Make The PERFECT YouTube Banner in Canva [FOR FREE]!

Creating a YouTube channel banner can be incredibly frustrating. So in this video, I'm going to walk you through the exact steps to create a YouTube channel banner for free. Using a software called Canva Plus, I'm going to show you how to get the dimensions just right so you don't have to be frustrated about figuring out that YouTube channel banner anymore. Before we jump into the tutorial, let me introduce myself. My name is Trina and I am a YouTube strategist. On this channel, I focus on helping you grow a business you love without burning yourself out. And I want to walk you through a couple things before we get into the actual designing piece inside of Canva, because these two things are really going to help you create a better channel banner if you understand what you really need for a channel banner. So that first thing is understanding your branding. Now, if you have a current business, you probably already have your branding down, but when you think about your channel banner, you want to make sure it ties into the rest of your other stuff. Basically, if you have a presence on Instagram or if you have a website, you really need to make sure that your colors, your imagery, your text also ties in with anything else that you're creating. So it's really important to keep your YouTube channel banner reflecting your brand. So I Recommend Having about 2, maybe 3 colors for your channel banner and keeping the font of your text to one style font, two at the max, which I'm going to dive into once we get inside of Canva on how to figure out what colors go good together and what fonts go good together as well. And then I also want to talk about the things we are going to be putting putting on your YouTube channel banner. Alright, so things like a photo of you. Yes. I highly, highly recommend having your imagery having your face somewhere on that channel banner because it is basically your billboard to possible new viewers and new subscribers. And they really want to see who they're about to learn from or watch from. And it's important to have a photo of yourself. You'll also want to include your channel name somewhere, whether that's your name or a channel name. You'll also, which we'll dive into deeper, want to include the value proposition of your channel, what is your channel all about? And then also an upload schedule. So whenever you upload, if it's uploading weekly, or if you have a certain day that you upload, including that in your channel banner, because people need to see from your channel banner that you are a content creator, it's coming out with New content all the time. Let me just show you how to do all of this on my computer. So before we start actually making the banners, I want to give you some examples. I know I always work best from seeing some examples before I start. Start from scratch. This is what mine looks like. You can see that I have my name right here. I have the value prop of my channel, what you're going to get when you subscribe to my channel. And I have new videos every Wednesday and I'm showing different aspects of my business. So I'm a public speaker, I'm a mom, I'm a content planner and I do video content. So I also like Vanessa Lau style. I like her bright colors, I like her doodles and stuff. So you can see again, she has her name. She. She has a photo of herself as well. You can see what her channel is all about right here. And new videos every week. You can check out the girls at Funnel. Gorgeous. These are two ladies who run this YouTube channel. And you can see right here what their channel is all about. You can see they have new videos every week and they say hosted by the two of them since it's a channel that has two hosts. Diana Gladney. What I like about her channel is you can see that she has weekly videos and live streams every Friday. So people are going to see instantly, oh, I can actually catch her live every Friday at 12pm Central Time. You can see that she has her value proposition right here. Embolded. And a photo of herself right here. And finally, the last example I'm going to give you is Shelly from Shelly Saves the Day. Now she doesn't have a photo of herself in her banner, but she does have this fun little cartoon and you can see exactly what her channel is about. YouTube explains simply video editing made easy. Again, she has when her new videos are and when her live streams are as well. So there's some examples. Dive into making these. Now, YouTube used to allow you to download something similar to this where you could see what your safe zone is. Because when you are creating a banner for YouTube, you're creating sizes for multiple platforms. So you can see there's the TV size, there's a desktop size, there's a tablet size. And then you have to also think about the mobile size. As of this recording, I could not find this again. But we can work around this. We can make this work if we use these similar dimensions. I loved using this because you could always make sure you were staying in the line here because with some of the templates that Canva or Picmonkey do have it didn't always align up to this safe zone. So let me help you work through this. If you cannot find this template anymore. Now I do have a link to try Canva. If you are interested in it, it will be down in the description box. So just a heads up, if you've never tried Canva, you can absolutely try it and make your YouTube channel banner for free. So what I like to do is just come up here and you can literally search YouTube channel art and you can get some templates already created here for you. But again, like I said, I like to create mine from scratch. That template that YouTube used to provide you. So here's a workaround that we can do to get this. All right, what you're going to do is you're going to go back to Canva. Let's just go ahead and do an Instagram post. We're going to change the dimensions real quick. Okay. So what I mean is we're going to go to resize and you want to come back to this and you want to resize it to 2,560 by 423. Okay. 2, 5, 6, 0 by 4, 2, 3. So when we come back here, 2560 by 4, 2, 3, we're going to copy and resize. Then just add an element