YouTube is a very competitive platform. There are thousands of hopeful vloggers out there looking to find fame and fortune on YouTube, so making yourself stand out from the rest of the competition isn’t easy. Most of those who come across your channel will be visitors who are there to enjoy the video content that you produce. However, while getting people to your channel is one thing, encouraging them to stay around and become a long-term supporter is quite another.
Making good use of channel art is one of the simplest yet most effective things you can do to convert more visitors into long-term fans.
What is Channel Art?
When visitors arrive on your channel, you have a great deal of control of what they see in terms of the layout. You can add a custom color scheme, and even some custom images, to your channel’s page. With the right channel art in place, you can watch as your subscriber numbers skyrocket, with only minimal effort on your part.
Channel art is sometimes known as a cover. It is this that people will see first when they visit your channel’s YouTube page. The main choice you have to make here is whether you will use a banner that makes use of photography, or one that uses a logo or other artwork instead. There are a number of free YouTube banner creator services online which you can use to produce a high-quality banner.
Branding
You can think of your YouTube channel as being like a brand. As such, you want to make sure to promote it in a particular way. Namely, you want your channel art to be big and bold so that it draws the viewer’s eye and is memorable.
Another important consideration when treating your channel like a brand is that of consistency. A brand can only build and sustain a good reputation if it delivers consistent and reliable results. You should take steps to ensure that you have complete control over where your brand’s logo appears, you don’t want it adorning anything that you disapprove of.
Size Matters
This is perhaps the most important consideration when you are designing your channel art. If you don’t get your sizes and proportions right, all of your careful design work will go to waste. It is important to realize that your cover art might not display the same across all devices. The only way to be sure how it will look on any device is to open the page up on that device.
YouTube’s official guidelines recommend that you upload a single image of 2560 x 1440 pixels to be used across all devices, the minimum dimensions allowed are 2048 x 1152 pixels. The file size cannot be above 4 MB, so keep this in mind before you start throwing together a bunch of ultra high-resolution images to use.
The artwork you choose for your YouTube channel can make a significant difference to the number of visitors who go on to become subscribers and long-term viewers. Think of your YouTube channel as a brand and approach your artwork design as an exercise in promoting your brand.
