YouTube Channel banner tutorial Video

Easy to follow Canva YouTube Banner tutorial so you can create your own beautiful and properly sized YouTube banner in Canva.

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🕒Timestamps🕒
00:00 Start
1:39 Channel banner example
2:00 YouTube channel banners on devices
2:56 YouTube channel banner size
3:21 Safe area size
3:49 Image formats
4:10 Designing your channel banner in Canva
8:45 adding elements to your youtube channel banner
10:32 What text you need to add to your YouTube channel banner
15:05 Uploading your YouTube channel banner in YouTube studio

YouTube Channel banner tutorial Video – Video Transcript

Hello and welcome to the live stream whether you are joining live with me now, or if you are catching us on the replay. Today we are joining my two loves, we are talking about how do you create a YouTube channel banner in Canva?

Canva and YouTube, and we’re bringing it all together today. I’m going to walk you through a tutorial, showing you how to do it in Canva, not only how to design it, but also features that you need to know about because there are features that you need to know about in order to make this successful.

For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sara Nguyen, and I help you build your business using video on social media with ease. Now, whether you are live with us now, or if you’re catching the replay, please, if you have questions, leave them in the chat or in the comment section below, and I’ll get to them at the end or after the live stream as well.

And as usual, all the links to everything that I mentioned will be in the description as well as timestamps. I’m really excited and we’re going to get right into today’s live stream. Let’s go over to my computer now and let’s talk a little bit about, let me just get this started, make sure it’s the right one. Okay, yes.

Let’s talk a little bit about YouTube channel banners, how to create in Canva and what you need to know. I’m going to step you through it so that you will know exactly what you need to do and have a beautiful channel banner so that people understand what your brand is all about.

Let’s go over to my computer now, okay, let’s go over to my computer now. Third time’s a charm. Here we go. This is an example of my channel banner. This is what’s currently on my channel.

When you go over to my YouTube channel, this is the image that you see. This is the whole image, but you need to be aware that when it comes to YouTube channel banners, that you have to be aware that size matters. And why does size matter?

Because the way that you would arrange all of the elements, whether it’s the text or the images will appear differently, whether your people are viewing your channel on desktop so as you can see that massive image there on desktop is, you know, it looks different here if people are looking at it on a computer.

It looks different if people are looking at it on a television, because people do view YouTube on a television these days, which is crazy, but it’s true. And it also looks different once again, if you’re viewing it on mobile. This is really important.

This is really important that you keep this in mind when you’re designing your channel banner so that it’s not cut off and the texts and the messages isn’t cut off on these different devices. And that you’re aware that if it is going to be cut off that this is what it’s going to look like.

With that said, what does a YouTube channel banner size need to be? I’m going to talk you through the sizes. Then I’m going to show you how do it in Canva. In terms of the actual size, the size is right here. 2,560 pixels wide by 1,440 pixels high.

That’s the entire size of the YouTube channel banner. That’s what it needs to be the entire size. But as you can see, I’ve got here, this yellow section here, this is the safe area. This is the boundary, and this is the area technically that you need to design within.

And this area here will show on all devices, whether it’s mobile, whether it’s desktop and obviously on television, ’cause you’ll see it all. This is where if you want to put any messages and you want to make sure that people can see them across all of your devices, this is where you want to design it within.

The other thing you need to keep in mind that these are the different size formats of the channel banner so you can do as a JPEG, PNG, Gif like a flat non-animated Gif, flat gift, or being BMP. And it also needs to be under six megabytes.

Otherwise, YouTube won’t let you upload it. With that said, how do we actually go in and design the channel better? I am in Canva. And as you know, if you are, have been on the channel for a while, I’m a big fan of Canva because they make it really, really easy to design anything and YouTube channel banners are no exception.

If you check out the link in my description, I’ve actually got a link to the Canva Pro version for 45 days. The usual trial period is 30 days. Whereas my trial, my link is for 45 days, but what I’m going to teach you, you can do on the free or the paid version as well so I’ve got your back.

I’ve got your back. Either way, so how do you create a channel banner? Let’s let’s talk through some things. Within Canva, one of the great things about them is if you type in the search for YouTube channel art, they’ve got a whole heap of really beautiful well-designed channel banners for you to get the juices started, right?

Because there’s nothing worse than particularly if you’re not a designer trying to design and come up with scratch. They’ve already got layouts. They’ve already got designs for you to work off in these templates, so you can change the images, you can change the text, which is really great. You would literally pick a design or you can start with a blank canvas.

Once we’ve gone there, so I’m going to say I clicked a blank canvas. What you can then do is, let’s do this, so what you can then do is you can with the blank canvas, I want you to hit the R button, right? Just trust me on this one.