here. We're just going to make this a quick color. Let's title this banner template and then we'll download it. Then when you come back to your banner, since you don't have this, you can upload this banner template PNG and put it right in here. What I want you to do is drag it so it fits the whole size of your banner. Remember, you don't have that solid background there, but you can do that. And what you do is you want to make sure it's in the middle. You see those pink lines? It's helping you line it right up in the middle. And what you know now is you want to keep everything possible right in that center line. We now have this because we know that is what is going to be showing up right here. This is what's most important, keeping everything in the middle. Now what you can start to do is you can actually fade this out just a little bit as you smooth start to add things on here. The first thing I suggest doing is giving your banner a background color. You can see mine is half of that coral and half of that white. And literally all you need to do to do that here to elements. Grab one. We're going to make it again this color, drag it halfway up. What I'm going to do is command C and then command V to paste. And you see I made a duplicate and I'm going to make this one white and I'm going to actually position this backwards and position this backwards again because I want this to come to the front. So if we can go ahead and bring this forward. Should have picked a different color. So let me switch the colors real quick. You can see this is still your safe space. So you're just gonna have a little bit of white at the top and it's gonna be predominantly blue. So it looks similar to this, right? This is the blue part now and this is the white part. Let's take for example, Vanessa's. She has a solid like this beige color back there. So what you could do is come back to this, come up here and change it to maybe like a beige color. You can pick any color you want right in here. And if you have a hex code, then we'll delete this. And again, we want to make this the entire size. So this is going to be your background. And remember, we're going to delete this eventually, but we're keeping this in here for our safe zone. This is where we know our text and any of our inventory is going to go. That's going to look good across most platforms. The next thing I would suggest adding is a photo of yourself. So we can just grab this picture. And what Canva actually lets you do is you can go to Effects and you can do background remover if you have the paid for account on Canva. So you can see what background remover does is it takes out all that background. Now there is a little bit of a glitch right there. So I can do a erase brush and just go ahead and erase that right off of there and be done. And. And now I can move this picture anywhere that I want to. My banner, remember I want to keep it safe right in there. So if we just again minimize it to pop it right in there. I don't want to cut my head off at the top. Now if you don't have the Canva paid for version, you can try this. This is free. This is remove image background. You want to go to remove bg and then you can do the same thing for free here. If you don't have a paid for version of Canva. Okay, so we got that centered. I think I'm going to just make it go straight up and down right there. The next thing you'll want to do is add your name or your channel name. So I'm going to grab some text, and you can select any kind of text that you want, but make sure that your text is bold. A great place to come up with pairing font ideas, because you really want this to stay on brand is if you go and type in Canva font pairings. Canva is going to actually give you font combinations that they suggest work really good together. So you can pick any type of font that you like. Let's say you like this Oswald. So you're going to pop that in there, and Canva's actually going to tell you Oswald and Garamond Premiere Pro work together. And these are all available in Canva. So we'll come back. So what you can do is just go ahead and add text, and then you'll come up here and you'll want to change it to what you pick. So we picked Oswald. All right. And I'm going to put my name right in here. And remember, we want to make it bold and really stand out. So again, we're going to make it bold, and then you can make it bigger by grabbing it like this, or you can just come up here and pick the font size that you want. So let's go ahead and pop it right in the middle. Again, I'm using these lines, these guidelines that Canva gives you, and then the next thing that I want to use is my value proposition, and I want that to look a little bit different than my name. And since we picked this font that goes well, we're going to use Garmin Premiere Pro. Again, we'll come back, we'll go ahead and add this and go to Garmin. So we're gonna go with this Garmin Bold, and then I'm gonna change my value proposition to. All right, so I'm gonna put that there, and I actually want to put another line. So I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate this. I just hit this plus right here, and that way I can drag it right on top of it, and I can play with the spacings a little bit better. And I'm gonna put the second line in my value prop. Now, again, we can make this bigger if we want. We can just come up in here. This is at 32, so we want to keep this in the center. Remember, everything's going to stay in the center. We may even want to change the color here. So we may want to make it this blue color. And again, maybe we want to make my name two different colors. So Go ahead and highlight that. Maybe make it that pink. And remember, we are losing this later. Okay? That's what it's going to look like. Remember, we just have the safe zone here for now, but it's not going to be that dark, remember, because we have this safe zone to help us. So let's get this line right back in here. It's right there in the middle again, so that we're safe. And I want to use this again for when my new videos are. So I'm going to go ahead and take that and I'm going to copy it and say, make that just a little bit smaller. You can also play with some of