Designing Youtube Banner

Creating a YouTube Channel ArtYouTube is one of the most popular websites on the web; its popularity draws from registered users being able to upload their own material. It has now further improved these, now allowing users to create essentially their own channel. This has grown in popularity, Funtoys Collector who ranks as the top channel on YouTube racked up 517.3m views on YouTube in January 2015 alone. This is a staggering amount of viewers.

This the Funtoys Collectors channel art, as you can see it is not the most professional looking graphic design, but it does fit the channels connotation. If you are going to create a more professional channel, you need a high quality banner that reflects that. Below is a design for Student Lifehacks channel art.

The recommended resolution for the banner is 2560 x 1440, and it also has a safe area which is in the centre of the canvas, this is because the display photo is placed right above the banner which takes some of the space, another reason for this is that the banner loads up different for different devices, mobile devices which have narrower screen will cut off a portion of the banner, hence the need to centre whatever it may be you are placing. This banner was created using Photoshop, but there is also a banner template, exclusively provided by Youtube.

Here is the canvas size or resolution; here you can change the resolution, whether smaller or bigger. As you can see it is under the recommended size, but this is relative to the objects or text added. But it is still important to use a high resolution canvas.

As you can see here, this is what occurs when you dont centre your design, within the safe area, in the mobile version of your channel art, a huge portion of it becomes cut off.

This is a much better placement of design as the text is still legible, even though a portion of it is cut off.

ReferencesYouTube's top 100 channels have more than doubled their views in a year | Technology | The Guardian. 2015. YouTube's top 100 channels have more than doubled their views in a year | Technology | The Guardian. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/02/youtube-top-100-channels-funtoys-pewdiepie-taylor-swift-doubled-views. [Accessed 12 March 2015].