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So you're trying to customize your YouTube channel and give it a little bit of pizazz?
Well, in this training video I'm going to show you how easy it is and I'm going to give
you two templates to make your job a little bit easier. Stay tuned.
Alright, you ready to create that custom banner for your YouTube channel? Well, what we're
going to do is go to pixlr.com and click on the advanced editor and at the end of this
video I'm going to give you two templates. One's going to be a pixlr template and the
other one for power users I'm going to give you a photoshop template, but for this demonstration
I'm going to show you how to make that custom banner in pixlr, so let's go ahead and find
the template. I put it on my desktop here, and let's go ahead and upload it. Ok, now
that we have the template open I don't want you to get overwhelmed with this. It's really
more simpler than what it looks. Ok and I'm going to walk you right through it. So the
first thing we're going to do is move your cursor over to the layers here and I want
you to scroll down all the way to the bottom and double click on this lock. Ok, and let
me kind of tell you a little bit about YouTube's banner for the one channel design, it's basically
a responsive banner and it will resize itself depending on what device you're looking at.
So if you're on a desktop computer it's going to be a certain size, if you're on a tablet
or an ipad, nexus7 it's going to be a different size, a mobile device it's going to be a different
size. But I don't want you to get really, really overwhelmed with this because it's
really easy, I've made it super easy. So let's go ahead and click off the complication here.
And the first thing that you need to do to create your banner is come up to layers here
and I want you to click on this where it says "open image as layer". Ok now that I have
my picture uploaded here what I want to do is position it so that it's perfect for our
banner design. Now let's move over to layers and let's activate "logo safe area". And you're
going to see that this gray box is around here. Now this gray box is basically what
all the devices are going to see. This place right here is for your picture or your avatar
that's on your YouTube channel and just be aware of that. And I noticed that the snowboarder
is being cut off right here so what we want to do is move him so you can click on this
little move tool right here make sure that your layer is selected and let's just kind
of adjust him where we want him to be. ok, that looks really cool with the sun coming
through, but notice right over here it's going to be cut off, so on the TV view and also
the desktop view it's going to look a little funky here. So we're going to need to modify
that. Now let's come up to edit and what we want to do is go into "free transform" and
what you'll want to do is hold down your shift key and then move this bounding box get it
right positioned so it goes right to the edge, and then hit enter or return. Let's make this
banner a little bit more interesting. let's go ahead and click on the type tool here,
click here, let's go ahead and make it a snowboarding TV and you can select different fonts and
it has all the google fonts that are here, it's really, really cool. You can change the
size, let's go ahead and make that 94 and bold/italics, let's keep it white, if you
want to change the color you can just change the color there, it's really cool. But let's
just keep it white. And let's go ahead and move it, click the moving tool, let's just
select it and move it over here a little bit. And let's go ahead and add some effects, so
to do that you can come over here to the layers to look in make sure that the text is selected
here and let's click this icon and that's for your styles and you can see that they
have shadows, I like the shadow so let's go ahead and put a little shadow on there, get
the distance here right, change the opacity, hit ok. Another thing I like to do is change
the mode, so let's go ahead and change the mode and let's make it an overlay. That looks
pretty cool! Ok, now we need to see if it's safe basically across the board on all the
devices, we'll go ahead and unclick "logo safe area" on that layer here click on "desktop
area" that looks good, "tablet view" that looks good, so I think we're good to go. So
the next thing we need to do is come up to file, down to save and what we need to do
is save this as a JPEG format, make sure you do the quality at 100%, you can go up to 2MB
for your upload on your YouTube channel, and let's go ahead and save it. That's good to
go and now we're ready to upload it to your YouTube channel. Now let's upload this banner
to YouTube, just go to your channel, make sure you're logged in, roll over your banner
and you'll have this little icon that shows up that pencil, click on that and click "edit
artwork". And what we'll do now is browse our computer here for our brand new banner
that we just saved and let's go ahead and upload, it's going to take a second. And wa-la!
Check this out. This is the way it looks on a computer, see how it just moves it's so
responsive there, ok which is cool! See how it fits perfectly on a mobile device and now
look at the tablet, see how cool this is? It's perfect. Hey, thanks for watching that
video. Now before you go to my website to download your free template to make your job
a lot easier in customizing that YouTube banner make sure you subscribe to my channel because
I have some great videos that are coming out and you don't want to miss it.