A full-time thumbnail designer breaks down the AI tools, composition rules, and truth-telling principles behind a click that converts.
Posted
2 years ago
Duration
Format
Interview
educational
Views
224.3K
8.2K likes
57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
AI tools speed up mockups and photoreal upscaling, but a thumbnail still lives or dies on composition, balance, and whether the first few seconds of the video actually pay off what it promised.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You make your own thumbnails and want a repeatable composition framework instead of guessing what looks good.
You're curious how working designers actually use ChatGPT/DALL-E, Midjourney, and AI upscalers in a real thumbnail workflow.
You're a newer creator who needs the click-through rate a loyal, established audience doesn't require you to earn.
SKIP IF…
You already have a documented thumbnail system and are looking for growth tactics unrelated to thumbnail design.
You're not on YouTube or a platform where a static image thumbnail drives the click.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
A professional thumbnail designer who works full-time with several large YouTube channels explains that AI tools now do most of the heavy lifting on mockups and image quality: ChatGPT/DALL-E for fast conversational mockups, Midjourney for more photoreal but messier backgrounds, and a paid upscaler called Magnific for turning low-quality reaction footage into sharp assets. But the actual click still comes down to composition fundamentals: a rule-of-thirds grid, balancing visual weight like a scale, keeping text to three or four words, never repeating the title in the thumbnail, and never placing anything important in the bottom-right corner where YouTube stamps the timecode. The through-line is honesty: the thumbnail has to pay off within the first 5 to 10 seconds of the video, or the click becomes a broken promise that costs trust on every video after it.
Free for members
Chat with this breakdown — free.
Sign in and you get 23 free chat messages on us — ask for the hook, quote a framework, find the exact transcript moment, generate a markdown action plan. Bring your own key when you want unlimited.
The designer introduces his full-time work with a comedian commentary channel and explains how he refined that channel's cluttered 'scrapbook style' into something cleaner without losing what made it recognizable.
02:46 – 05:57
02 · Enhancing Thumbnail Quality with AI Tools
AI upscaling (Magnific AI, roughly $40/month) turns low-quality reaction footage, like TikTok screenshots, into sharp, photoreal thumbnail assets — a tool he only justifies because he's producing two to four thumbnails a day.
05:57 – 09:53
03 · Collaborating with AI for Thumbnail Ideas
ChatGPT with DALL-E becomes a conversational mockup partner, fast but simple; Midjourney looks more photoreal but introduces artifacts that have to be cleaned up by hand. Sponsor segment for Video.ai falls inside this block.
09:53 – 12:03
04 · What Makes a Good Thumbnail?
A thumbnail's promise has to pay off within the first 5-10 seconds of the video; the strongest version of this is a literal, direct payoff, like opening on the exact scene the thumbnail showed.
12:03 – 15:03
05 · The Importance of Truth Telling in Thumbnails
Clickbait costs trust over time. Only creators with deeply loyal audiences can skip the literal payoff. He edits his own thumbnail before editing the actual video so the intro has to match the promise.
15:03 – 18:55
06 · Image Balance and Composition Techniques
A free rule-of-thirds asset accounts for YouTube's rounded corners and timecode placement; nothing important should sit in the bottom-right corner, and visual weight should be balanced like a scale.
18:55 – 21:13
07 · Thumbnail Focus and Text Usage
Reading direction (left to right) decides which side of the frame carries the subject. TV-heavy audiences tolerate more visual detail than phone-heavy ones.
21:13 – 22:42
08 · Font and Branding in Thumbnails
A Seinfeld-style word-removal test keeps thumbnail text to three or four words max. Borrowing a popular font invites comparison; owning a distinct one builds brand recognition.
22:42 – 27:27
09 · Tips for Creating Effective Thumbnails
Never repeat the title's words in the thumbnail. A minimalist, text-free thumbnail can outperform a busy one precisely because almost nobody else is doing it. Closes with where to find his new channel and weekly thumbnail-critique Twitter Spaces.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
A visual thumbnail style only becomes truly ownable once it's been simplified and cleaned up, not just invented and left messy.
A $40/month AI upscaler only pays for itself at volume; it makes sense producing several thumbnails a day, not once a month.
Midjourney's backgrounds can look too photoreal for thumbnails, leaving stray artifacts like wires or trash cans that have to be manually removed.
