The number of videos uploaded to YouTube every day is incredible. It’s become a noise that makes it a challenge to be heard or seen above the din. Just like with books sitting on a bookshelf in a retail store, having a cover that gets noticed is key to making the sale. An uninteresting cover that doesn’t catch shoppers’ attention won’t fly off the shelf. The same is true with YouTube videos and the thumbnail that people see before clicking on the video clip.
Creating a fancy thumbnail for your latest video is harder than you think. Firing up a full-blown graphical package is really overkill for your needs. What you require is an app that has just the right number of useful features. When covering the common tasks, knocking out a couple of YouTube thumbnails in record time is easy! For that, try Adobe Spark.
Get Inspired
An inspirational thumbnail gallery within Spark provides some fresh ideas about how to layout a YouTube thumbnail. From there, you can pick the optimal shape and dimensions of your project canvas. Once this is set, you’re ready to move ahead.
Working with an overarching theme helps to create a thumbnail with a consistent appearance. Manipulate different elements like text, color palette, images and word overlays. Adjust sliders to bind elements together and control how visible each one is within the final thumbnail for the most dramatic effect.
Access Photo Imagery Quickly
When using the Spark app, you can search for suitable images online. Pick the ones that are free to use on your projects to avoid having licensing trouble. There are also convenient hooks into the Adobe Creative Cloud where you might have a photo gallery already. Adobe Lightroom, Google Photos and the cloud app, Dropbox, are all integrated with Spark to make it easy to find the image that you’re searching for.
Finding images quickly and easily is a cinch, especially when you build up a collection of images for use on future video thumbnails.
Choosing Typography
The type of font used for a thumbnail says a lot about what the video content will show. If it’s covering a technology-related subject like a product review or a tutorial, then a sci-fi influenced font might look just right. Alternatively, a video that’s covering tips on how to get better at arts and crafts, and targeting female viewers, will find a more receptive audience by using a font that’s more flowery and artistic.
Choosing the right font sets the tone for the video that’s to come and encourages viewer interaction. Spark comes with many professional fonts, so you can select the one you wish to use for a thumbnail while making it suitable the theme of your channel.
When looking at the YouTube analytics that is provided by Google, it’s possible to see which videos have received the most views. Quite often this is down to the video thumbnail that attracted the viewers’ attention in the first place. Getting that right is easier than ever now.