🧑‍🎨 How to Make a Great Thumbnail

How to YouTube #8

Hey YouTubers,

I used to have absolutely no idea how to make a YouTube thumbnail.

Annoyingly, as you (hopefully) know, thumbnails are really important, and I had to learn.

On YouTube, the viewer experience with browse content goes like this:

1. Open app/website.

2. See lots of titles and thumbnails.

3. Choose one to watch.

4. Maybe choose something else if they get bored.

We should therefor aim to create in the same order as viewers experience.

It took far too long for YouTubers to realise this.

Make no mistake, YouTube is a video platform. The best content wins in the long term, but making good thumbnails is part of a good YouTubers skillset.

However, it can be really overwhelming to try and create great thumbnails.

What actually matters? How do I know what to focus on? How can I tell if it’s good or absolutely terrible?

I’ve got you covered. Today, we’re going through a 3 part framework to help you create your thumbnails.

👋 Attention

The first thing your thumbnail needs to do is grab the viewers attention.

Your thumbnail is almost always going to be competing with other thumbnails on the Youtube homepage or in search.

That means it needs to stand out.

But here’s the most important part. It needs to stand out to your target audience.

What MrBeast’s target audience want to click on, is not the same as what Andrew Huberman’s audience want to click on.

So you need to research your target audience and think about what type of thumbnail is going to get their attention in the first place.

This thumbnail from Life of Riza stands out on the homepage for very different reasons to MrBeast’s thumbnails (or any other entertainment channel).

This thumbnail would catch the eye of people who are interested in aesthetic, cinematic vlog content.

Here are a few things to think about that help make things more noticeable:

1. Faces

2. Contrasting colours (use a colour wheel for this)

3. Unique or impressive photos (like the one above)

4. Bright colours

5. Amazing design

🤔 Relevance

The second thing that happens when a viewer looks at a title and thumbnail is their brain quickly processes whether they care.

Your thumbnail has stood out to the viewer, their eyes have been drawn towards it, now what?

It needs to be interesting to them.

This thumbnail from the Like Nastia channel with (110 million subscribers) might grab my attention, but it’s not interesting or relevant to me.

So the job is to make your thumbnail represent something interesting and relevant to your target audience.

What does your target viewer care about? Have they seen this idea before? What will this video give them?

With this part of the framework, it helps to use common things that you know your target audience will quickly recognise or interest them.

For example, if you’re making videos for Notion lovers, it makes sense to include the Notion logo.

🧐 Question

Once someone is looking at a thumbnail that they potentially want to watch, you need to get them to click.

Fundamentally, people click when they want a question answered.

In this thumbnail, the viewer is thinking “what is the 3 second rule?”

In this next thumbnail, the viewer might be thinking “how on earth is he richer than Elon Musk?”

But the thing that determines whether someone clicks is how strong is the question in their mind that the title and thumbnail raises.

How strong is their desire to click.

To demonstrate that, the next one is one of my favourite thumbnails to reference.

Every thumbnail raises some kind of a question, but the best titles and thumbnails raise questions that the target viewer can’t not get the answer to.

I personally have to find out what a dog’s lick actually means.

Takeaway

All three of these sections overlap, and they aren’t always clearly distinct from each other. But when I’m making thumbnails for Ali’s channel, and I inevitably get overwhelmed, this is the 3 part process I come back to.

1. Will it stand out on the homepage?

2. Will it interest our target viewer?

3. What is the question they can’t not get an answer to?

Making good thumbnails is really hard. I still mess it up all the time, but it’s about getting slightly better each time.

Videos go viral for all sorts of reasons, so don’t get overly worked up about creating the perfect thumbnail. The title obviously plays a huge (if not larger) part, and ultimately the video content does need to be up to a certain standard as well.

The most important thing is that your consistently making videos and getting better over time, no matter your channel size.

But don’t let thumbnails be the reason your great content isn’t getting watched.

Have an epic week!

Tintin 🧑‍💻

The YouTube Tin

🎙️ Podcast: I listened to this podcast with Jake Thomas (a YouTube title expert) a few weeks ago and it’s just so good.

🗞️ Video: This video called “Americans that think they’re Irish” sent me down the rabbit hole of this channel Meditations for the anxious mind. I love analysing channels with lots of views but raw production. Why do you think he’s doing well?

🪓 Tool: For most of the past year, we’ve mainly used Canva to make our thumbnails.

🔬 My Channel: I make videos (really just screen recordings) about YouTube to help you guys as much as I can and share more of what I learn at my job. Let me know what you’d like me to make videos about. I’ll share as much as possible!