A less advanced AI image tool can be an advantage for thumbnails because its simpler, less-detailed output needs less cleanup before it reads as clean.
The strongest thumbnail payoff is literal: opening the video on the exact frame or scene the thumbnail promised.
Clickbait earns one click and erodes trust on every video that follows it, which compounds against a channel over time.
Only established creators with deeply loyal audiences can skip a literal thumbnail payoff and still hold viewers through a slow intro.
Editing the thumbnail before editing the actual video forces the video's opening to deliver on a promise that's already locked in.
YouTube stamps a timecode on the bottom-right corner of every thumbnail, so nothing important should ever be placed there.
A rule-of-thirds grid turns a thumbnail into nine mini-compositions, and aligning subjects on the intersection points reads as more intentional and balanced.
Viewers read left to right, so whichever element should register first belongs on the left third of the frame.
Applying a joke-editing test to thumbnail text (cut words until the line breaks, then restore the last one) usually lands at three or four words.
A thumbnail and its title should never repeat the same words: the thumbnail earns the first glance, and the title adds context on the second.
A text-free, minimalist thumbnail takes more nerve than a busy one, but it stands out precisely because almost no one else is doing it.
Channels with heavy TV viewership can support more visual detail in a thumbnail than channels watched mostly on phones.
Takeaway
Good thumbnails are won on composition and a kept promise, not AI.
WHAT TO LEARN
AI tools now handle most of the mockup and image-quality work in professional thumbnail design, but the actual click still comes down to composition, balance, and whether the video's opening pays off what the thumbnail promised.
01The Power of Thumbnail Design
A visual thumbnail style only becomes truly ownable once it's been simplified and cleaned up, not just invented and left messy.
A designer who understands a creator's existing visual language can refine it without a full rebrand, which is faster and lower-risk than starting over.
02Enhancing Thumbnail Quality with AI Tools
An AI upscaler only earns its monthly cost at volume; it makes sense producing several thumbnails a day, not occasionally.
AI upscaling matters most for reaction-style content, where the source footage is often a low-quality screenshot or screen recording.
03Collaborating with AI for Thumbnail Ideas
Conversational AI image tools let you iterate a mockup in plain language, feeding in context about the video and adjusting in real time.
A less advanced AI image tool can be an advantage for thumbnails, because its simpler output needs less manual cleanup than a more photoreal one.
04What Makes a Good Thumbnail?
A thumbnail's promise has to pay off within the first 5 to 10 seconds of the video, or the click feels like a broken promise.
The strongest payoff is literal: opening the video on the exact scene or frame the thumbnail showed.
05The Importance of Truth Telling in Thumbnails
Clickbait earns a single click and erodes trust on every video that follows it; truthful thumbnails compound the other way.
Only creators with deeply loyal, established audiences can skip a literal thumbnail payoff and still hold viewers through a slow intro.
Editing the thumbnail before editing the actual video forces the video's opening to deliver on a promise that's already locked in.
06Image Balance and Composition Techniques
YouTube stamps a timecode on the bottom-right corner of every thumbnail, so nothing important should ever be placed there.
A rule-of-thirds grid turns a thumbnail into nine mini-compositions, and aligning subjects on the intersection points reads as more intentional and balanced.
07Thumbnail Focus and Text Usage
Viewers read left to right, so whichever element should register first belongs on the left third of the frame.
A channel with heavy TV viewership can support more visual detail in a thumbnail than one watched mostly on phones.
08Font and Branding in Thumbnails
Applying a joke-editing test to thumbnail text, cutting words until the line breaks and restoring the last one, usually lands at three or four words.
A thumbnail and its title should never repeat the same words: the thumbnail earns the first glance, and the title adds context on the second.
09Tips for Creating Effective Thumbnails
A text-free, minimalist thumbnail takes more nerve than a busy one, but it stands out precisely because almost no one else is doing it.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Magnific AI
A paid AI upscaling tool that regenerates an image pixel-by-pixel to look sharp and photoreal, commonly used to clean up low-quality source footage like TikTok screenshots.
Rule of thirds
A composition grid that divides an image into nine equal boxes; aligning subjects along the intersection points tends to read as more balanced than centering them.
Scrapbook style
A thumbnail look built from cut-out images pasted over a messy background with a bold yellow font, popularized by a commentary channel and widely copied since.
