Thumbnail Standards
All text in the thumbnail must be aligned to the left. This prevents issues with the timestamp blocking the image.
Don’t include important information in the bottom right corner of the screen such as the logo, etc.
Design for the small screen, consider how much space you have to work with when your thumbnail is only 20% (hint: zoom out of Canva to 20%) of its actual size. Zoom out in Canva until your view is 20% to see how impactful your thumbnail actually is.
Never use default thumbnails in the YouTube Editor (Thumbnails should be uploaded as PNG files).
Thumbnails should have a standard resolution of 1280x720 px and be no larger than 2 MB in size when downloaded from Canva.
Logo Standards
Photo Standards
Student photos to be used on thumbnails require permissions (MUST obtain signed and completed Media consent form from student subjects) versus faculty/staff permissions (We recommend notifying staff members and faculty as a courtesy. Signed consent is not required.)
Expressive emotions are welcome but nothing inflammatory.
Encouraged to use approved material from Media / stock photo from Canva but make sure to preview thumbnail before publishing and review quality / any image corruption
If you’re using images outside of Canva please follow the appropriate copyright laws.
In addition, remember that not every video needs a photo, as long as you keep to the standards you can also rely on cartoonish figures, etc.
Make sure to select from a diverse range of images.
Text Standards
Use no more than 2 types of fonts (need to select font to upload into Canva under brand kit)
Main headings should be in bold font. (Sans?)
For longer video titles, thumbnail text does not need to repeat the video title. Focus on shorter phrases/keywords that summarize the point of the video.
Highlight key areas (or outcomes) the video should cover.
Color Theme Standards
Encouraged to use colors under LR marketing “brand kit” but the emphasis is more on high contrast colors to differ from text to graphics
Take special care with picking color backgrounds that stand out against YouTube’s white background and night background
Must verify color choices are ADA colorblind compliant
Best Practices Standards
Try to tell a story; if you’re walking a student through how to check a book in and out, have a student in the thumbnail handing a book to a librarian in a library, etc.
Take the title of your video and type it into YouTube Search in an incognito window. Then, compare your thumbnail design against the top 3 choices for that search. Does it stand out? How can you make it different?
All videos should be captioned or a transcript provided. Audio components should have an accompanying transcript.