When you hit the R button, Oh, that’s the T button, what’s going on? When you hit the R button what happens is you get a rectangle that’s put on your actual page, right? With this rectangle, what happens now? This is where you can start to size out the boundary of the page.

What we’re going to do is, what I’m going to do is as you can see, and it’s going to be quite subtle that I need to resize it so that in this area here is the safe banner site, the safe area where I can put anything within the design. And I know it’s going to appear across all of that limits.

I’m going to drag it. And as you can see, there’s this black dot and the width is changing as I’m dragging it. I want to change the widths to be 1540. I’m going to keep dragging 1530, 1541 that’s close enough. And then I want to pull the top of it down to be 427.

This is the 427. Here we go. That’s close enough. Now, and then I’m going to go to position and I’m going to go to middle and center so that it’s exactly in the middle of the page.

Now this is the space I know I need to design within right now to make it even easier so I can get rid of this actual box, if you go to file and go to show rulers, you can see there are these rulers and then I’m going to drag the guides and put guides down so that I know exactly where I need to design.

Then I can actually, once I’ve done that, I can delete the square. And now I know within this boundary here, this is where I need to design, right? This is where I need to be aware of it when I put my messages in there, when I put my images in there, anything outside of that won’t appear across all devices.

If you have a look at some of Canva’s templates, I’m just going to hit this one you can see that they have put the key things like the text here, and the messaging here and the image within this safe boundary. If you have a look at most of their designs, I, you will see that they’ve done exactly that.

There’s a little bit cut off this. This one’s not the best one, but you will see that most of them apply the rule of keep it within the safe boundary. Right? You can see it right here within the lines. That’s how easy it is. Right?

What I want you to do is to go into Canva, create the safe boundary rectangle at the rulers so you know where to design and then pick a template, pick a template and start designing and start playing around with it. And it’s easy as that.

That’s really how easy it is to create a channel banner using their kind of templates. Now, what I’m going to do is I’m going to kind of recreate my channel banner, so you can see like, I’m going to kind of recreate this so you can see how you can add elements to actually create it ’cause you may be going all right if I pick a channel, then what?

I’m going to go and add a new page. I’ve got my boundary here. All right. Let’s start by adding a background colour. I’m going to select this thing here on the top, and this lets me add any colour in the colour wheel.

I’m going to pick this nice blue here as the full background. Alternatively, you can go to backgrounds and they’ve got images that you can use as the entire background, as you can see, there are so many things that you can use, but I’m going to use like a flat image at the moment.

I’ve got that image. Now, the next thing I’m going to do is I’m going to add an image of myself, right? Here’s one I prepared earlier. Ysou go to upload and then you can upload your own images. I’m going to add that to the page.

I click on it and it adds it to the page and I’m going to resize it a little bit. And it’s like, all right, this is looking okay. But one of the things that I find that makes everything beautiful is one of Canva’s more recent ads is once you’ve added an image and you go to effects, you can put it inside a mock-up, you can put it inside a device, right?

I’ve gone to effects. And now I’m going to scroll down to frames and I’m going to click see all, and I’m going to put it inside a phone, because everything looks sexier in an iPhone.

Everything looks sexier in a mock-up of a Mac or a laptop. And it kind of just makes it look like, you know, you’ve got, you put a lot more effort into the design than you actually have. And right there, you can see that now the design is, you know, in this little iPhone.

I’m going to add that there. Now, the next thing that I want to add to the actual design is I want to add some text, right? In terms of texts, I find that people get this part a little bit wrong. I find you need to be quite conscious of the hierarchy of information.

People try to add a lot of things here. I think there are really three things that you need to add. The first thing is a sentence and I got people like, Oh my goodness, a sentence? But one sentence that summarizes what the channel is about so that people can quickly understand what it is that you actually do.

The second thing that you need to add is, ideally, your video frequency so new videos weekly, new videos Monday, whatever your schedule is. And the third thing is your name. And I think in terms of hierarchy and size they are the order that things should be, but people get it mixed up.

People have their name as a massive thing, then what they do and then the frequency. Whereas, I think it’s more important that for someone coming to your channel, the first time that they see, all right, this is what they do. This is how often it is because they already see your name, right?

Your name is not that important. I know people are like, no, but it’s my name. Your name is important, but it’s not that important on the channel banner because it appears, you know, elsewhere within your channel homepage.

Don’t worry too much about how big your name actually appears. Now, there are lots of ways to add text with Canva, they’ve got a tech section here, which allows you to add some of their beautiful pre-made ones.

