How to Create a YouTube Banner / Background

Creating a YouTube background used to be an exciting opportunity to showcase your creativity with complex designs and personalized elements. Oh, the good old times.

Nowadays, however, YouTube has simplified this feature a lot, and so you only get to design a simple banner.

According to YouTube, this banner should be 2560 x 1440 pixels. But if you’ve ever tried to make one, you know these dimensions aren’t quite accurate. Basically, if you make your banner exactly 2560 x 1440 pixels, nothing will align properly.

In this post, I’ll guide you through the process of designing a YouTube banner that actually looks great and fits perfectly. Let’s dive into the real steps you need to create a professional and eye-catching banner for your channel:

The real dimensions of a YouTube banner / background

Technically speaking, yes, the full dimensions of a YouTube banner are indeed 2560 x 1440 pixels.

However, this full-size banner will only get displayed on TV displays, which is a relatively small percentage of all devices playing YouTube.

The actual visible banners displayed on people’s iPhones, iPads, and desktops are as follows:

• Maximum width for desktop devices: 2560 x 423 pixels
• Exact “safe area” that gets displayed on all devices: 1546 x 423 pixels

Okay, so these are the numbers, but how does it actually work? Will YouTube just resize the default 2560 x 1440 banner to make it fit 2560 x 423 or 1546 x 423?

Not exactly. It’ll actually crop your banner.

Take a look at this example:

• Whatever you see inside the red box is going to be displayed on all devices – it’s the safe area.
• Whatever you see inside the blue box is going to be displayed on desktop.
• Everything else is going to be displayed on TVs.

As you can see, that safe area is right in the center of the banner image. This means that if you want to make your banner look right, you actually need to maneuver all the key details to be placed in that exact spot.

Here’s what this specific YouTube banner / background looks like on a couple of devices:

How to create a YouTube banner

My favorite tool to create YouTube banners is Canva. It already offers somewhat of a template with the right base dimensions (2560 x 1440). However, that default template doesn’t show you the safe areas, so I tweaked it a bit to make it more useful.

👉 Here’s my version of the Canva template for a YouTube background.

You will need a Canva account to use it, but apart from that it’s totally free. Simply duplicate the template and use it as the base of your YouTube banner design.

Here’s a quick preview of what the template looks like:

What you see there:

• light blue: accepted area for desktop
• darker blue: safe area for all devices – place all your channel’s key info here
• white: full area that’s going to be shown on TV displays

You can add any design elements or text that you’d like and then just move the blue bars to the background to not have them displayed in the final design. Like so:

Alternatively, if Canva isn’t your first design choice, here’s a raw PNG file of the template. You can import it to any design tool, like Photoshop, Figma, or whatnot.

What to actually put in your YouTube banner

A handful of common approaches have emerged over the years. Here are the most popular ones nowadays:

Option a: Use it to promote your latest product or offer

Since the banner is going to get displayed on all devices (at least the safe area part of the banner) and a lot of your new subscribers will see it then it’s a good opportunity to promote your recent product release or upcoming event there.

Here are some examples of this approach:

T-Series

WWE

Taylor Swift

Ed Sheeran

Option b: The obvious path – make it an introduction to your brand

This is simple enough – just introduce yourself and perhaps the type of content you’re doing:

Movieclips

Cocomelon

Dude Perfect

Mark Rober

Option c: Make it enigmatic and fun

While this approach is the most original and it’s hard to pinpoint what you’re gaining from it exactly, apart from general interest of people and maybe more clicks, it’s also hard to disregard it knowing that one of the biggest youtubers of them all is doing exactly that:

MrBeast

A trip down the memory lane

For those of you curious about the good old times, here’s what the old YouTube backgrounds used to look like – a lot more fun in my opinion:

DeStorm

AHMIR

Alexa Goddard

EpicMealTime

JennaMarbles

I hope all this comes helpful when you’re creating a banner for your channel!