Speaker 1: I made only three videos on this channel, and all of them got over 100,000 views. Believe it or not, it all comes down to these four steps. I already explained how I use storytelling to get more retention. Now it's time for step two. You ready?

Speaker 2: If no one clicks on the video, they don't watch. The point of a thumbnail is to create a journey. From the thumbnail to even the title. High quality images are crucial. Add some intrigue. And make people want to know what happens next. It's making sense that we need to make better thumbnails.

Speaker 1: I don't mean these guys are wrong, but let's be real. You already know all these basics. Even if you don't, they're just common sense. Do you really need to be told to keep your thumbnail simple five different times in five different videos from five different gurus? I guess not. So here's the full guide on how to actually make a thumbnail that gets clicks. We will go from the design rules I use to thumbnail types. Getting inspiration. Branding. Word choice. Visual effects. Testing. The first rule is pretty simple, but it takes your design from a mess to a piece of art. Just take any popular YouTuber's thumbnail and draw four lines like that. Do you see what's going on there? Almost all of them, even my thumbnails, follow these lines at the core. Well, you might know the rule of thirds from photography, which basically says put the objects over these lines to get a nice shot. That's why almost every channel has a thumbnail like this. Because it works. So just add those lines to guide you throughout the entire design. Trust me. It's a game changer. We'll come back to the layout. But before that, you need to choose a color. You probably heard people talking about the color wheel. The idea is to get enough contrast in your thumbnail. You should choose two opposite colors from this circle. And if you dive deeper, you would see there are more techniques that's used to get fancy combinations. But here's the plot. I don't use them. There's a much easier way to find a color for your thumbnail and for your entire channel. So here's what I do. Take any color you like as your main color. I chose yellow for mine. Then add three more. One black, one white, and one in the middle. You can slightly tweak these to match your main color. But I like to keep it simple. And finally, add another color to highlight things. There we go. A color palette. That's actually useful. Even though my sister says it looks like a Minecraft house made from diamond and gold. I like it. You can use it in your editing too. But that's for another video. Now you might ask, wouldn't that be too repetitive if I use the same colors in all my thumbnails? That's right. The solution is simple. Just change the highlight color. That way you can keep the fresh vibes while still being recognizable by your viewers. It's simple. Just pick a basic font that isn't overused. And you're good to go. For those who are asking, the font I use is called Eastman. And it looks pretty good. All right. We talked about the rule of thirds and how to make a good layout. It's nice. But you can't just invent something new in this square for every single video, right? Well, you don't have to. If you paid attention while browsing on the homepage, you may already have catched some thumbnail types that most YouTubers are using. Shout out to this legend for breaking them down into 21 categories. But here's the best 10 that will work for 99% of the time. YouTubers like Airak and MrBeast use that style all the time. But even if you're not an entertainment channel, you can still use this type of thumbnail. Take a look at this. Hey, what's he doing? Dude, put that chicken down. Oh, this is how airplane engines are tested. They test it with chickens. See, that's the target emotion of these thumbnails. Just shock the viewer while scrolling on the homepage and make them click. It's easier to say. But think about what you have in your video that would shock the viewers. Of course, big things always get more attention. Don't take this out of context. People are curious to know what a $50 million house looks like or how this dude earns $900 just by listening to music until they realize he doesn't. Among all those overedited and screaming thumbnails, another way to stand out is keeping it really simple. Just an interesting chat from Discord, a chair, a red button, or this thing. Whatever this is may get more attention. It's usually just a screenshot from the video and a simple question that makes you curious to know what's going on. Channels like DrInsanity or Zack are doing it so good that it makes it impossible to skip. If you're a small channel in a popular niche, social hacking is probably the best way to gain the first traction. Basically, take the face of a famous person in your niche and slap it into your thumbnail. Oh, the video must be about that person, though. Otherwise, it's called clickbait. All the videos you see with MrBeast's face are using this strategy, and it works pretty well. Even Dream used it in his first videos. So don't underestimate the power of a popular face. All right, let's speed things up. This is the style you see all over YouTube. Just the creator next to something bigger. Yeah, the one I use in this channel. Basically, an interesting text at the top to give more context about the video. It can be anything to compare to. Before and after. Something cheap versus expensive. iPhone versus Android. Fin versus AI. You got the point. Blurring the main character or the final result. So people have to click to find out. I don't know if you realize, but all of those viral thumbnails that I showed in this video, and even all the ones that you saw on your homepage, have one thing in common. They're not just using one of these formulas. They're combining them. Look at MrWho's The Bosses series, where he buys every release of a tech, like iPhone or PlayStation. I showed you this in big numbers, but if you look closer, you would see that he also uses header comparison and even social hacking formulas all at once. Or take a look at this chair. Which types could you spot? It's branded because of their logo right here. It's simple because, well, there's nothing else than a chair. And it's using social hacking because everyone saw this chair at least once. We can even include it as a weird object if you think chairs are weird. Even I used big numbers and header styles in my first video on this channel. I