Open loop
A question or incomplete idea placed on a thumbnail or title that creates curiosity a viewer can only resolve by clicking.
Combo punch
Treating a thumbnail, its title, and the video's first few seconds as one coordinated unit rather than three separate decisions.
“I think simply telling the truth goes a long way with all things, you know, in life. But in particular with videos.”
quotable principle that stands alone outside the video→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
13:28
“I actually edit the thumbnail before I edit my video, so when I'm doing my own videos I'll actually get my thumbnail finished before I even start my actual video edit.”
“Jerry Seinfeld has this famous quote where he says that when he's writing a joke, he takes one word out at a time until the joke doesn't make any sense anymore. And then he puts that last word back in.”
named framework with a built-in story→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
24:28
“You don't want to repeat the title in the thumbnail. If this is the first time you're hearing that from this point forward, don't ever do that.”
direct, quotable hard rule→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
The Script
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
17px
What makes a good thumbnail that gets clicked? Composition is king, baby. When I'm talking to creators, we'll talk about the title, we'll talk about the thumbnail, and then I'll say, okay, now what's your first five seconds?
I made a thumbnail with Max. It's an image of him with a cow, with a police officer. And then you click the video and right away you're confirmed.
He's literally walking around the streets of London with a cow, with a beer in his hand. And it is an immediate payoff. And that video I think has like 5 million, 6 million views or something like that.
Making sure those first 5 to 10 seconds have some sort of payoff to the thumbnail. You gotta just press record. David.
Altizer is on the Think Media channel today. And I'm excited because, dude, you've worked for a lot of different YouTube channels. Now you have this next transition to thumbnail design.
First of all, tell us like, what kind of YouTube channels are you working on? And then are you, tell us your thumbnail design process. How are these big YouTubers like, you know, how do they do it?
And, you know, break down that process. Sure, yeah. So I'm currently working pretty much full -time with Curtis Conner.
Folks. He's a comedian commentary channel, and he and I have really developed a great kind of design language based off of what he was already doing. But I've kind of simplified it down and kind of elevated it is what I told him.
I was like. I've been a fan of your work for years and he kind of created this yellow Helvetica font style on top of him giving a crazy reaction with a bunch of messy stuff behind it. I call it the scrapbook style because it looks like a scrapbook.
It looks like somebody took... pictures and cut them out and then pasted them on a picture and so he kind of actually humbly said yeah i think i created this style but now almost every commentary channel does that format so i want to highlight that like he has the ability to kind of own that style because he literally pioneered it, but we needed to elevate it.
And that simply meant simplifying it, cleaning it up. And thankfully with Curtis, I'm given a really, you know, high quality video file of him giving me faces. So usually he'll have the title in mind.
He'll maybe even have most of the video shot and then we'll get on the phone and maybe discuss. you know the thumbnail and he because he's so intuitive and he's been a youtuber for so many years he kind of just knows what what it should be and so he'll tell me like hey here's what i'm thinking and then i'll spitball some ideas then he'll give me like you know a 10 or 20 second clip of him giving me like three or four different faces and you know he has a nice camera and nice lighting and so i'm able to just pull that out and stick it on and then almost everything else though is like generated either with AI or from the assets that he's referring to.
One of the things that has been really helpful with my career is AI upscaling. So I work with Cody Co as well and Curtis Connor. Both those guys do reaction content and often the things they're reacting to are TikToks or like really low quality images.
And so in the past, their thumbnails would almost look a little. kind of low quality because like they're just reacting to this really you know blurry object maybe they even scale up to it or whatever like scale into it there's some tools like topaz and another tool that I use called Magnific AI which is extremely expensive I don't necessarily want to recommend this to everybody but if it's something that it's $40 a month it's extremely pricey okay it is but because I'm doing this full -time I'm making you know two to four thumbnails a day and I use it every day.
It's become, you know, part of my budget and part of my workflow. They also have a free trial. So if you want to try it out, you could try it out.
But what it does is it uses some of the same technology that you see in mid journey, but it takes like an image that you import into it and it creates AI on top of like from, from a pixel for pixel basis, it replicates what it's seeing underneath. The AI, if that makes sense. So like when I input it, it's going to output a really sharp, crisp representation of what I inputted using AI.
