Sheryl Plouffe shows how to recreate YouTube channel art by modeling a favorite creator's design in Canva. She uses a screenshot as a semi-transparent guide, swaps in her own photo and text, and builds a personalized banner that mirrors the original layout while keeping her own branding.
Chapters
Do you have YouTube channel art envy where you're watching your favorite gurus, your favorite influencers, and you're admiring their YouTube banners and you wish that you could have something similar to what they have? Well, then this video is for you. I came up with a banner hack that I'm going to share with you today. I shared this with my coaching students in a class that I'm teaching them on YouTube. So I took a little excerpt from that. It's a step-by-step tutorial, so have a watch. This is my channel art right now. For those of you who've been following me for a while, this is fairly new. Like, I actually did this, I don't know, maybe a month and a half ago or so. And I, you know, the header, the channel artwork that I had before was It was okay. It was fine. It didn't have— I don't think it had my picture on it. It had words and it was placed in the middle and you could, you know, read it, whatever. But it didn't have like a picture of a phone and it didn't have colors on it and all this stuff. It didn't have this little picture over here enticing people to go and download my free training or any of that. And it was fine. But what happened recently was I wanted to change my artwork and I was in Canva. Right? And I was kind of starting from, from, not from scratch, but starting from the previous channel art that I had. And I was like, oh, how can I make this better? And there's this girl that I follow, and I'll show you something. This girl I follow, who I like, and her name is Vanessa Lau. Okay, I just like her videos. She's a smart girl. Instagram, like, just kind of knows her way around Instagram. Like, look, she's at 357 had 100,000 subscribers and I really liked her artwork. Do you see any similarity between her artwork and mine? Mm-hmm. So what I did was I did, I took a little, um, little page from Russell Brunson's Funnel Hackers. If anybody's familiar with Russell Brunson of ClickFunnels, he does a thing called funnel hacking and that's the foundation of his like million, $100 million business. And what he does is he doesn't, imitate, he doesn't copy, he models other people's funnels. And I was thinking about him, I've been listening to his books recently, and I thought, okay, well, I could start from scratch, or I could model my channel art over based on someone's channel art who I really like. And I've been admiring her for a while. And I was like, what if I could, hmm, what if I could model this in Canva, how would I do that? So what I did was I went like this, I went Command+Shift+4 on my Mac, and I went here and I took a screenshot of her channel art. So I went like this, and I just copied over to about here. Okay. And I was like, okay, so what if I were to— hang on a second, I'm just gonna start a new page so I can show you. And then I'm going to go over here and I'm going to upload that image to my— from my computer. So here's my desktop. Um, I think it was this one. Okay, cool. So now I'm going to, um, is that uploading? Hang on a second. Where is it? Screenshot, open. There we go. So then I was like, okay, um, oh, and by the way, this Canvas is from— like, I mean, I'm in Canva, and I'll just show you how I got to this. So Canva, I'm going to create a design, and I'm going to go YouTube, um, here, channel art. You can actually search for it when you search and go YouTube channel art. Okay, so it gives you the dimensions that you need. That's how you get the, the size of the canvas you need. So I was like, okay, well, what could I do with this? So I went over and I grabbed Vanessa's, um, channel art, and I brought it into my project, and I, uh, went like this, and I was like, okay, well, let's have this take up Position this to the middle, and then what I did was I made it almost transparent. So what I'm doing is I'm using this as a guide. You see what I'm doing here? And then I was like, okay, well, if this is my guide, I'm going to leave it lace and transparent at the back, and I'm just going to model this, and I'm going to make this my own. So I went over to my photos and I thought, okay, well, there's a picture— you can see there's a picture of Vanessa there. So what if I or to go into my pictures, and I found a picture of— I could use this one, and I'm going to take out the background. I am on Canva Pro, so I'm not sure if you get all of these features that I'm showing you right now, including the background remover. Okay. So I'm going to say, okay, cool, there's my picture. So there's where Vanessa placed hers. I really like how she placed hers on her artwork. So I'm just going to place this kind of in the same general area as where Vanessa did hers. Okay, cool. And now what if I were to add text where she's got her name kind of like right up here? Okay, well, what if I did that? Well, What if I went, you know, Cheryl Plouffe, right? Um, a little bit bigger because hers looks just a tad bigger than that. Okay, I'll put mine, uh, maybe like right there. Oh, maybe like right in here. So you see what I'm doing, guys? I'm, I'm in— I'm modeling her artwork to my own and using her layout as a guide for how I can lay mine out. I went over to the elements and I was like, okay, I like having this smartphone. It makes a lot of sense for my brand because I'm all about building authority online with video. And a lot of that is mobile video now. So I was like, well, what if I put a smartphone in here? I wonder if I could find a photo of a smartphone. Hmm. Okay. Now this takes a while. Like this isn't something that I'm just whipping up in 2 minutes necessarily. But I could go in here, or I could even find like an actual photo. That might even be better. Okay, so what if I found, um, some— what if I did that? Okay, cool. What if I turn that on an angle? Kind of how I like how she has hers on an angle. And then I'm just going to make this a little bit smaller. I'm going to place it exactly where she had hers. I mean, that looked pretty cool how she did it. Do you see what I'm doing? And so on and on it went until I was modeling artwork of someone who I already like and admire. I love— because I'm like, this is like, to me, this is great artwork because she's got her logo, she's promoting people to get her free stuff, it has her name, it's got a photo of her. Now listen, She's got some— she probably didn't do this herself. She probably had someone professional really build this out for her. But what I ended up with didn't turn out too bad, I think. So now that you've tackled how to model someone else's YouTube channel art for yourself, it is time to move on to, you guessed it, YouTube thumbnails. Here's the next video to watch.
