How I Make YouTube Thumbnails

I’m not a thumbnail designer.

But I occasionally do simple designs, like this one for Bryan Johnson:

So I thought I’d walk you through my process, using this thumbnail I made recently for an episode of Making It (the podcast I co-host with George Blackman and Jamie Whiffen):

After a strategy session in London, George and I set ourselves a challenge.

We’d choose an episode each, and make a title and thumbnail for it in 20 minutes flat.

My episode was an analysis of three channels that had caught our eye recently: easy, actually, Fallow, and MikeShake.

We both had trains to catch – so the pressure was on.

1. Focus

I decided to focus exclusively on easy, actually for a couple of reasons:

1. It was the first channel we discussed in the episode, so we’d immediately “honour the click”.

2. easy, actually was the most ‘trending topic’ - they’d had explosive growth that month, creating a lot of buzz on YouTube strategy Twitter. I thought the title could be something like “How this channel got 300k+ subscribers in 2 months”

3. It seemed a simpler design job than trying to cram a visual representation of each channel into the thumbnail (e.g. MikeShake chopping something with a sword, the Fallow guys cooking, the stick figure from easy, actually). And probably a more effective one, as Fallow aren’t very visually recognisable.

2. Browsing photos for inspiration

I looked through our library of thumbnail template photos and found this one…

…which reminded me of an eye-catching Aprilynne Alter format that took off a few months ago.

Interesting.

Now I needed to make the photo look like I was analysing easy, actually.

We’d included other creators’ thumbnails in previous designs, like this:

So I combined that approach with Aprilynne’s composition, putting three easy, actually thumbnails above me in the thumbnail.

Hmm.

It didn’t look quite right.

I switched from our usual grid background to a gradient background like Aprilynne’s:

But something still felt off.

3. Troubleshooting

The thumbnails weren’t that visible, and the blank space around me looked too… blank.

I almost scrapped the idea.

Then I realised.

This design would only appeal to people who were already familiar with easy, actually.

How could I make this video compelling to the entirety of the podcast’s TAM (total addressable market)? That is, everyone interested in social media strategy – even if they’d never seen easy, actually?

View count seemed obvious: easy, actually had hit 5.6 million views in their first two months.

4. Adding text

So I shifted myself to the left, and added text saying ‘5.6 Million Views’.

And it looked…

…terrible.

There were three main problems with this composition:

1. It wasn’t clear where the viewer should look first

2. My eye-line was off

3. The easy, actually thumbnails were still hard to recognise

I liked the Roca One font though. Like a more restrained Cooper Black.

So I made three fixes:

1. Text to the top of the image

2. Removed one easy, actually thumbnail, and made the other two bigger

3. Found a more expressive photo, with my eye-line going straight at '5.63M’:

   

Much better!

I put myself to one side for an Option B:

But ultimately chose Option A for the symmetry + better eye-line.

5. Finishing touches

With the 20 minutes nearly up, I made two last changes to make the thumbnail ‘pop’:

1. Changing 5.63 Million to 5.6M

2. Underlining 5.6M, to draw the eye

It was time to get feedback.

6. Feedback

Jamie made some great suggestions which brought everything together:

1. Make the 5.6M text yellow, and the underline red

2. Make the underline seem more hand-drawn, Elizabeth Filips style

3. Add drop shadows to text & thumbnails

I was initially sceptical about having both red and yellow in there.

But it looked great! Very Quentin Tarantino.

Thumbnail wrapped.

Finally, we needed a good title.

I’d narrowed it down to three main options:

I wanted to go with “breaking youtube is easy, actually.”, combining two title formulas:

• easy, actually’s: ‘X is easy, actually’

• Paddy Galloway’s: ‘X broke YouTube’

  

But it felt a bit vague – ‘clever but not clear’, as Jamie said.

So we went with How to Get 5.6M Views in 2 Months. We’re still testing titles though.

The video did well by our standards: 1/10 in YouTube Studio, and with 200+ more views than usual after a couple of weeks. We also had a huge spike in watchtime.

More importantly at this stage (the podcast only has 500 subs) – I like how the packaging looks!

See you next time 👋

Gwilym

1. How to Make a Cheap Camera Cinematic by Zachary Silva - Beautifully executed in just 5 minutes. This video nails the ‘authentic’, direct style that’s having a resurgence right now.

2. How to Master the Art of Filmmaking by Dan Mace - At first I thought this was a 10-min video about Dan’s work with MrBeast. Turns out it’s a THREE-HOUR filmmaking masterclass! This could easily be a full course.