So like. if it's somebody that if if i have a photo of a person that's not recognizable it's not a famous person i can just put it in there and it'll spit out a sharper cleaner image essentially uh so i use that all all the time now so that's kind of been my like little secret sauce uh but i work with max give us all the secret sauce what other what other ai tools are you know Give us all of it.
This is awesome. I'm loving it. The thing that I love to use for mock -ups right now is actually ChatGPT 4 with Dali.
So Dali is their version of MidJourney, which is an AI art creation tool. And it's not as advanced as MidJourney. It's not even as advanced as some of the other tools that are out there.
But what is so great about the ChatGPT AI art creation is that you can talk to it like a human.
just start talking to it and i'll just say hello my name is david altizer i am a youtuber who makes content about cameras and i'm doing a review on a new sony camera that's brand new it does this this and this like i give it all the the context of like what that video is and then you say i want a thumbnail where i'm off center and the camera is focused with leading lines leading into the camera so that the viewer can see that camera and uh like their eyes go to that But I still want to be in the image, you know, give me a mock up and then it just will spit out a mock up.
I'm like, OK, cool. Now can we do it a little darker and blah, blah, blah. And so then I'll maybe have four or five mock ups of a thumbnail.
And I can even input like a photo of my face and be like, OK, here's here's my face. make sure that the subject kind of looks like me and so then it'll kind of create you know a subject that sort of looks like that and if you're watching the think media video right now you can see some of the examples that i've done this one specifically is with hayden hillier smith he was doing a video where he was talking about a film that he made and he wanted to have kind of like the before and after he wanted to have leading lines going into the center of the frame and we had a bunch of mock -ups and we landed on this one as our format and i was able to take that mock -up and basically just plug in the actual assets into that and I didn't really even use any of the AI stuff but it was such a wonderful way to collaborate with AI to spit out something that we wouldn't have even thought of just have kind of that collaboration you might hear all the time with Mr.
Beast and Ryan Trahan and many others talking about how you need to have uh youtuber friends you need to have people to work with and i i don't think this rep replaces that but if you are just getting started using this is a great way to collaborate with something it is just a robot but but it's so uh amazing how how how great this is and and just seeing something at least for me i'm such a visual learner when i see something i'm like oh that makes me think of this can you add this to it and then it just does it and i might have again like five or six mock -ups that i can then show the client we then dial it down to like one or two and then i just use that as a way to kind of get started so that we kind of know where we're going with it i think that's a hard part for a lot of people is they don't know where to start so the fact i mean you're giving away the secrets here which is amazing And I actually, I've experimented a little bit with chat GBT four, but like you're encouraging me to go do that more.
So this is, this is really, really cool. Are there any other prompts that you do? Cause you're really just using this to get ideas, right?
That's the ultimate goal is you're trying to, you're trying to spark inspiration on how to actually, you know, compose and set up the thumbnail. Is that right? Correct.
Yeah. And every once in a while I will. create backgrounds, uh, using AI mid journey is better, but you know, what's funny about mid journey is it's so advanced now that it looks very photo real and it starts to do what you were talking about earlier about how, like, there's so many little details that you have to remove.
So like mid journey looks so photo real that like. i'll receive a background that looks like a real photo but like there's wires in the background there's like a blue trash can over here and like i need to clean it all up whereas chat gpt is not as advanced so some would argue that it doesn't look as realistic but it's more simple and minimalistic because it's not as advanced so like i find chat gpt's dolly image creation definitely good enough for thumbnails if anything i kind of like how simple it is because it usually spits out an AI image that's pretty simple and minimalistic.
And then what I'll do is I'll actually take that Dolly image, which again, isn't as advanced as what Midjourney does, but then I'll input it into Magnific, which is what I was talking about earlier. And it then takes that AI generated image and makes it look photo real. I have this very simple, clean AI image that I then input into Magnific, which then converts it to looking realistic and sharp.
And then I pull that into Photoshop and use that as an asset. That's super cool. I love that.
Hey, real quick, I want to shout out today's sponsor, Video .ai. Video .ai is a tool where you can upload your long form videos or podcasts and it will automatically chop it up for you to repurpose into shorts and clips with customizable animated captions and brand kits. My favorite way to use this tool is for finding podcast clips that we can upload to our YouTube channel.
