That doesn't look like me. That's the shirt I'm wearing in this video, but that face got completely changed. So I don't like that at all. And I'll show you how to fix that. Yeah, I can't use any of those. Those are too AI. So what I'm gonna do is find one of my old thumbnails and I'm gonna use that as an inspiration for the one that AI's gonna make for me. So what I'm gonna do is go to videos and I'm gonna just scroll through here and I'm gonna use this one right here as my inspiration for the thumbnail. So what I need to do is right-click on the video. Say copy link address. And then I'm going to go to a site called YouTubeThumbnailGrabber.com. This is a completely free website. There's tons like it. You don't need an account or anything to do this. And then you just paste in the link that you copied, say get thumbnail images, and there it is. And then you can click download HD thumbnail image, hit save. And now it's saved to my computer as a JPEG image. And I come back to Descript, click on this little paperclip, say add context. I'm gonna go to computer. There's the image I just saved. I'm gonna hit open. And now let's see what it does with this generation. And here we go. They're coming online. And let's take a look at this one. I like this. It's got Make Music in Descript. It didn't change my face. And it's got some music up at the top and the Descript logo. Let's take a look at the other ones. That's not bad. Notice it took out of the screenshot that was in the image I provided it. It cropped out the part that I wanted to highlight. So pretty incredible. AI did change a little bit. Like it put my, put a hand up there, but I like the simplicity. This one, it's got the gradient in the background, make music in Descript, AI generated music, and it's got the little highlight there and the Descript logo. And this one, honestly, all four are not bad. I would continue refining it if I had more time, but I'm going to pick three of these and run these as A/B tests on the channel. So one of these four options are what you're going to see on the video you're watching right now. And if you haven't seen this video yet, I show you how to use Descript's AI to make your own bespoke music inside of your Descript projects. So click on that on your YouTube window right now.
