Canva To Create Scroll Stopping Thumbnails For Youtube (Tutorial)

Did you know that people don’t always read the title of your YouTube video?

When they decide if they’re going to watch it, what they actually look at your thumbnail, that’s what’s going to catch their eye. 

And that’s oftentimes how they base their decision on whether or not they’re going to watch your video or scroll past it.

That’s why creating a really, eye catching scroll stopping thumbnail is so important on YouTube.

Let’s face it, you spent a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of creativity in writing the script and recording your video and editing and all that good stuff, you know, and you’re putting it up there because you want people to see it. 

So let’s talk about thumbnails that are actually going to make them see it. 

So if you’re looking to grow your business, please subscribe to our channel and ring the bell to get notified each week when we post new videos before we jump in.

My name is Jeanne Willson and I own a marketing agency. And along with my business partner, we started Six Figure Business Coaching to help more entrepreneurs learn how to better run a business and market their business. 

It’s one of my passions to help entrepreneurs grow because I had people who helped me grow. 

Importance of a Good Thumbnail on YouTube

I hope you know the value of YouTube. And I Think that’s probably why you’re here. It’s so so powerful as far as a marketing tool, because not only does it provide a platform for you to showcase who you are, and to show people what you know. 

But it’s also a great platform for SEO for the search engines to find you. 

However, in order to effectively use YouTube, you need to have people watch your videos. And one of the ways that you can do that one of the best ways that you can do that is by creating an eye catching scroll stopping thumbnail. 

And don’t forget that you can share this with your virtual assistant this video so that they can learn how to use Canva to create an eye catching scroll stopping thumbnail for your channel. So let’s get to it. So let’s jump right in here. 

So how do you make a thumbnail?

And today we’re going to create this thumbnail image, I’m gonna give you all the elements and talk a little bit about why what’s important and what things to look for. 

So we’re over here in Canva. And if you haven’t already signed up for an account, it’s free, which is fantastic. We have an upgraded version because it has some really nice features. But you can do this on the free version.

So the first thing we’re going to do is click on Create a design, and we’re going to click on YouTube thumbnail. And the reason we do that’s because it automatically has it set up at the exactly the right dimensions that we need. 

So that’s just a great little shortcut there. So let’s see. Soon this thumbnail, you’re going to want to in order to get it to be something that people stop and say “Wow”

 

 

You certainly want it to be bright and eye-catching. 

We always use our branded colors, but try to use them in a bold way you can see that purple. But then we also use the red YouTube logo because this is about something you use on YouTube. 

 

So I like to use a logo that represents whatever company that we’re talking about. 

Now remember, you can show this to your virtual assistant who can actually do this for you, which is fantastic. You know, you two may have to have a conversation about how you want it to look and what elements you want to include. 

Incorporate, but this can absolutely be a training video for you. So like I said, you want to think about your thumbnail if you know, bright and eye-catching, you want to be a little different, you want to use something because again, you gotta stop that scroll, so you don’t want it to just look like everyone else’s.

Choose a Photo That Would Stand Out

So one of the elements that you can do is a silly kind of crazy face. And this is not my best luck, but it is a crazy face. And I want to show you some of the faces that you can just practice with and take some still shots because then you might be able to use those on your thumbnail.

And I would do this at the same time that you’re doing your video so that you’re wearing the same clothes and your hair looks the same and things you know you want to do.

Some faces like you might want to do a happy face, a sad face, a surprised face, a disgusted face or an angry face.

And just see which one comes out you know the best like this is more of a normal face.

You know, surprised face. I’m not sure what that faces might be a scared face.

But anyhow, you know, these are gonna, these are gonna be the things that people kind of pick-out and they go, “Oh my gosh, look at that face, I gotta see what that video is all about.” Because sometimes they’ll judge your video, as I said before, based on, not on the topic, but the picture.

Choose Correct Wordings

The other thing that you want to think about is your wording.

Now, when you decide what words you’re going to put on your thumbnail, it doesn’t have to be exactly what your title is.

For your video, it can be something, and we’d like it to be something that was maybe three, four or five words that at best, because you want it to be something that they that you can make really big. And you want it to be bold, and you want it to be something that they can pick up really quickly as people because people you know, we all have a short attention span.

And it’s so as we scroll, we kind of just really look at stuff at a glance.

So you want it to be really, really something that people can can catch on first glance, but so you don’t want to use script fonts, because they’re just too hard to read. You can you know, even if you widen the spacing between the letters or made it bigger or older, it’s still I would, I would just make a rule to stay away from scripted fonts.

Just because they’re just too hard to read for people, you know, when you have seconds, just split seconds, to really impact them and get them to stop and watch your video. So keep that in mind.

So some of the things that you can do that are kind of fun with your text is you can make some 3d text.

I can’t do a lot of 3d in Canva, I will show you what you can do. But if you have other software that you use, if you have Photoshop or something else, you can create to try and create depth so it feels a little bit layered.

You can put fun arrows in here to accent where you want people to look. And you can use knockout text.

The Step by Step Process

So let’s get started in talking about how we created this. So up here, I would title your design, thumbnail YouTube video, and you can call it whatever you want.

But, and then over here, you can see where it says if your changes have been saved or not. This is where you can undo something you’ve done something wrong, and you want to go back and undo it.

