How To Create Custom YouTube Thumbnails In Canva

Do you want to get more views on your YouTube videos? One of the things that you can do is to create better thumbnails. Sheryl Plouffe here, Video Strategist. I work with solopreneurs and small businesses to help them build their brands and businesses with video. And full disclosure, my thumbnails have not always been great. I've actually really improved and upped my game in the thumbnail department, and that's exactly what I want to show you today. In fact, some of my thumbnails were downright cringy when I look at how much text I was cramming onto those little thumbnails. So I'm doing things differently now, and it's really helping me to get a much better result. I'm seeing over the last 90 days about a 17% improvement in the CTR or the click-through rate of my thumbnails. And it's because some of the changes, some of the changes that I've made that I'm going to share with you in this video right now. So be sure to like this video, subscribe to the channel and hit the notification bell as new videos come out every Thursday. So what you'll learn in this video is how to make better-looking thumbnails using my favorite graphic design tool, Canva. Let's head over to my computer and I'll show you how I do it. So here's how to start designing your custom YouTube thumbnail in Canva. When you get into Canva, and it doesn't matter whether you are on the free plan or the paid plan because you can design anything, of course. When you look in the search tab, you'll just click or type in YouTube thumbnail. It should come up actually. And there it is, YouTube thumbnail. And now of course you have a bunch of templates from which to work from, or you can start with a blank canvas, or you can also access your own designs. So there are a number of different ones that you can choose here. You can again go to your own designs. And pick something there. So let's say for all intents and purposes we're going to be using a really simple one like this. Far be it for me to go and do all the customization of the colors and the font. I mean, Canva is just an amazing tool to be able to come in here and manipulate this and customize it to whatever look and feel that you want based on typeface and colors. But really what I want to show you is how you would actually inject you in this equation. So this is a very generic photo of a guy, you know, typing, or what is he writing in a notebook here. What I like to do is cancel that out, delete this particular photo, and then what I like to do is I like to upload a picture of me. So let's just say, um, let's just say this one, for example. Okay, and this is a picture I took on my phone and I just AirDropped it to my own computer. So I'm just uploading it from my computer right into Canva. You hope— you can also take a picture like this and change and flip the orientation. So in this case, I would probably flip this because I want my fingers pointing at the words on this side. When it's flipped the other way, it doesn't make sense because what am I pointing at? I'm not pointing at the the text on the screen. So I would probably flip that, and then I would want this to be larger, maybe even a little larger still, so it looks like I'm pointing over here at the, at the typeface. And I want to get rid of this background imagery here. I actually did, and I'll link to it here in the cards, to a full video where I talk about this particular effect on how you can Remove the background in one click in your Canva graphics and images, not just thumbnails. So be sure to go and watch that full video as well. I'm just going to process that, and now if I want to, I could even— in the background of this image, let's see here, let me just move this over here. And now this background I could change to black, let's say, or gray, or what would be a good color here? Let's pick this sort of light gray actually. Okay, if I wanted to, you could leave it white if you, if you chose. So now I could just move this over and, and there you go. So now this is potentially could even be a template. What you do then is if you really like the look of this and you want to repurpose this over and over again, click on the Show More button, and if you go all the way down a little further here down to template, you can save this, publish it to a folder of your choice. I am on the Pro Plan, so I do have the team template function enabled, and if you have that, then that's great. You can choose a template and you can select the folder where to save it. If you're on the free plan, well then you can just save this as a design and then just copy that design over each week if you're doing a weekly video. I'll show you how to do that. So let's say you really like this design, you've manipulated this and you've created your custom thumbnail. And the other thing is too, what I like to do with regard to the words is something that I, uh, learned from Sunny Lenarduzzi is stick to no more than 4 words. And that's not something I did, as I showed you previously. I was putting the whole title in the thumbnail. It's just getting way too busy. You want this to be as clean as possible. And certainly here there are some— there's more customization that you can do. You know, if you really wanted this blue to be a little further over or even behind the image, you can see how now if I pull this over, because the position is backwards, It's going behind the imagery that I have masked. If this is, let's say, the position was forward and it's like that, all you have to do is click position and go backwards, and then you'll be able to take that color over and