how to make simple youtube headers without photoshop
this screen will pop up and click on right in the bottom - "how to create channel art." this will bring you into a new window scroll down until you see size guidelines
in the bottom you will see this
download that template and keep it somewhere handy; everything that i'm going to tell you to save, keep it handy somewhere. i usually keep mine on my desktop while i'm doing this.
now that you've got that saved you can go to pic monkey
when you get to picmonkey click on edit a photo, and open the channel art template that you just saved
go over to this little icon on the side, and pick out what kind of text that you want to use - if you have custom texts downloaded they will come up under "yours" and you can use them
make sure to keep any text or anything else you add in the square that says "text and logo safe area" if you go outside of that area, when you upload it to youtube, it will get cropped out and it won't look very nice. so stay inside that box!!!
at this point you've put in the text that you want and you can add some extra things if you wish
you can go over to this icon on the side and add some overlays if you want to - they do have overlays that you can pick from, or you can just google transparent overlays and add in whatever overlays that you would like
add whatever overlays that you like, but once again, make sure they stay in that safe square or they might get cropped out. i added two push pins from the options that picmonkey gave me
once you're happy with your text and your overlays, you can go up to this little icon here and scroll down towards the bottom until you find the icon that says draw
click on draw and move the brush size up to as high as it will go, and start erasing that template that youtube gave us. you can make the background any color that you want, but i usually just use the white that it starts on
now your header is going to look like this
and you could totally leave it like that if you wanted to, but you can also make it look a little bit fancier
next go to this icon and check out some textures. maybe you want your header to look like space or water - check them out and see if there are any that you like. if you don't like any, you can always go to google and search for wallpaper backgrounds, or any picture that you would like to fill your header with. once again, if you're going to choose your own fill for your header, click on the very first box on the top that says "your own"
here i chose the cork board looking one because i used the pins so it kind of makes sense??? the cool thing about this is that you can overlap a bunch on top of each other. so if you want space cork board, you can choose the cork board, and the choose the space afterwards. you can also change the fade and saturation.
so here is watery cork board, because why not
once you're happy with what you've done, whether you've chose your own background or if you've used one that picmonkey has given you, you can go to the top and save your creation
when you're saving make sure that it's saving as jpg and make sure that your file size is less that 2MB (which is always is anyway but still)
next you go back to youtube, go back to my channel, go back to the little pencil and click on edit channel art once again.
choose to upload the photo from your computer and once it's uploaded it will show you this screen
which is showing you what your channel art will look like on desktop, tv and mobile, if you don't like the way that youtube cropped it (but if you follow the template, it should crop it perfectly) then you can click adjust the crop and move it around until you're happy with the crop
once you're done, save it and there you go!! channel art done. it's a simple way of having just easy, not too cluttered, pretty channel art.
keep an eye out for my youtube channel here!!