I simply upload a video and then it breaks down the entire conversation so that I can skim through the topics to find something that would make a great clip. This saves me a ton of time so I don't have to rewatch the entire podcast looking for good clips. From here, all I need to do is edit it how I would like, export it, and then upload it to our YouTube channel.
Now, if you want to give it a try, check out the link in the description of this video. I do want to talk about what makes a good thumbnail and... And even people too, they might hear this and they assume in order to make good thumbnails, they need AI tools and they need Photoshop.
And you really don't. A great example is I saw on your just like personal channel, it has like half a million views and it's the 4K, forget SSDs, iPhone 15 Pro records SD cards. And the thumbnail is so simple and there's just a little bit of text and...
Do you click the video? Watch the intro. Do you see the intro?
Yeah. So that's what I was going to mention too is that's a great example. And I'm curious if you did this on purpose and if you see other, because I noticed Ryan will do this sometimes and other YouTubers.
But when you click on that video, there's a direct payoff because it's actually, it looks like a screenshot of the opening frame. So tell me, is that a strategy that you use? 100%.
Okay. Yes. Yeah.
In fact, I'd say the greatest success in that, conversation with my work is with max i think the title is i broke laws in front of the police it's an image of him with a cow with a police officer and then you click the video and right away you're you're confirmed he's literally walking around the streets of london with a cow with a beer in his hand and it is an immediate payoff and that video i think has like five million six million views or something like that i also tried it with curtis curtis is a different he has a very dedicated very strong following loyal fan base so he could sort of like rant for two minutes at the beginning and people will still watch it he'll still get two million views even if he took three minutes to get to the point but I have been encouraging him to have intros that match the thumbnail or maybe like a teaser at the beginning and he's been seeing success with that as well so yes this is 100 % a strategy and one of the things I forgot to bring up when I'm talking to creators is we'll talk about the title.
We'll talk about the thumbnail and then I'll say, okay, now what's your first five seconds. And like, literally that is. part of the discussion when we're talking about thumbnails is like making sure those first five to ten seconds have some sort of payoff to the thumbnail because we do live in a unfortunately in a day and age on youtube where people will maybe put something that would be considered clickbait on the thumbnail and you click it and it's completely different you know it's just it's not what the thumbnail is they were just trying to get you to click on it And so I think simply telling the truth goes a long way with all things, you know, in life.
But in particular with videos, if you are really, you can kind of. Enhance the thumbnail make it cleaner make it pop make it look better to like get get somebody's attention But it still needs to have a baseline truth telling aspect to it that you are paying off as quickly as possible Especially if you're a new creator I think a lot of bigger creators that you may watch you could maybe have an argument with me on it's like well They don't do it.
It's like well. Yeah, they have six million subscribers And they're averaging 1 million views per video if you remember if any of you were Casey Neistat fans during the vlog era.
Did you care what title or thumbnail was on that video? No, you just clicked it and watched it because you became a fan of Casey Neistat's daily vlogs. And anytime he would post, you would watch it.
The thumbnail and title was almost irrelevant, you know, for the most part. So I think those are two different models. And Curtis definitely has that a little bit too.
But anyways, the intro and the thumbnail need to kind of match in my opinion. I think that's kind of a secret, uh, secret. trick that you can do and i've done it with my own videos like you said that was just a video took me two hours to make it but i had that intention of like shooting the thumbnail and i actually edit the thumbnail before i edit my video so when i'm doing my own videos i'll actually get my thumbnail finished before i even start my thumb my actual video edit and then that kind of can almost dictate the video in a way at least the intro yeah that's really good what are other tips you have on What makes a good thumbnail that gets clicked?
Composition is king, baby. So composition is king for all things when it comes to cinematography, when it comes to photography, when it comes to fine art. And the same is true with thumbnails.
Any form of art composition is king. You may have heard that in other niches. Can you explain what composition is?
Yes. The easiest way to look at it. And again, I would recommend everybody go outside of the YouTube box or the YouTube bubble.
that we live in and study art, study fine art, study why certain paintings are actually good. Study why certain films and filmmakers are great at storytelling. I think that's such a great way to have a rich kind of understanding and baseline of like what actually looks good.