behind. That even looks better. And I would move this over and probably make this a little larger if I were doing a video on top 20 office hacks. Let's say like that. So now what's nice about this is that you can get across what the video is really about quickly, and it looks great on mobile. The typeface is large enough to be able to really make an impact, and there's more you can do to it here. Of course, if you wanted to go in here and add, let's say, an emoji, you often see thumbnails with emojis or something like that. Let's say this pencil or something, you know, like you could, you could do something fun with, with this. You could maybe even go, let's say, top 20 office hacks and, you know, I don't know, that looks kind of silly, but I think you get the point that you can add some elements to it and really customize that experience. Actually, that might look good here. Let's say if we did this, then we did that and made this bigger, you know, yeah, okay, you'd have to play with this a little bit and see what would look good. But there is lots of different elements in Canva that you can add to the thumbnail to really make it pop. So let's say you're happy with this and you are not on the Pro plan and you don't have team templates and that sort of thing. What you'll do is you'll just want to name this. So you could even name this, you know, Do Not Erase Template. And then you'll go back over to your Home and you'll go to Your Designs and you should see your new Do Not Erase Template here. Then what I would do each week as I come in is— and don't worry about this, the image here is just not taking the changes we've made right now. But if you click on it, in fact, I'll show you. If you click on it, you'll see that the changes are there. So don't worry about that. But what I would do is I would come in every week and I would click on the three dots at the top and I would make a copy of that. Don't erase your Do Not Erase template. What I would do then is work on the copy. So I would open that up and I would manipulate this with a new photo, a new icon, whatever it is that you're going to do. And from there, one other tip you can do each week is just create a copy of that image and work on copies each week. That way, all of your thumbnails stay within one project, and when you download them, just be sure that you're downloading the proper page. So let's say you are on the third week of your YouTube videos and this is the thumbnail you're going to use. When you download it, You want to make sure that you are selecting the proper page, because if you don't choose only the one image, it will download all 3 of them. I think they do it in a zip file, and then you'll wonder why it's not working. So you make sure that you click on the— in this case, page 3, click Done, and then click Download, and it will download only that one thumbnail to your computer. A couple of other features you may want to look at, and it depends on what type of membership you have with Canva. I'm going to click on the image of me in this thumbnail and choose Effects. In Effects, you can also change whether you want there to be a color to the image like that. Not sure if you want to necessarily do that. Let me go back once. There we go. Cancel that. You could also add a glitch, colorize, all different types of features that you can add to this image. Not only this image, but if we didn't want this gray background, I can go up here to Photos and find something appropriate to this image. Let's say an office. So let's choose, let's choose one that is free for the purpose of our demonstration. I think this one's free, and then what I'll do is I'll position this back back, back in the image. Let me just drag this over here. There we go. And then I'll just— I can crop this. In this case, I'll just make it larger. And then I could also add an effect to that, whether it be an effect or I can just go over to Filter. Let's say I wanted to make that a little brighter, a little more pink. Whatever the case may be, or maybe I want to make it black and white. It kind of has a neat effect. I'll bring myself back into the picture here, into the frame, and now we have an office background. We wanted to see a little bit more of it, maybe we could bring this blue back just a tad, and maybe I want to add a filter to myself in this case and make it a little bit more gold color. So you can see that the customization doesn't end at only the text on top of, you know, the screen or the image. Another thing you can do is you can duplicate. Let me show you this. So let's duplicate this, and now I will make that duplicated text black. And I can give it almost a 3D effect. I'm going to use the arrows on my keyboard just to bring that across and down. So I'm just tapping on the arrows left and right and up and down here to give this an effect. If I want to make it look like, let's say, like that, I can give it this type of effect as well. I could also move this so that the white was on top. So let me just see— position. Um, we're going to bring that— that's right— forward. Okay, so now the white text is on top of the black text. So there's— I'm just bringing this down. In fact, I really like that a lot better. So we're just giving it a little bit of a 3D effect here. I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial on how to make better looking thumbnails. I know it's helping me improve my click-through rate and certainly the number of views on my videos. And speaking of that, be sure to check out my other videos on this channel. New videos come out every Thursday. Please subscribe to the channel and I'll see you next time.