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Hello every one!
I'm just working on the last thumbnails
for my videos and i thought I should share
how I do this with Illustrator CS6.
So, here we go.
Custom Youtube thumbnails are a great way
to grow your audience and to get the people interested in your videos.
You can check if you can upload custom thumbnails.
In your video manager
and in here you can go on edit
on one of your videos.
And if you see this button here
"Custom thumbnail" you can upload custom youtube thumbnails.
However keep in mind, they should not be bigger than 2 MB.
We create a new file in Illustrator
and we will choose "For Web".
and in here we want to choose the right aspect ratio
and this should be the aspect ratio of the youtube thumbnails them self.
Robo voice: *W A R N I N G*
I just realised, I did put 800 in here, this is wrong!
The HD resolution should be
1280x720.
So make sure you use 720 if you create your thumbnail.
We also don't want to align them to the pixel grid.
And now we can click on ok.
Here we have our basic thumbnail.
I always like to have some kind of branding on my videos.
So if you take a look at my custom thumbnails
you see that I have on the side always the program I use in the tutorial
so people can easily see which program is used in this tutorial.
I also have the same font and same kind of headline for every picture.
So it is good to have some kind of consistency
with your thumbnails.
So we first going to create the box on the left over here.
we choose the rectangle tool and we draw a big rectangle.
Like this.
And then we can choose a fancy color
for example this one.
And for the border we going to choose
as custom color, we double click on this one here
and make this one a little bit ligther.
So we're kind of copying the colors of indesign over here.
Let's increase the stroke thickness to 15 pt.
And now we can get some text in here.
Let's call this one InDesign CS6.
We will select this and increase the size, I hold the shift key to keep the proportions.
And under character we can now make this one bold.
Like this.
And I would say we copy the color from here.
By switching the color over here and removing the stroke
we get the same color as the border.
Let's rotate this one by 90°.
I again hold the shift key.
And now we place this one in here.
Under character styles I now will decrease the spacing between the letters a little bit.
Like this, to have it fit in here a little bit better.
For now I can move this one from the side, so that it looks nice.
Now we will place this one on a new layer
that is above our second layer.
So every thing we now put in here
will be in the background and behind
this banner here on the side.
Now it's time at the video where we want to make the thumbnail for.
In this case I have this TOC video I have done a while ago.
And if your on a mac, you can just hit the space key
and this will open a preview of the video.
In here I the the little *** in here
and scrub trough the video to find a relevant
part of the video that I would like to use as a thumbnail.
This one for example is quite nice.
I scroll back a little bit and hit the pause key.
Like this.
Now I need to get this one here, into Illustrator.
I will maximise the screen to have it quite big.
And then I press the command and shift key
and wait a few second till the banner down here has disappeared.
And now I press the key 3 as well.
You hear a little sound for making a screen shoot.
We can tab out of this one here
and look at our desktop. And we see here
there is our screen shoot.
We will take this one now and put it into illustrator.
And you see here we have it now in the background.
Let's zoom out a little bit.
And now I place this one here in the background.
Let's maybe move the Indesign a little bit more to the side.
And also we decrease the size of the box a little bit.
ANd this should be fine.
Next we want to add some type in here as well.
So we call this one "TOC in TOC".
Again I hold the shift key while scaling to hold the proportions.
And now I'm going to add a border to this one.
A white stroke.
Let's say it should be 5 pt thick.
To give it a little bit separation from the background.
We can also make this slightly bigger.
But now to have it blend in nicely with the background
we going to add also a square behind this.
And we don't want to have a border for this one and the color should be white.
We will send this one to the back.
Send backward.
And we put the opacity down, to let's say 30%.
Maybe 40% is better.
Like this. So it'S a little bit more separated from the background.
If you compare the before and after affect.
You see the difference.
In the video tutorial I'm making the thumbnail for it's really about the details your see here.
The list of figures and list of tables is included in the TOC.
So I want to emphasise this.
For doing so were going to take the ellipse tool.
And I draw the ellipse around the part here.
And then I select both.
And copy this one here.
And go on right click -> Make clipping mask.
Now I select my first circle
and I give it a nice stroke and I remove the fill.
Let's give this one a fancy color, like the cyan here.
And we place this one directly above our old circle.
We can select both, and with the align tool we align them perfectly over each other.
We can now go ahead and scale those ones up.
I again press the shift key.
If you make this one a little bit bigger
so this is kind of the eye catcher of our thumbnail.
And now I'm going to go ahead and increase the thickness of the line.
This is not the one we want, we send this one backward.
And now we can select the line, and we increase let's say the stroke to 20 pt.
If you want to edit your contents inside your clipping mask inside here.
You can just send this one back for the moment.
Double click on the picture.
And now you see we're here in this clipping group.
And we can just move this one around and scale it as well if we want.
To exit just press [esc].
And then this should be fine for now.
Click here to deselect it.
And now we can save this thing
for the youtube video.
We're going to go on File, and were going to choose Save for Web, to keep the file size small.
And PNG is basically always a good choice and is not very big, you see here around 300k.
We save this some where.
I would always give this one the same name as the videos well.
We save this, and now we can take a look.
And here is our nice thumbnail.
And if we compare this with the old one we see
I did get the aspect ratio wrong in the beginning.
So we're going to upload this one.
We can go back to our YouTube page.
And in here click on custom thumbnail.
maybe we can also take a look what happens if the aspect ratio is wrong.
Let's just upload this for a second.
And you see, if the aspect ratio is wrong, you get some ugly cropping.
Over here the top is cropped away.
So we change the image to the one that has the right aspect ratio.
We see this looks quite better.
We're going to save our changes.
And it will take some time
till the new thumbnail is applied to all of your video previews.
Because Youtube needs to process it.
If we go now back to illustrator
if you have done this in the wrong aspect ratio as well
you can click on this symbol here
and change the aspect ratio
in this case you would need here 720 pixel.
And we click just enter and you see here
the aspect ratio gets corrected.
Now you can change all the things that they fit again.
And basically you would now save this template
for all your other thumbnails
and then you can just delete the thing over here.
Like this.
And I would always lock the InDeisgn layer on the side.
And you can use the same template for all your videos to get a consisted thumbnail layout.
All right, and there we have our nice custom thumbnails.
If you enjoyed this video, why not give it a thumbs up.
until next time, bye bye!
Nice thumbnail
also your (...)
oh noooo :' ( screwed it up lol^^