Home page A great design for your banner, also known as channel art, can give your page a polished and professional look and entice viewers to check out your content.

One challenge is creating a design that works for all devices.

YouTube crops the image differently.

Depending on the type of device on a TV, it will show the whole image.

But on other devices it will crop out most of the image and just show the middle area.

So we want all the important information to be within this safe area.

Later in this video, we'll show you how to use this template to make sure your images will work.

Now it's time to start creating our design in Canada.

If you're new to Canada, you can create a free account at Cannes, va dot com.

On the home page will click YouTube Channel Art.

In our example, we want to create an image for a baking channel to get people excited about watching our weekly videos about making doughnuts.

We'll look for a template that will work for us and doesn't need too many changes, you can use the search bar to type a keyword.

This could be a topic such as food or even a color.

In our case, I think a yellow template will go well with our channels.

Cheerful personality.

You'll see a variety of template designs.

Well, look for one that will be easy to read on all devices.

Let's try this one.

It has all the important elements in the center, so it will look great on a smartphone, and the solid background will eliminate any issues with cropping out images or graphics.

Now that we have a design we like, we'll just make a few changes to customize it.

Let's start by changing the text will change the title to the name of our channel.

Then you can let people know a little bit about your channel.

For example, when you will upload new videos now it's time to find an image to fit our message.

We'll select the old image and click the trash icon to make way for a new image.

At this point, you could upload your logo or other image, for this example, will use one of canvas vector graphics by clicking elements Let's try typing doughnuts in the search bar.

You'll see both free and paid images.

Paid images are marked with a price or crown, but we'll look for one that's free.

If you're still not seeing one you like.

You can refine the search by including a color or other descriptive words.

Let's change this to read doughnut.

I think Red will be a nice contrast with this yellow background.

This smiley face doughnut may work well.

You'll notice that it's an animation, but we can save it as a still image.

Later, let's click it toe added to the design.

Now we can drag handles to resize it and will position it in the same place as the previous image.

Finally, we'll just take a moment to review the design and see if any other changes are needed.

We want to make sure our design will look good on YouTube.

So now it's time to upload the YouTube channel art template and place it over our design.

You can find it quickly by googling YouTube channel art guidelines.

There should be a page from Google Support.

We'll click that and then we'll scroll down to find the Channel Art template and then click the drop down arrow.

Now we can click channel art templates to download it.

This is a ZIP file, so we'll need to unzip or extract it before we can use it in Cannes, Va.

I'm on a Mac, so I'll click the file and it will unzip to a new folder.

Now let's return to canvass toe, upload it and check it against our design.

You click upload, then select, upload an image or video, navigate to the Channel Art Templates folder and then opened the PNG file.

Now we can lay this template over our design by dragging it over the edge of the template.

It should snap into place so that it fits the whole canvas.

Now the YouTube template is making it hard to see our banner.

So a great way to fix that is to change.

The transparency in the menu bar will click the Transparency icon, and then we can bring it down until our image shows through.

Now we can see it much better, and it will make it easier if you need to adjust your design.

It looks like the text and the image will fit nicely, so Now you can delete the YouTube template by clicking delete on the keyboard.

When you're ready to publish your design on YouTube, you can click download in the menu bar.

Since we have an animation will switch the file type so it will be a still image.

Either a PNG or JPEG file will work for this.

We'll go with the PNG file, then we'll click download again.

Finally, let's go to your YouTube page, make sure you're signed into your Google account and then choose your channel.

Now you click Customize Channel.

Here you can add or edit your channel art.

Then we can drag and drop the file from the Downloads folder.

YouTube will show you a preview of how your design will look on TV, mobile and desktop.

We can see that this one is going to fit all three devices, but if it's not fitting quite right, you have the option to adjust the crop right here in YouTube.

Since everything looks good, will click select to add it to the page.

Now you have a head start on a great YouTube channel.

We encourage you to get started on your own channel art design that will show your channels personality and get people excited about your video content.

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