And that's how you develop your taste. And that's how you were asking earlier, like you don't want to just copy other YouTubers. If you have all these input sources from other genres of filmmaking, photography, and fine art, those things are going to come into play when you make your thumbnails so that your thumbnails actually look completely unique technically, but you're actually pulling from all these other sources.
Anyways. The way that I get started, and you can download my asset for free, PlugPlug, on LearnThumbnails .com, and it's a free asset. I have a rule of thirds that is 16 by 9.
It basically looks like a tic -tac -toe grid. The image... just is more interesting and more appealing and has better balance when you line your subjects up within those either cross points or little points within those boxes.
And so you almost want to treat each box in that tic -tac -toe grid as its own image in of itself. And having an understanding of image balance is really important too. So for example, if I had a bunch of the weight of the image, I'm saying that in air quotes, but if I had like the subject on the right hand side of the image and i had like a car on the right but then there was just a big sky on the left and it was just empty the image would feel lopsided.
It would feel like all the weight of the image is on the right. And so you want to balance that out almost as if all the objects in your frame are on a scale. You balance that out by maybe putting a big piece of text on the left that can then be a size that sort of matches what's on the right -hand side, and that starts to balance the frame.
Or you move your subject into the middle, you move all the objects on the right, and then you have text on the top left or something like that. The asset... Pack that I'm giving away for free to also includes the time code in the right scaling and the rounded edges that YouTube has as well.
So if you haven't noticed right now, YouTube rounds all the corners of your thumbnail on the home screen and on the subscribe feed. And it's different on mobile and it's different on desktop. The roundedness is actually more round on a mobile device and it's less round on a desktop.
The timecode is also larger on a phone and the timecode is smaller on desktop. And what I mean by that is on the bottom right hand side of the thumbnail, you'll see the length of the video that. Is always taken into account when I'm making my thumbnails.
You never want to have text or anything important on that bottom right side. So you can basically put text or things top left, top right, bottom left, but never touch the bottom right. And I almost treat that time code as part of my composition.
So if that big chunky 10 minute and 16 second time code is on the bottom right, I kind of want to balance that somehow by putting something on the left hand side of that rule of thirds to then balance. that timecode because again people are are not viewing the thumbnail as just an image especially on a you know 27 inch monitor which is what I have at my desk here they're viewing it mostly on a phone and certainly now on TVs as well which has been really exciting as well Because of the TV model, if you're a creator who has a lot of TV viewership, you could have a little bit more detail going on in the image.
And I've seen that work really well. Mark Rober, for example, has had some successful thumbnails. I mean, he's very successful in general, but he's had some that were very highly detailed, but still very simple in idea.
So I think that's where the confusion can be. You can have detail, like if it's a big explosion with like fire and stuff, but it's still just an explosion. There's not wire.
They're not different colors mixing and matching but there is details within that So if you're a TV viewer you can do that and we're able to get away with that with the editing podcast for example Which has a large TV viewership audience. So anyways composition we could go on a tangent with that for a long time I personally really like having the subject on the left -hand side of the image because of that timecode but I also do a lot where the subject is just dead center with Leading lines going into the middle but again do some research outside of YouTube and study composition some of the best painters and some of the best artists in the world have some of the best compositions that you can learn from and I would highly encourage you to go outside of YouTube to learn that to be honest it's funny because I've heard people say the opposite of they enjoy putting or prefer putting the the face on the right hand side like you've seen the mr beast reacts videos because the time code just kind of covers like maybe like the neck or the shirt or something yeah no that works too yeah that totally works i've done that with curtis just depends but yeah there's never one answer that fits right for every single thumbnail right
Depending on your audience, you know, we read left to right So in America and in the english -speaking and most countries read left to right It just depends on like what you want them to see first. So in the beast reacts You can sort of on your peripheral see that it's beast. So, you know exactly what it is It's the same face every time too.
So like there's nothing there but for Curtis like his audience is so dedicated to Curtis that like I kind of want people to just see Curtis's face first because as soon as they see it they'll probably just click on it but but if he's reacting to something wacky and crazy that is like gonna get a click then maybe I'll put that off to the left you know so that's how I'm thinking about it is like what do you want them to see first because we read left to right they may actually see that left hand rule of third first so if it's the game that you want the focus to be on then put that on the left if it's the creator then put them on the left you know with cody co he's always on the left for the most part what do you think about text on a thumbnail when should people use text or arrows or certain circles elements like that and when should they not use text on a thumbnail So I think you and I would be in agreeance on keeping things as simple and minimal as possible.
