How to Create an Eye-Catching YouTube Video Thumbnail [+templates]

Video transcript

So you clicked on our video. That’s proof enough that these methods work!

Hi, I’m Nicole with Bambiz. Today I’m going to talk to you about how to create a YouTube thumbnail. It’s really important to remember that when you’re creating these YouTube thumbnails you want to make them clickable but you don’t want to make them clickbait.

You want to make sure that your thumbnails are eye-catching enough that they don’t get lost in the sea of videos, but you also want to make sure that they are actually accurate.

A few things that you need to stick to are the dimensions that YouTube sets for you which are 1280 pixels by 720 pixels.

You want to make sure that you’re using photos of yourself especially if it’s with your name associated with your law firm.

Then you want to make sure that your text is easily readable. We don’t want to be using crazy fonts that people can’t understand or it’s hard to read where you have to squint.

You also want to remember while writing this text that, yes, you may have a question as your topic but you want to try to change that into a statement. Now I understand that there are some instances where you might have to actually use a question rather than a statement.

For example, “What is elder law?”

You should also remember that when you’re creating the background for your image that it needs to be eye-catching but it doesn’t need to be distracting.

So let’s get started…

How to Create a Thumbnail in Canva

Okay so let’s just dive right into actually creating this thumbnail. For most people, they want to go straight to Canva. There’s a free version. This is the paid version that we’re using so some things may not be available but some things you can find in the free version as well.

Go into Canva and search YouTube thumbnails. Now, this gives you a range of all the different thumbnails that you could possibly use and you can click your style.

These are already set to those dimensions that I was talking about, the 1280×720 pixel range.

So these are really easy to just edit. You just click on one.

Let’s find a simple one.

The nice thing about this specific thumbnail is that it is one color in the background and there is clearly a place for a logo. It’s really easy in terms of just changing it and there’s a clear space for you to plug your picture in.

Now the great thing with this is that you can obviously pull this in and create this a little bit different or you can even make this way bigger if you want to.

Then what you can do is you can use your picture. I’m going to use our fantastic CEO, Jim Blake. You’re just going to plug and place the picture in there. Then you can also plug your logo in here.

You can use this top area or not. Or you can just change this to your law firm’s website.

Then you can also just click on the background and change the color. We can make this our branding colors. There are many options to make these pop.

You can add a lift and instead of having this, you could obviously go into elements here you can use something like that.

You can use something like that where you can change the colors of it up here. You have many options.

Then when you get done and you’re ready to download it you’re gonna go Share you’re going to come over to Download and you’re going to make sure that you download it as a png. That’s the best type of file to use for online and you’re just going to download it.

Now the last thing that I want to talk about is clickable versus clickbait. This thumbnail that I created here of our wonderful coach Amy.

There’s nothing wrong with it it has every aspect that we’re looking for. However, this thumbnail is more eye-catching and has all the same elements.

Elevate it so that when you’re looking on YouTube which do you want to click on?

>> Don’t forget to download our free YouTube thumbnail templates! <<

If you’re interested in getting started on your YouTube journey, but you’re not really sure of the content that you should be posting, head over to let us help you get started today.

To learn more about how we can help with your Elder Law or Estate Planning firm’s marketing, schedule a free 15-minute call with us