Thumbnails

1280 X 720 px

Pic Maker Thumbnails - remove background, add gradient or solid background, add text

Canva to save the .jpg in a usable format.

https://filmora.wondershare.com/youtube-video-editing/youtube-thumbnail-makers.html

Here are four YouTube video thumbnail best practices that will put your thumbnails to work for you.

1. Keep It Simple
YouTube thumbnails are not the place to write a summary of your video. They’re small. When you consider that more than 70% of YouTube’s watch time comes from mobile devices, they get even smaller. To counteract that, your thumbnail shouldn’t include a ton of text.

Instead of adding your full YouTube video title to the thumbnail, try condensing the title down into a few important words over a background or image.

2. Keep It Relevant
Just like any search engine, YouTube rewards content that answers viewers’ queries. That means your thumbnail should be relevant to what your video is about and should include keywords to communicate important information to potential viewers. The thumbnail is meant to entice viewers to click, but if you don’t follow up with what you’re promising, your bounce rates are going to increase and YouTube is going to rank your video lower.

3. Keep It High Contrast
To really grab attention, you’ll want to use high contrast colors in your thumbnail. No blacks, whites, or reds since they tend to blend in with YouTube’s branding. Try sticking with blue, green, orange, and yellow to make your videos pop. You can even search the target keyword for your video and use a color that contrasts with what the majority of your competitors are using.

4. Keep It Branded
You’re working with limited real estate, so you may be tempted to leave your logo off of your thumbnails. Don’t do it! Your logo can boost brand awareness. You’ll want to include your logo so that it’s conspicuous, but doesn’t draw too much attention. Try adding your logo to a corner of the thumbnail. Don’t add it to the lower right corner, though, or it will be covered by the video length.

You can measure the impact of these best practices by checking your YouTube analytics.
Canva

One of the most popular graphic design tools, Canva is a top pick for creating amazing thumbnails. The tool also provides amazing templates for creators to build professional thumbnails within a few minutes. With over 1 million templates, images and fonts to choose from, Canva’s drag and drop interface makes it easy for even beginners to create amazing thumbnails.

Adobe Spark

Offering customizable YouTube thumbnail templates, Adobe Spark is a smart choice to quickly create professional-looking thumbnails. An attractive feature of the tool is that it offers a specific category of tools for YouTube Thumbnails. Also, if you choose to use their pre-built thumbnail layouts, all of those will be absolutely free of cost. Creators can also use the free version of the plan or opt for a premium plan that costs about $100/year.

Fotor

With some very good thumbnail creation tools, Fotor allows creators to customize the pre-designed YouTube thumbnail templates. The interface is extremely easy to use and can be used by anyone with or without experience. The tool also offers various text and design elements to ensure that your thumbnails are in line with your brand guidelines. While Fotor does offer a free version of the tool, for just $40/year extra, you can get access to various other features and the benefit of using the tool with absolutely no ads.

Snappa

Snappa is a popular online YouTube thumbnail creator packed with amazing pre-designed templates, high-resolution images and many other tools that you would need to create YouTube thumbnails. The best part about this software is that it is extremely easy to use and navigate, making it a great choice for beginners and non-designers. Snappa gives you nearly countless options to create YouTube thumbnails from scratch, customizing the fonts, backgrounds, and text in order to be in sync with your brand guidelines.

Inkscape - A free vector image editing software comparable to Illustrator.

istockphoto.com - A source for stock photography and graphics.