The way that I like to do it, I like to hit that add button again, to add a rectangle. I’m going to go and put a darker colour this time. Let’s go this one, and I’m going to make it smaller. That’s way too big. Don’t worry.

I’m not going to bore you through the whole thing. I normally put behind my text, particularly for things like this, just the rectangle colour in a solid colour, so that it’s easier to see the text. Then I’m just going to add a heading.

This is where I’m going to then add the text. I’ll put here that sentence. Mine is videos and social media tips and tutorials. Like that. I’m going to change colour to white. As you can see, it’s really easy for you to just add all the elements, change them around, and of course, they’ve also already got templates so you don’t ever need to build it out from scratch, like I’m doing here.

Add your text. Then you can also add like elements. If you go to elements, you were able to see there’s all sorts of things like whether you want to add shapes. Shapes are a really cool ones to add some, I guess, depth to your actual design.

You can add, they’ve got like really cool things, right? You can just scroll across and see all of the stuff here, or you can search for what you’re looking for. I use a lot of things like circle, you know, circles with spots, circle spots, and like that I’ve got elements to add to the actual design.

I can change the colour of it. I can, you know, resize it just like that. Right. And that’s how easy it is to create the channel banner. But just by adding all the things to the page. Now, this is such a beautiful design, as you can see.

But the point of it was to show you that it’s really easy to modify what you need to do, keep everything within the boundary that you want to appear and like that. And once you’re finished, all you need to do is select that download button and you can save it as a PNG or JPEG.

I prefer PNG. It’s just a higher quality image type. And then that will download the file, which you can then upload to your actual channel. That really makes it easy to do. I’m going to do one more little thing.

Just give me a second. And as I said, like a little bit flustered today, ’cause I’ve got a new setup and everything was a little bit like upside down, but that’s okay. We’ll get there.

I’m going to to go ahead and download this as a PNG. I just want this one here. That’s page five. Okay. Just make sure that– okay, so now that it’s downloaded, I’m going to show you how to actually upload it within YouTube as well. Yeah.

It’s a really exciting tutorial today going through the whole cycle. Now let’s have a look at, all right, so within your YouTube channel, you would click on YouTube studio. Oh, yep. There I am.

I’m kind of hiding things. I might move myself to be over here. Now, you click on YouTube studio and then within YouTube studio, you would scroll over to customisation. Okay, so you’re like, where is it now?

It’s in this branding section here and then this is the banner image size. This is where you want to upload it. When you click on upload, it will then allow you to choose the image that you’ve just downloaded from Canva and open it and see, see that banner, see that boundary that I talked about YouTube will show you here, how it’s viewable on TV, desktop and all devices, which includes mobile as well.

You can’t do anything if you haven’t resized it properly as opposed in within YouTube. You need to resize it correctly and have everything done correctly before you upload it. Then you click done.

And then you would, you can see a little preview here and then you would publish it and that’s how you would upload it to your actual channel. Just give it a second. I know people are quite impatient. They’re like I did this and I can’t see it.

You need to give it a couple of seconds ’cause you know, YouTube is doing its thing. And then you’ll be able to see it like that. That’s how you create a YouTube channel banner in Canva and upload it within YouTube as well.

That’s basically it. Hopefully that answers all of your burning questions in regards to what you need in order to create a channel banner, as you can see, it’s really easy.

Canva’s templates make it super, super simple because they’ve really done a lot of the hard work with you so you can just choose one of their templates, add the boundary to it and then start designing a way, upload it and then download it and then upload it into your YouTube channel.

Then you’ll be able to see it. That basically wraps up today’s tutorial. I wanted to make it as easy for you guys to understand as possible and to see that it’s something that you can do quite quickly and easily as well. Hopefully, I’ve answered that and that basically wraps up today’s live streams.

Let me just check. Let me just go over and see what’s happening over in the comments. Nadia, Hey, great to see you on the live stream. Anonymous SPYDER, thanks for dropping by on the live stream.

Healthy Trails Living, thanks for dropping by as well. Yeah, so super excited and grateful to have everyone on the live stream today. And you know, I think give it a go create the YouTube channel banner, see how it goes. And you know, if you don’t like it, you can always just change it out so that’s always my kind of little theory there.

If you found this video useful, give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already, where I do lots of more tutorials on helping you grow your channel and grow your business. And while you’re here, make sure you grab a copy of my YouTube Cheat Sheet.

It’s a blueprint to help you go from struggling to thriving on YouTube. It’s a free download. I know you’re going to love it. And that basically wraps up today’s live stream. I had a blast.

Thank you so much, everyone for joining me and I’ll see you in the next live stream. Bye.