My Design Workflow Applied to Creating a YT Banner!

I'm going to talk about creating and YouTube better but keep in mind firstly that I'm not on design expert there's not a lot you can document absolutely everything I do on this channel and over time it will improve okay whenever I design something I pretty much always use exactly the same workflow so today I want to share that workflow with you and I hope you can use it in your own projects please be aware of the fact though that this is not a technical tutorial there are plenty of Photoshop and tutorials out there this video focuses just on the design part and on the workflow first of all think about which kind of image you want to create what the purpose of your images what your goals are and what the resolution of your image is in my case the purpose is creating a channel art right here that represents my personality and looks at at least a little bit professional there are tons of templates out there I

picked this one because it simply shows which parts of the screen are visible on which device TV uses the entire image and on desktop and mobile devices you only see the middle stripe right here so I remodeled that with these black stripes for full width and this for small with this part of the channel arc will always be visible so that's where I put my name as you can see it has a little bit of a drop shadow just to make it pop a little more and the way I went about doing this I just took a couple of pictures of myself with my phone the quality doesn't need to be super high and smartphones take pretty good pictures nowaday anyway because if I have just that my one of my goals was representing my personality and in the grand scheme of things what I'm trying to achieve with this YouTube channel is also building some kind of personal brand so using my face probably not that bad of an idea to make people remember me oh yeah I simply simply started

dropping these images in here felt the entire thing up and try to make it somewhat asymmetrical there are some artifacts here and there but a bit of that doesn't really matter if anything it makes more interesting don't try to make it look too perfect because that can end up looking even more boring also do not clutter your image with random everything needs to have a purpose don't include any unnecessary elements I made it black and white oops no black and white increasing the contrast and really just lowering the alpha channel of this entire folder all of my faces here so you can just barely see them looks pretty nice during the process I always checked how it how the smaller version of it looks both versions need to look alright and after that I went on to making sure this looks alright too

because this looks a little crappy what I did is I filled the empty space with more photos of myself which still looks a bit crappy so I added this nice black blend at the edges and suddenly looks pretty alright I can live with that what's special about this workflow is that I try random things all the time adding some weird patterns not having any photos in the background giving everything weird colors putting a weird big picture into the center of the screen and what we just figured out together is that this version looks pretty dope as well so I'm gonna save that as PNG and as you can see there are already a lot of different versions in this folder so every time I find something new that looks good I save it now let's have a look at the images I saved so far this is where I started out

just some plain text and a nice texture in the background I highly recommend putting a bit of texture into absolutely everything makes your images look more interesting darker version colored version also pretty nice but doesn't really fit my channel this looks a bit too artsy for some reason too serious here the same thing with a bit of texture I don't think this looks all that nice either but it was good enough to save it same in green this is the one I am currently using and this is the one we just exported which looks pretty dope as well especially if we just use the middle stripe it should look pretty alright both of those are pretty good so what I recommend when you have all of those is clicking into your folder and click on extra-large symbol so you can

see them all besides each other if you want to compare two you can also open them and put them next to each other comparing them side by side you can often see that one version might be a bit better in this case I think I'm gonna stick with this one but what you absolutely should try if you're not sure is using both of them actually in the context you want to use them in so let's put the other one into the banner okay select oh yeah this looks way way worse than I anticipated so let's reverse that right away looks really weird no that clearly shows how important it is to put your images into context

that's better thank God so here's another example where I used exactly the same process just saving all of the image that I liked this is the banner for an app I created some time ago so I kept trying different designs always comparing them and keeping what looks good this is the one I like the most so I kept iterating on that as you can see there are a lot of other colored versions as well in red whatever it's really important to compare them all the time whenever you like two of them put them next to each other which one looks better one is better so let's keep going with that then it turned into this try different titles different formatting is another funny one oh my god yeah you just need to experiment and then compare experiment compare experiment compare

experiment compare that's the workflow I'm talking about hope you enjoyed this hope you learned something thanks you for watch things