How to make a YouTube Watermark in Adobe Photoshop

In this tutorial we’re going to show you how to make a YouTube watermark in Adobe photoshop.

If you’re not using the YouTube watermark for your channel, you could be missing out on potential subscribers.

What is a YouTube Watermark?

The YouTube Watermark is a small graphic that displays in the video player, and allows viewers to subscribe to a channel without having to exit the video.

YouTube allows channels to upload a 150×150 pixel square graphic of their choice. With that said, we recommended using a traditional YouTube branded watermark graphic, or a custom design.

YouTube Watermark Guidelines

To prevent a watermark from uploading blurry or pixelated, we advise uploading a graphic that is larger then 150×150 pixels. The watermark should then retain its sharpness after YouTube has compressed the image to fit in the video player.

Watermarks are visible on all devices, however, the watermark is only functional on computers. Mobile devices and Tablets will display the watermark in the video player, you just wont be able to click it.

YouTube Watermark Display Times

Upload a watermark to YouTube and you will see three different display options to select from. These three display options are:

• End of video: The watermark will be visible for the last 15 seconds of the video.
• Custom start time: The watermark will display at the time you choose.
• Entire video: The watermark will appear throughout the entire video.

When it comes to selecting a display time, we suggest choosing an option that best fits the majority of your videos.

Our personal preference is to use the “entire video” option as seems to be the most beneficial and consistent approach for our own videos.

YouTube Watermark Design Tips

If you’re designing your own watermark, you will want to follow YouTube’s specifications and create it within a square format. If you are wanting to use a rectangle watermark, you will need to be sure and design it within a square container.

These same principle applies to other shapes as well. As long as the watermark fits within a square, it can be an image, logo, graphic, or abstract shapes.

YouTube allows .png graphics which means that you are able to use transparency within your watermark. YouTube does apply a very subtle amount of transparency to watermarks by default and this cannot be adjusted.

If you prefer that your watermark design utilize transparency or be less opaque, you should take full advantage of transparency.

If you plan to use words in your design, you should consider using a large bold font. This way your text is not too small to be legible due to YouTube downscaling your watermark.

Make a YouTube Watermark using Adobe Photoshop

Now that you know what a watermark is, and how it can benefit your channel, we encourage you to make your own YouTube watermark using Adobe Photoshop.

In this tutorial we show you how to make three different watermark styles to fit your brand and channel.

We’ll show you how to make two square watermarks using traditional YouTube branding, and a third rectangular option that is minimal and in your brand colors.

Feel free to follow along with the tutorial step by step, but we also want to encourage you to have fun and design your own unique design.

If you don’t have the time or desire to make your own watermark in Photoshop, you can download our .psd project files and all three watermarks for FREE.

A link to all of these downloadable assets can be located below.

We hope this was helpful and that your YouTube channel can start taking advantage of this simple, but powerful feature today!