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Channel Art Guidelines – YouTube Help

Transcript

Today I want to talk to you about your YouTube channel.

The reason this came to be for me was because I revamped the Blog Marketing Academy YouTube channel not too long ago. When I started doing more regular videos, I went over there and sort of set things up. I got some things I’ve wanted to do with the cover art over there and that’s what I want to talk to you about now because before I started recording this video, I went over to my other YouTube channel which is for my Tech site and I revamped it.

I basically want to get that YouTube channel going again. I hadn’t had a new video on it in about four months and not only that, it’s a decent resource because I’ve got over 4,000 YouTube subscribers over there on that channel. I have like 5 or 6 million video views and it’s a channel that definitely deserves more attention than what I’ve been giving it. So, I went over there and took it from the old style YouTube channel and I went over to this one channel design. I think that’s what they’re calling it. And so, basically, you have a big cover art thing across the top and then you can set up a trailer video which advertises why to subscribe to the channel and stuff like that.

But I want to talk to you about that channel art because it can be really annoying. If you look at the guidelines (and I’ll link to the guidelines along with this video) but, you need to specifically make that cover art image to a certain size and it’s not very intuitive because the part that we see in our computers is just this little horizontal stripe thing but the actual image needs to be a lot larger than that because basically what they’re doing is having one image that works on multiple formats including televisions. So, you need to make it 2120 pixels x 1192 pixels.

And so, if you go over my screen here for a minute you’ll see what I’ve done… It’s PhotoShop here. I literally have this image at the exact size that they said they wanted. And I opened up a blank image, made it to exactly that size, 2120×1192. I created a new layer, I just found a screenshot that I had… this is an iPhoto I took a long time ago… a keyboard that seem techy related; so I went ahead and put that as a background, took my logo in here. Now, the one thing you’re going to need to do, and if you look at the image they give you in the channel art guidelines, is you need your logo or anything you want to be seen on all platforms to be right smacked in the middle of this image. You’re going to have a lot of space out here around it that doesn’t really have anything – because, generally, the only people that are going to see the entire image is the ones viewing it on a TV. If they’re on a computer, they’re not going to see that. So, with that in mind, you want to make sure that image shows up right here.

Now, the other thing is that if you don’t quite align this right like where exactly are the lines here to put this logo inside them, when you upload your image to your YouTube channel, it will show you right there what is going to be visible. And if you look then and it’s like slightly off alignment, then you  just go back over to PhotoShop, drag the logo a little bit more and make sure that it fits within view and then re-upload it and then it will come back to you.

So, that’s basically what I did here. It’s little bit difficult, Google did not make this one very easy, but that’s what I did. It works out pretty well. The end result being; what you see right not over on the screen. So, that’s what it looks like on the computer. This is now the PCMech YouTube channel and it has a nice little image here and I made this little icon for it and kind’a works out. I think it will work pretty well.

Hopefully, that helped a little bit to at least see how the channel art guidelines sort of translate into the real world when you’re actually making the image. If it does… Cool! 🙂

 


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