this. If you go in here to effects, you can add a drop shadow if you want. You can make the offset further, heavier, however you want to explain that. You can also do a blur around it. You can also change the direction of that drop shadow if you want. These are different things, again, that you can play with when you're creating this. Right now, I'm just getting through this to show it to you, but there are a lot of options in here to really, really make your banner stand out. So again, if we did maybe this background, you can see how that really makes it pop. So if we zoom in here, you can see the difference that that had. And if we do a blur, less of a blur. If we do more of an offset, less of an offset. And again, remember what it's going to look like without the safe zone. All right, now is the fun part. Now you can start decorating it to make it stand out. Remember, Vanessa does a great job of different doodles. Funnel gorgeous. Had this background for theirs. Diana had this pattern for hers. And then this icon again, Shelly has this look. So what you can actually do is into elements here on Canva and search what you're looking. So if you're looking for doodles, here are all the different doodles. You could pop this in. You can change the color maybe to pink, tilt it however you want, keeping it in that safe zone. And if we go back to elements, one other thing to make it simple is you can always click on that and take the transparency down. Right? Take the transparency up. Take the transparency down. So you can always see if you're in that safe zone. Maybe you want some hearts to add here. And we can turn that. We can change it any color we want. You put it over the scribbles. And there are a whole lot of options in here. Obviously, we can't use the video stickers, but you can See that there are flowers that you can use, simple drawn objects. So maybe if you're a cooking channel, you can do cooking and there's a whole bunch of different cooking elements, maybe your makeup channel, whole bunch of different makeup elements to really make this stand out. Now, one last thing that you can do is add a call to action. If you're a business owner and you're trying to get people on your email list, you can see Vanessa does this. She says free training to turn your followers into clients and has an arrow. And Shelly does this as well. Free YouTube guide. Do understand that this does become a little bit tricky and there will be a little bit of tweaking it. You'll need to upload it to YouTube, see where that arrow hits. There's no secret way to make it perfect that first time. So that will make a little bit of tweaking for you. So what you can always do is again, let's just go ahead and copy this. So we say on brand, put it there. And again we come here to arrow. Grab an arrow like that and you can always add. Flip it. What you saw Vanessa do, she had this laptop. So Canva does have those as well. If you go into elements and you go into frames. So if we come up here and you go to frames, you'll see that they have a laptop frame where you can grab that and just have a screenshot. For example, I have a screenshot of my editing course, so I could just take that and put it right in there and it automatically fits into that frame. All I need to do is just minimize it. I can put it right on top here. All within Canva. Once you have it all nicely tweaked, you'll want to make sure that you go ahead and delete your safe zone, download it. I would suggest making the size as large as possible because you want it to look really good on YouTube. So make the size as large as possible, go ahead and download and you can come here to your channel page, come to the camera. Right here is your banner image. Then you're going to come in here to change. You're going to select wherever you saved it and hit open and your new channel banner should be in there. Now, if you want to learn more about making sure that you have your YouTube strategy in place, ready to roll to drive you more views and subscribers, I'm actually hosting a two hour workshop to help you create a clear YouTube game plan. You can see we're going to go over research tactics, how to create a strategy from scratch, set up your monthly workflow. All happening on December 16th at 1pm I'm going to leave the link to enroll in this workshop below this video. This workshop is called the YouTube systems to success. It is completely live with me. You see everything that you're going to get here. You're going to not only have a one and a half hour session with me walking you through different aspects of creating a YouTube strategy and your workflow, but you're going to get lifetime access to the workshop recording. You're going to get a YouTube workflow already done for you. You get to swipe my copy. You're going to learn the 1, 2, 3 process for research plan and creating YouTube videos. You're going to see how you can create a monthly social video content and I'm going to also give you that workflow and I'm going to give you my video optimization checklist for success. So when you break it all down, this is everything you're going to be getting at this workshop. It's going on live Wednesday, December 16th. All you need to do is pop on over to Trina little.com forward/workshop to save your seat. We are limited at the amount of seats that we can have, but again, all you need to do is come over here. It's valued at over $1500 and you're going to get access to this and me live for just $97. Now if you want to continue making sure your entire channel is set up for perfection and more importantly, set up to get more views and subscribers, make sure you grab my YouTube roadmap. It's over 15 pages of tutor and video tutorials showing you exactly what you need to do to get your channel set up for success. Then once you go ahead and download that, I have a playlist of videos on your screen right now that's really going to help you with those next steps as well, like what's right in your description box, how to create playlists and different settings you should have set up on your YouTube channel if you don't yet. So get that roadmap and then click on this playlist to watch these next couple of videos. I'll see you over there.