Design Tips to Help You Excel at Creating YouTube Channel Art
YouTube has become a force to be reckoned with in terms of offering a user-friendly content creation platform for creative individuals. Whether you are a small-time YouTube creator or part of a larger network of channels, your channel art can make your content stand out from the crowd. However, it’s quite difficult to differentiate your brand and channel from the plethora of other creators on the platform without some creative thinking.
According to Neil Patel, 90% of the information we process comes from visual stimuli, with 43% more chance of being memorable if you present your content through adequate visuals. With that in mind, let’s take a look at how you can excel at creating YouTube channel art in order to attract more subscribers and views in the future.
Why Create Channel Art?
Before we take a look at the steps necessary to create good channel art for YouTube, let’s talk about why you should do so in the first place. Remember that your channel art is the biggest piece of visual content with your name on it.
Once an individual decides to check out your channel for more information, the artwork banner will make or break their engagement. The benefits of creating good channel art for your channel include:
- Creating a good first impression, and incentive to subscribe
- Distinguishing your channel from other creators in the niche
- Creating a snippet of what your quality of content a viewer can expect
- Communicating important contact and social media information
Create your Brand
Depending on the scale of your channel and the niche you create content in, you should create a brand sooner rather than later. Your branding should reflect your content’s topics and your character as the creator behind the curtain. Some of the questions which can help you pinpoint your brand and visual style include:
- What topics do you mainly talk about?
- What age and gender are you?
- What age and gender is your target audience?
- How frequent is your upload schedule?
- Do you collaborate with other channels or work independently?
- Do you have social media pages and/or your own website?
Once you get a better idea of what your channel represents, you can reach out to the best paper writers on the web to help you with the copywriting process. Try to create a memorable name for your channel and choose several complimentary colors to represent your YouTube channel art in a cohesive way.
Consider the Technicalities
Just like Facebook or LinkedIn, YouTube has a strict set of rules in place when it comes to channel art dimensions and general design choices. These should be taken into account from the start in order for you to use the space and composition available to you in the best way. The technical details of YouTube channel art to keep in mind are:
- The recommended size of channel art is 2560x1440 pixels
- The minimum size of channel art is 2048x1152 pixels
- The maximum file size of your YouTube channel art is 6mb
It’s good practice to create preset artboards in your preferred design application before you start. Whether you use the Adobe suite or online platforms such as Wepik Youtube banners or Canva, these dimensions and sizes should be the upper ceiling for your channel art. Once you set them up, you can safely place design elements, wording, logo and social media handle on the empty board.
Choose a Design Style
The design style you choose for your channel art should reflect your content’s production quality and visual standards. For example, if you use a combination of orange and violet in your videos for annotations and popups, you should do the same in your channel art.
You don’t have to be a graduate designer to come up with a neat combination of visual elements and colors for your YouTube channel art to appear professional and appealing. In fact, you can use channel art template services online if you don’t have an idea of what your YouTube channel art should look like.
Anything from minimalistic wording to photographs created in your backyard will work well for YouTube channel art. However, make sure not to copy someone else’s style, typography or images in order to avoid copyright infringement.
Include Calls to Action
While calls to action typically find themselves in marketing materials, you can use them in your YouTube channel art just the same. Calls to action are a great way to entice visitors to your channel to subscribe, check out your videos or follow you on social media.
Avoid long messages and too much text in your channel art, however, since YouTube users prefer audio-visual content to textual information. Small messages tucked in the corners of your channel art, however, can work wonders in terms of viewer engagement no matter what niche your content belongs to.
Change it Over Time
Lastly, your channel art can serve as a constantly-changing piece of content and a marketing tool for your channel’s growth. You can use your YouTube channel banner to announce upcoming events, mark big changes in your content’s structure or simply to communicate different messages to your audience.
Design trends change over time, so don’t allow your channel art to become outdated compared to others in your content niche. Keep things fresh with small updates to your YouTube channel and your viewers will always have something interesting to look forward to in the banner placement on your channel.
In Conclusion
The channel art you implement will only be as effective as the content you produce. Remember that most of your viewers will likely come across your videos first before coming to the channel for more info. Create a connection between your content, your persona and the viewers you try to attract and engage. The right crowd will always find their way to your channel and enjoy the style of content delivery you chose to commit to.
Bio: Steven Mehler is a blogger and content creator with over ten years of experience in branding and advertisement. He is an editor at Rated by Students and aims to improve the content quality of his clients and stakeholders through digital marketing. In his spare time, Steven enjoys swimming as well as coffee and tea from around the world.
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