YouTube channel art sizes, all in one place

The banner: 2560 x 1440, but only the middle survives

YouTube's own guidance is to upload a banner of at least 2560 x 1440 pixels for the best display across devices. That is the file you upload, and it is not what most people see.

The same image is cropped differently on a television, a desktop browser, a tablet and a phone, and the phone crop is by far the tightest. A television shows nearly the whole canvas; a phone shows a narrow horizontal strip through the middle.

The practical consequence: everything that matters — the channel name, the upload schedule, a tagline — belongs in a narrow band across the centre. Anything you place near the top, the bottom or the far left and right is decoration that most of your audience will never see.

YouTube's upload screen shows you the crop boundaries live as you position the image, which is the moment to check rather than after saving.

What actually goes on a banner

The banner is the only large piece of design a visitor sees before deciding whether to subscribe, and the ones that work are almost boringly plain: the channel name, one line saying what the channel is about, and an upload schedule if there is one.

What does not work is a collage. At phone size a busy banner reads as texture, not information. One idea, set large, beats five ideas set small.

Keep the colour palette identical to your thumbnails. A visitor arriving from a video should recognise the page instantly; a banner in different colours quietly breaks that connection.

The profile picture

Upload a square image. YouTube crops it to a circle and shows it small — beside your comments, at the bottom right of the player in most playback modes, and next to every video in the feed.

That size is the whole design brief. A photograph of a full scene becomes an unreadable smudge; a face filling the frame, or a single letter, or one simple mark, stays legible. If you cannot tell what it is at the size of a fingernail, it is the wrong image.

Use the same picture everywhere else you exist. Recognition across platforms is worth more than a picture that is individually prettier on each one.

The watermark

The branding watermark is a small image overlaid in the corner of your videos during playback, which viewers can click to subscribe. It is set once, in Studio, under branding, and applies to your whole catalogue.

Because it is displayed small and semi-transparent over moving video, it has to be a single high-contrast shape on a transparent background. Export PNG — this is the one place where transparency is essential — and test it over a bright frame and a dark frame before committing.

The three images have to look like one channel

The mistake that is easy to miss is treating the three as separate design jobs. A banner in one palette, an icon cropped from an unrelated photograph and thumbnails in a third style give a visitor no reason to believe they are all the same channel.

Pick two colours and one heavy typeface and use them in all three, and in your thumbnails. That is the entire brand system a channel needs, and it is worth more than any individual image being clever. When someone scrolling past has seen your colour combination four times, the fifth time they recognise it before they read anything.

The practical version: build the banner first, because it has the most room, then pull its colours and typeface into the icon and the watermark, then into your thumbnail template. Working in that order means you decide the palette once instead of three times.

Checking it before you commit

Upload the banner and look at the preview YouTube shows you for television, desktop and phone before saving. It is the only place you see all three crops at once, and it takes ten seconds.

Then look at your own channel page on a phone, signed out. The gap between how a channel page looks on the monitor you designed it on and how it looks on a phone is wider than almost anyone expects, and the phone is where most of your visitors are.

For the icon, shrink it on screen until it is about the size of a fingernail. If you cannot tell what it is, neither can anyone in a comment thread.

Exporting all three

Set the banner to 2560 x 1440 and build with the centre band in mind. The profile picture is square: 800 x 800 is comfortable and downsizes cleanly. The watermark is small and square with transparency, so PNG.

This editor has the 2560 x 1440 banner canvas and the 1080 x 1080 square canvas built in, so you can build all three in the same style in one sitting without resizing anything by hand.