wouldn't say it's very creative, but it worked for sure. I can go on with all the thumbnails that I show, but the idea is choose two or three styles, combine them, and try to stick to it for around five videos. It will make your audience understand it's your style. But don't stick to it for too long because using the same formula hundred times would probably make the viewers feel like you just keep repeating yourself and it will lower the chances of click. Unless you're a reaction channel. Well, it's one of the most popular advice that you can hear from YouTube gurus. Just look what other YouTubers in your niche are doing and try to replicate it. But I completely disagree with that and I have evidence to support my opinion. Take my first video as an example. Trying YouTube shorts is definitely not a unique video idea. What about the thumbnail? That style seems to work for many people. Well, in that case, you're a smart guy. Just copy what works, right? The problem is you're not the only one. That is the worst thing to do. If you see many similar thumbnails from different channels about the same topic, hopping on that train is probably not a good idea. If so many channels are already doing that, it's the cliche thumbnail now and your audiences are basically the same. So there's no reason for people to click on your zero view video instead of their 100k. Even worse, people will probably notice they're too similar and you might become just a copycat of your competitor. So what should you do then? You can't reinvent the wheel for each new video, right? Well, just kidding. Of course, it's not really possible to do that. If you're posting consistently, sooner or later you'll run out of thumbnail ideas. And when that happens, you should just look at channels outside your niche. For that video, I went through the channels I follow in completely different niches and came up with this thumbnail. Same thing applies to almost all of them. So get inspiration from the channels with different niches. That will make your video stand out from the crowd because your audience with those channels are different. But it's the same with all these other channels. So when it appears alongside those, yours will be much more likely to get more attention. Experimenting with new things is always good, but just try to keep the core elements like colors, fonts, and style consistent. That makes your audience notice your video on the home screen way faster and with enough time, boosts the CTR. This is where you got to be creative. You can use a big number if that suits your video, a bold statement opposite of a common belief or just a title that represents your video. If nothing fits well, leaving it blank is always an option. Congratulations, you just learned how to make a viral thumbnail. Right? I don't think so. Look, you learned the theory, which is really important, but it doesn't mean anything if you don't know how to use it. Most people will probably close the video at this point, take all that information, and go make a thumbnail like this. But if you stick around, you'll learn how I turn this into this. Hey Finn, what do you call it? Photoshop, baby. Photoshop, baby. How do you say it like that? With just a few simple effects and some ancient Photoshop sorcery that I learned from this guy. Yeah, hey everyone, I'm still here. Got stuck in this timeline. Dude, you need to work on your jokes. Photoshop. After choosing your concept and sketching a detailed draft on paper, open Photoshop, create a new project, get your lines, add your character, text, a nice background, and other elements. It already looks better than that. Make the text fancier by double-clicking here. Then change the color, add inner glow, outer glow, and whatever this is. Just tweak the settings to make the unique effect you want. Here are the adjustments that I usually do if you want to get a similar style. After you're happy with the look, save it as a new style to use it next time. You can do that for other elements too. It's the effect that I used in this thumbnail to bend this chart. You can bend anything by just clicking the corner of an image and choosing this button. Now, you can warp it however you want. Looks good, but they seem too distracting in the background. Let's add some blur. Select the image, filter, blur, Gaussian blur. That might work, but we can do even better. Let's try again. Select image, filter, pixelate, mosaic. Oh, we made it worse. Again. Again. That's it. Even though these blurs might not suit this thumbnail, they work very well in some cases. So it's nice to know how to use them. All right, let's move on. We fixed these images, but the background is too shiny. It's almost hard to read the text. So we need to make it darker. Take the brush. Whoa, whoa, calm down. You don't have to be a Bob Ross to use this. Okay, just try to keep up. Make your brush big and soft. Reduce the flow to something like 5% and increase smooth. Now open a new layer on top of your background and start painting behind text, character, and things like that. Okay, we're getting somewhere. That background image looks nice, but I don't really like the color. I said, but I don't really like the color. How to change it? Glad you asked. Select the background, click image, adjustments, hue, and saturation. Here you can choose a specific color to change or tweak the entire image. Noise. We're almost done, but I'm looking so unnatural over there. I mean the text above my head is shiny. There should be some light reflections in reality, right? Pick the selection tool. Select the thing. Create a new layer. Take the brush, make it smaller. Pick a nice color and brush over where the light is coming from. Oh, don't forget to change the layer blending style to overlay. If it doesn't work for your image, try other styles and colors too. After everything's done, I like to send it to my phone and play around with the colors in Lightroom. So it goes from this to this. Before publishing the video, you need to test how it looks on YouTube homepage. To do that, go to thumbsup.tv. Add your title and thumbnail and see if it looks good. If it does, you're good. If not, go back to the drawing board again. But hopefully it does. Here it is. I know, it's probably not the best way to make a thumbnail, but that's just how I do it at the moment. It will definitely change with time. But for now, this is all I do and it works for me. So may work for you as well. Photoshop baby.