So Jerry Seinfeld has this famous quote where he says that when he's writing a joke, he takes one word out at a time until the joke doesn't make any sense anymore. And then he puts that last word back in. So I think that should be the same philosophy when you're creating a thumbnail and especially with text.
How many words can you remove before it doesn't make sense anymore? So like, even if you can just have one word, that would be great. You know, why is a good one with a question mark or how, or, uh, you know, those are good because they can, they can play off of whatever title you have to create some sort of open loop that makes people want to click.
So I would just keep it simple. you know, find a font that you really like that is clean and bold, but maybe even something that not many creators are using so that you can start to kind of own that font in a way, you know, Trahan has kind of owned that like very simple Helvetica font style and many others are using it. I would, I would have just encouraged other creators to, yeah, you can.
be inspired by Trahan, but maybe find a different font that looks a little different. That way you can start to kind of use that as part of your branding, but I would keep it to like a minimum of, you know, or a maximum of like three to four words. If you can, again, Curtis has done.
more words because sometimes they'll have like a whole sentence there i don't know if how effective that is to be completely honest it's just what he does i usually do the whole edit for curtis and then he'll actually do the text himself because we found we were going back and forth a lot where he'd be like put this no put this move it over to the left i was like how about this i'll just give you the clean image you do the you do the text so that's our working relationship so you can get away with more just depends on the context but i say good rule of thumb is keep it like under four words and as far as arrows and circles i don't use those as much as i used to i think that might be again it depends on the niche i think for you with your basketball stuff like the arrows and circles make a lot of sense because you could almost not even have any text it's just pointing to something or circling something.
So it just depends on the niche really, but I don't use a lot of arrows and circles. One thing too, I think most people get wrong in the beginning is they just put the title. for text in their thumbnail.
And what you need to realize is I like to think of my title and my thumbnail as like a union or like a combo punch, a combo attack. And so usually most people look at the thumbnail first, it catches their eye and then they read the title, which gives more context to what they're looking at. And so that's how I kind of like to approach things.
And I'm curious your thoughts too, because we'll see, you know, people in our community a lot of times are just putting the same exact title. in text and if you actually add something that is completely different and can spark curiosity make them look at the image and then when they read the title now they have maybe the context of what they're clicking but how do you yeah is there any you know tips like that on how you approach just that combination yeah i would actually add to that and say that the first five to ten seconds is also part of that same union because if you if you're successful in having a good title and thumbnail and they're like looking at it on their phone for a second it's going to start auto playing as well and so you've even noticed if you look at even most recent mr beast videos he's removed all of the kind of big bold text at the beginning where it's like captioning because the auto captioning kicks in on the autoplay and if you have a bunch of text going on on the video
with the closed captioning as well it kind of is disorienting so i've even noticed he'll actually turn off the captioning when he does go to the bold text on the frame and then it'll kick back in when he stops using that so you can actually finagle that and kind of tweak it if you do have text on like Embedded in the video itself that being said that's you know, that's beast in that style But I would keep all three of those things in mind as part of your strategy but absolutely you don't want to repeat the The title in the thumbnail just like if this is the first time you're hearing that from this point forward don't ever do that Like just just don't okay and just like use your imagination on like what I can add to this whether it's a question that you can ask that can play off of that title whether it's you know how many days you tried it or like I don't know it's just when you're coming up with your titles and thumbnails think about both of them together and when I'm writing out my ideas in Apple Notes I'll like I'll type the title out and then in parentheses I'll put whatever two or three word text
that I'm going to put there in like a parentheses on the thumbnail. So it's like, you really want to think of both. And to be honest, I think it takes a lot of courage and a lot of boldness to not put text.
And I would encourage you to maybe even consider trying that because one of the things that can really make you stand out is by simply doing what. everybody else isn't doing and i've seen success on a couple of thumbnails that i've done where it was very focused very simple the one i'm thinking of right now is i did a thumbnail for frame voyager where it was uh killian murphy and he was just in the middle I had like some inception stuff going on behind him and I had some cool like atomic bomb stuff from Oppenheimer behind him.
