Establish a professional first impression for your YouTube channel, and create a YouTube Cover Banner with Adobe Photoshop!
Take advantage of your YouTube cover banner by elevating your channel’s professionalism, building brand awareness, and getting visitors to take action.
A YouTube cover banner is the first thing people see when they visit your profile, and if you value your YouTube channel, you’re going to want to create a great first impression!
Don’t know where to start, not a problem, we have you covered.
Whether you’re looking for a few tips, or you need step by step instructions, our goal is to help you leverage this digital space and look more professional.
Don’t have the time or desire to create a cover banner from scratch, no worries. Speed up the process by downloading the FREE Photoshop Template + Sizing Graphic located at the bottom of this page.
YouTube Cover Banners
A YouTube cover banner is the header graphic for a YouTube channel. This digital real-estate is a great location create a great first impression, establish brand awareness, and give viewers a feel for your brand.
Cover banner artwork can be as simple as a logo or background image, but there’s a few things you might want to consider in order to get the most out of your banner artwork.
To do this, we advise that you design a cover banner that is not only clear, but also grabs attention by using a few of these key elements:
YouTube Cover Banner – Key Elements
- Channel name
- Brief channel description: brand tagline and slogan, content pillars
- Logo
- High quality images
- On-brand colors and fonts
- Call-to-Action (CTA)
Channel Name
Your channel name should be prominently displayed in the mobile safe area of your YouTube cover banner artwork. This way your channel name is visible and not cropped out of the image.
In regard to fonts, we suggest using a bold font that clearly communicates your channel name, and helps build name recognition.
If you’re not sure where the mobile/desktop safe area is, please watch our video tutorial above to learn more.
Channel Description
A brief channel description should be added to your cover banner to help your audience understand what your channel’s about. Your channel description could be a company tagline, a slogan, or content pillars. This is also a great location to indicate your publishing schedule if you publish videos regularly.
Logo
Using your logo in your cover banner artwork is a great way to establish brand recognition and awareness. Be sure that your logo is sharp, high resolution, and contrasts the surrounding background elements.
High Quality Images
High quality images are important to looking professional and on brand. but be sure to use the largest and most crisp imagery you own.
We always recommend using your own high resolution imagery and graphics to stay unique and on brand.
In addition to high quality images, it’s a good idea to use images and graphics that are relevant to your channel’s content.
Reason being, the goal of using images in the cover banner is to create a visual que for visitors.
For example, if you have a cooking channel, it would be fitting to use a photo of food in your cover banner.
If you don’t have anything readily available, you might consider using high resolution, and copyright free photos from the website Unsplash.com. Unsplash has a great database of high quality images that are free to use and download.
On-Brand Colors and Fonts
If you have established any type branding for your business be sure to keep it consistent with your YouTube channel. Since your YouTube cover banner is one of the first thing that visitors see when exploring your YouTube content, it’s the perfect location to reinforce your brand recognition and awareness.
The idea here is that when people see your brand’s colors and fonts at a glance, they immediately begin to recognize your channel.
Call to Action
A call to action is a great way to put your cover banner to work for your channel. The call to action is a simple statement that asks your visitor and fans to take action.
This could be as simple as asking visitors to “Subscribe”, download a FREE pdf, or visit a website.
We highly recommend that you to take advantage of this key space, and using it to encourage visitors to take action!
Conclusion
Whether you’re just starting out, or you’ve been in the YouTube game for a while, use these key elements to leverage more out of your cover banner.
Use our list of key elements and our video tutorial to help you leverage the most out of your cover banner artwork today.
YouTube Cover Banner Video Tutorial
Ready to create your own professional cover banner?
Follow along with our step by step Photoshop tutorial to create your own YouTube Cover Banner.
— Video Chapters —
0:00 – Intro
0:20 – Key Elements
0:35 – Photoshop Tutorial begins
03:10 – Photoshop Document Size
03:35 -Reset Photoshop UI
05:00 – Cover Banner sizes explained (TV Display, Desktop Max/Min, Tablet, Mobile)
08:24 – Adding a Background Color
09:00 -Adding a Channel Name
10:20 – Adding a Channel Description
12:15 – Adding a Cover Banner Portrait/Headshot
13:35 – Erasing the background
19:30 – Adding a banner background image
22:20 – Adding a Gradient Map to your background image
25:10 – Adding Shapes
37:25 – Adding a Call-to-Action
39:22 – Adding more graphic Shapes
42:12 – Saving your cover banner image for YouTube
43:04 – Uploading your cover banner image to YouTube
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