How to create great thumbnails

The goal of thumbnails is to get people browsing YouTube to either read the video title or click on the video instantly to watch it.

Thumbnails are a major driver of views on videos and one of the main tools to promote content on YouTube. In short, thumbnails should attract the eye and make people in your target audience understand what the video is about, if it’s interesting to them. If so, it should make them want to watch the video.What makes a good thumbnail:

  • It communicates the video's theme or one key idea or event from the video.

  • The visuals speak to the target audience for this video.

  • It complements the title well.

  • You can read and understand what the thumbnail is about at a glance.

  • It pokes at your curiosity (using legitbait).

  • It has strong value and color contrast.

  • Elements are large to be legible even on mobile displays.

  • It stands out visually among other thumbnails on the platform.

What does not necessarily make a good thumbnail:

  • The most beautiful art or composition. You really want to focus on visual communication and clarity rather than trying to make polished and unique illustrations.

  • Using text. If you use text, it's to help communicate what the video is about, especially if it's difficult to do with the visuals. Text is a valuable tool, but you don't have to use it every time.

Importantly, we have a limited time budget per video because we make many videos that don't have a huge impact. As a result, you should spend at most two hours on a thumbnail, including all iterations. To achieve that, you want to draft thumbnail ideas before creating the video. You should know that you can make a decent thumbnail and title before working on the video's content.

Coming up with a good thumbnail idea

Ideally, you want to always think about thumbnail and title ideas as soon as you have an idea for a video. If you can't find anything that'll make people want to watch the video, it's best to consider working on another video instead. The idea should be a very rough sketch.

The format

Thumbnails should be 1280x720 pixels big. Thumbnails are mostly shown through recommendations, be it on desktop or mobile. Users rarely see them at their full size these days. So you want to optimize the size of visuals on the thumbnail so that the picture reads well on small displays and at small sizes. That's also partly why polished paintings or drawings don't matter much: most users will see a small version of your thumbnails. In many places on the platform, YouTube shows the video duration in the bottom-right corner, so you don't want to put anything essential there. You generally want to center the composition instead.

When you should use text

The idea that a picture is worth a thousand words holds for youtube. If an image makes what the video is about perfectly clear, You don't need text. If, however, you are left with empty space on the thumbnail, making it look off, or you can't communicate the idea perfectly without words, you can include text. Try to stick to three or four words at most because people scan the page very fast.

In this example, it’s difficult to communicate the idea of “you’re not learning” or “understanding what you need to do to learn Godot efficiently.” That’s why we use text. The text has been compressed to four short words.

This video is about performance, which is also hard to communicate with images alone. A graph could’ve worked, but it might have looked like a video about accounting or math. Instead, the explosion and speed lines, along with the text, communicate the idea of speed. The audience should already have some game programming foundations, so we can assume they understand what FPS (frames per second) are.

Here’s an example without text. The two logos and the arrow should communicate the idea clearly enough.

Elements that are effective on a thumbnail

Characters, faces, exaggerated expressions attract the eye. If the characters are drawings or 3D models, they work especially well if they’re professional-looking. Very strong contrast and richness in the background can help make the video stand out. The thumbnail below has a combination of a very contrasted background and a lovely character, making the video stand out.

Unexpected combinations, anything that pokes at your curiosity can also work great.

References

Channels with some great thumbnails to use for reference and inspiration:

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