But it was really focused, really simple. And you could have put text there asking a question, but it really would have thrown off the kind of artistic integrity of it. And because his channel is a video essay channel, it works really well for that.
So I would encourage you to almost like don't use text if you don't have to. So good. This was a masterclass on YouTube thumbnails.
You gave us all the secrets. Thanks for coming on, David. Where can people find you and learn more about thumbnails and hang out with you?
Yeah, well, I started a new channel called Learn Thumbnails where I'm going to be. going over all of these things and more, uh, some of the work that I've done and I'm, I'm starting that up. Uh, I feel encouraged by the support of Nolan and many others.
So I'm building a whole business around thumbnails and it's all based around learn thumbnails .com. So be on the lookout for that. I'm most active on Twitter and many other thumbnail artists are active on Twitter.
So if you want to learn from other thumbnail artists, join us every Thursday. We have a thing called Thumbnail Thursday on Twitter Spaces. And you can jump in and be a part of that conversation.
We've got some amazing thumbnail artists who work for ARAC, Trahan, many others who are on the speaker panel. And we'll talk each week about thumbnails, about the work that we're doing. it up to roasting at the end where you we roast your thumbnails and give tips and tricks so follow me on twitter at dvd altizer
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The cold open gives away the ending: composition is king. What follows is a working thumbnail designer's actual process, built around AI shortcuts for mockups and image quality, but anchored in a composition and honesty framework that doesn't change no matter what tool makes the image.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
15:02concept
The rule-of-thirds thumbnail grid
Divide the frame into a 3x3 grid
Align subjects on the intersection points
Treat the bottom-right corner as reserved for YouTube's timecode
Balance visual weight across the frame like a scale
A free downloadable composition template that also accounts for YouTube's platform-specific rounded corners and timecode placement.
Steal forany thumbnail or cover-image composition, not just YouTube
20:31concept
The Seinfeld text test
Write the thumbnail text
Remove one word at a time
Stop as soon as the line stops making sense
Put that last removed word back in
Borrowed from Jerry Seinfeld's joke-editing process, applied to keep thumbnail text to a tight three or four words.
Steal forany headline, caption, or cover text that needs trimming
22:17concept
The combo punch
The thumbnail catches the eye first
The title adds context second
The video's first 5-10 seconds pay off both
Treating thumbnail, title, and video opening as one coordinated unit instead of three independent decisions, with the hard rule of never repeating the same words across thumbnail and title.
Steal forany piece of content with a separate preview image and headline
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
09:07product
“if you want to give it a try, check out the link in the description of this video”
Mid-roll sponsor read for Video.ai, framed around the host's own personal use case (finding podcast clips to repurpose) before handing back to the interview.
Add Modern Creator as a preferred source and Google shows you more of our breakdowns in Search, Top Stories, and AI Overviews. It only changes what you see, and you can undo it in your Google settings anytime.
Add to Preferred SourcesOpens your Google source preferences with us pre-loaded. Tick the box and you're done.
Sean Cannell breaks down the 12 biggest product updates from YouTube's Made on YouTube 2026 keynote, and what actually changes for creators versus what's just hype.
A nine-minute, six-step walkthrough for shooting a talking-head YouTube video on a smartphone — topic, background, gear, recording, review, and editing.
A 25-minute interview with Roberto Blake on the 2026 creator playbook — AI tools as freelancers, device context over format, the 100K real players doctrine, and the clipping industrial complex.
A professional thumbnail designer rebuilds a trilogy's visual identity, generative-fills a hair cutout, and FaceTimes the creator for real-time feedback before the video goes live.
00:20
00:45
01:04
01:23
01:44
02:06
02:28
03:10
03:38
03:58
04:21
04:34
05:04
05:17
05:53
06:24
06:56
07:10
07:23
07:47
08:15
08:28
09:07
09:16
09:36
09:53
10:40
11:06
11:26
11:43
12:41
12:54
13:16
13:41
13:45
14:16
14:33
14:56
15:25
15:55
16:19
16:49
17:26
17:41
17:52
18:19
18:34
19:15
19:37
19:55
20:15
20:43
20:57
21:44
22:15
22:24
23:10
23:22
23:42
24:15
24:26
24:45
25:04
25:19
25:41
25:52
26:11
26:43
26:50
59:21
09:01
09:11
24:59
14:24
09:23