So what I did here was just to open up a document. So I just went to file, created a new design, and I just made this 600 by 600pixels. That’s just a pretty good size. So all you would have to do if you were in the home section is click Create a design custom dimensions, and then 600 by 600, create a new design.

And then what I did was I picked out which picture I wanted to use. And I went over here to upload and you can click on upload an image, and then from your device, or a Google Drive or Dropbox or whatever. And so here’s where I picked the image from. And then I clicked upload.

So as soon as I click on it, it automatically shows up on my screen on the right hand side. So now I’ve selected this picture, you can see that because it has the circles on the side on the corners and the lines.

And then I’m going to go up here to do effects and click on background remover. This is such a great simple tool to use to get rid of the background and it does a really good job. Look At that. And now this is actually fairly new. You can also use an eraser to just clean it up a little bit. So if I go down here, I could see those little hairs all over the place.

 

So if I just put my eraser there and just click gets rid of a few imperfections. And I can see, and then just click Done.

So now you have your picture of you, and no background, which is awesome and so easy to use. So we’re going to go back to our thumbnail.

So for the background, what I did was actually take a photo on my phone. So if you have an iPhone, you can click on the button on the right hand side, if you’re looking at your phone, click on the button on the right hand side, and then the top button on the left hand side at the same time. And they take a picture, whatever is on your cell phone screen, and then I upload it, you can see it right here.

I need frames, such great tool frames.  And here you’ve got a cell phone screen. There’s also tablets, and laptops, and all kinds of cool stuff you can do with frames. So I’m going to drag this picture over here, and it automatically jumps in the frame.

So now I can change the size of this because I want it to be big for the background. And I also want to tilt it to make it more interesting. And then I want to put it over here. And then I can go back to position backward. So now it’s in the background. And one more thing we want to do too, we want to make it more transparent. So it’s not, you know, so people see it in the background, but it’s not so crazy obvious. Okay, then let’s, let’s copy that. Let’s get Okay, I gotta move myself all the way, you gotta be careful because I want to grab my picture and put it in there. But I don’t want it to do that. So we’re going to take this and we’re going to copy it. And again, you can I just click Command C on my computer.

 

 

Now one nice thing about the upgraded version is if you have set up the section that is your branded colors, then it will bring up your branded colors here. But this is also a really nice feature is it brings up the colors that we’re using in the document. So I’m gonna make this my dark purple, so it jumps out at people.

 

And I’m gonna see this text is what our branded text is, which is a Rhema dry. So if we go here and click context, same thing because we have the upgraded version, it brings up the three fonts that are part of our brand. So I don’t have to search for them, they do give you some really nice font combinations that you could start with if you wanted to, again, I would stay away from the fancy ones. But you could do that, or you could type in any font in here and they’ve got loads. And if they don’t have the one that’s part of your brand, you know, use something similar.

If you’re going to stick with the free version, if you are going to go with the paid version, you can actually upload your own branded fonts if they don’t have them here. Slots of good features. So I’m gonna click here. And then I’m Going to Scroll Stopping Thumbnails. Okay, and let’s see, we want to do a couple things to this. Sometimes you have to click out of it to click back in it to move it, I want to move there, then I want to make this white.

Actually, what I do in that one note, I changed it to a light purple, one of our branded colors. I’m gonna make it bigger. Just gonna see what size I made it here. Now you can see that it’s too spread out, there’s too much spacing. So we can go over here, this is our spacing tool. So the letters are fine, they’re spacing, but if I wanted to stretch them out, I could put the line height is just too high. So we want that to stay much closer.

And then we also want to make the snow we could line it up, left align it, I think on here or right aligned it open, I put a dash there. Oh, and I think that was capitals too, wasn’t it? It is. So we could do all caps here. Right here, we can select that and it makes them all capitals.

Bring it out here because I could see the s was falling down. And then we certainly want to make this purple behind it bigger so we can see it. We’re gonna move all over as well. Oops. Okay, click up here to align it. We’re gonna right align it.

And then the next element I’m going to include is an arrow.

So we can go over here to elements and change this. And you can pick all these different cool types of arrows. I think I picked this one. But you know, you can have some fun with this. And then I made it red and I turned, it was red, and purple.

Now it’s purple. Okay, so I made it my purple, you could make it red to make it stand out even more and bring it down here. So maybe we want to one thing you can do too is if you select two pieces, like I want to select this purple background and then the text and I can go up here and group them because I like how they look but I just want to move them up a bit. Be over a bit. And then I can put my arrow here. And then you know, you can always drag the corners to make it bigger or smaller.

And then the next element I want is YouTube, on the YouTube logo, and they actually have a lot of logos in your as well. So I’m just gonna grab this one and turn it a little bit. So people know that we’re using YouTube. And then one thing I didn’t include, but I could is Canva is actually the Canva logo itself too.

So we could put that in there because we’re obviously creating this in Canva. And you can tell that if you wanted to that way, maybe a little bit and there you go, scroll stopping thumbnails, the nice big crazy picture of me in there. So now what you do is just click download, we’re gonna leave it as a PNG that’s perfectly fine. This one happens to have two pages. So we’re just going to select Page one, click Done, download and you are ready to Download your scroll stopping thumbnail. 

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And until I see you again. Dream Big!