11 Creative YouTube Banner Ideas – Quick Guide Inside!

Your YouTube Channel Art is one of the first things people see when they first visit your channel. It spreads out across the top of your page and provides you with an opportunity to make a strong impression on your channel’s visitors. This article will examine YouTube banner ideas and what makes them good examples that can inspire you when designing one for your channel.

Having a cool YouTube banner is essential for promoting your video. You must maintain a consistent theme in your channel’s branding for marketing purposes.

The channel art should also be unique so that people who encounter it can differentiate your channel’s brand from other channels within the same niche.

Importance of having great YouTube Channel Art

Your banner adds the following advantages to your YouTube channel:

• It sells your brand to visitors to your page. In its own way, it communicates the channel’s purpose to anyone with just a glance.
• The designs and images used in your channel art make it attractive and interesting. 
• Your banner helps to set your channel apart from others, especially those in the same domain. 
• For a channel with a feature product or service, the banner can be used as a space for advertisement. The best thing about this is that varying the featured product also makes your page interesting.
• You can use your banner as a way to provide visitors with quick access to your channel’s contact information. 

11 Creative YouTube Banner Ideas to Get Inspired

This section will explore some popular banners on YouTube by analyzing the characteristics that make them stand out among the many others on the platform. 

1. Jillian Harris

The Jillian Harris YouTube channel helps people to become better versions of themselves. It focuses on building a community that celebrates art through creative living. Viewers ask questions on fashion, design, decor, career, etc., that Jillian tries to answer in every episode. 

The channel’s banner spells out her name and the year her brand was established boldly in the center over a plain white background. It focuses on communicating the simplicity and feminine theme Jillian’s brand conveys.

At the bottom right corner of the channel art, you find more information about Jillian Harris. This includes all icons representing the social media platforms the brand is available on, with its logo and website.

The YouTube banner idea of Jillian’s channel art to provide visitors with quick information about her brand ties in perfectly with the theme of the channel, which is to provide information to viewers in the form of answers to their inquiries.

This can guide how you make your banner if your channel has a similar theme.

2. Learn with Shopify

Next, let’s look at the banner for Shopify’s Learn with Shopify channel. Shopify is a huge brand worldwide, best known as an e-commerce platform. 

Its channel, on the other hand, focuses on helping nurture entrepreneurs. Each episode provides small businesses with tutorials on business idea formulation, deciding on a viable product, marketing strategies for products and services, and operations management.

Learn with Shopify provides all these as well as brand building and many other resources to help eliminate the try and error associated with growing online businesses.

The channel’s banner features the title, a tagline, and an image. This image of a sneaker displayed in an online store is a representative shot of the Shopify brand, which blends well with the channel’s goal. 

At the bottom right corner is a small translucent rectangle containing social media icons representing the other platforms that host the channel’s content.

The elements are positioned in the center over a green background. The color is in accordance with Shopify’s brand but includes a different shade behind the text to make it enjoyable.

When creating your banner, you can let this design inspire you to use an image that represents your channel’s purpose with one look.

3. HubSpot Marketing

A glance at the HubSpot Marketing channel shows a vibrant combination of colors and images on the banner with very minimal text. One text group represents the channel’s title, while the other references an offer that overlays the banner as a link.

The HubSpot Marketing YouTube channel aims at providing companies with the necessary tools, tips, and SEO solutions that will help them upgrade their digital marketing strategies.

The images in the channel art are of the channel’s hosts: Rimi, Tory, and Jamal. This is called the creator shot. The same concept can be modified to have the creator or any model on the banner perform an action the channel is known for.

An example of this is the banner for Ballerinas by Night which features an image of two ballerinas dancing. This supports the idea that the channel is about ballet dancing.

You can let that inspire you to include your image or that of your channel’s host in your banner.

4. TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor is arguably one of the biggest platforms in the world that focuses on travel. Its YouTube channel helps travelers plan and execute the best trips within their means. 

The main idea is to visit wonderful locations and assess the various services available. The platform reviews accommodation, food, location activities, and transport. It considers these locations and features the opinions of other people who have also traveled there.

The channel helps viewers compare the prices of different services and allows them to make reservations when possible.

TripAdvisor’s channel art comprises a photograph of a beautiful location or travel item that spreads across the top of the page. This photograph should frequently change to represent the various locations of travel.

Take some design inspiration from this banner to make yours. Find a large image that represents your brand without you having to explain anything and use it for your banner.

5. Epicurious

The Epicurious channel is a delightful one to watch. Its main aim is to help viewers with simple food recipes that they can follow. It also provides further education to visitors about the food in different cultures, kitchen tools and organizational methods, and information on food events.

Much like the TripAdvisor banner, Epicurious also features a large image of the channel’s central theme. i.e., food, and adds a large text of the channel’s title across the banner.

This YouTube banner idea is a great inspiration for when you want to promote your channel‘s central theme without exempting focus on the brand.

6. Refinery29

The banner for the Refinery29 channel is a creative merge of the simplicity used in the Bright Side banner and the representation image used for the BMW banner. The image is used to fill the brand text.

As a YouTube channel, Refinery29 focuses on helping women and minorities strive for a more independent and informed life.

The brand celebrates these marginalized groups with articles, social media posts, events, short films, and TV programs. The aim is to empower them so their diverse backgrounds and experiences don’t hold them back in any way.

You can draw inspiration from this banner to create your YouTube channel art.

7. J.J. McCullough

Pictures say a thousand words, which is why images inform people better than text. Icons and illustrations tend to be easier to implement in a design without compromising the message they need to get across.

J.J McCullough implements this idea well in his YouTube channel art. His channel focuses on helping viewers learn about other parts of the world and how different their cultures are. His brand approaches learning in a fun way, and the icons used in his banner capture this exceptionally.

This design can inspire you as you create your channel’s banner. Establish your channel’s theme, and find icons that represent this theme. You can then combine these icons to make an attractive banner.

8. Home Cooking Adventure

Sometimes channels may have more than one representative image to create their YouTube banner. The easiest solution to such a dilemma is to combine all the images in the form of a collage. This provides different representations of the channel’s theme and makes the design more interesting with the variety of images.

Home Cooking Adventure is an excellent example of a channel that utilizes the collage design in its page banner. The channel teaches viewers how to create wonderful sweets and savory dishes. It, therefore, combines different images of desserts to form the collage for its banner.

You can follow their example to create something similar for your YouTube channel. Just establish your channel’s central idea, gather representative images of this idea, and create your collage. Consider adding the channel’s title or brand’s tagline to make it unique.

9. Cookies Cupcakes and Cardio

It is good to use your brand’s tagline for your YouTube banner. Taglines are short, catchy, and embody a brand’s value proposition. These are perfect elements to combine so that visitors to your channel instantly know and understand what your channel is about.

The main YouTube banner idea of the Cookies Cupcakes and Cardio channel is to teach its viewers how to bake and decorate cakes on their own. To make content more rounded, the channel’s creator, Jenn Johns, includes episodes that cover her experiences on trips as well as question and answer sessions.

This channel’s banner features the Cookies Cupcakes and Cardio tagline overlaying a photograph of cupcakes. 

It also includes the channel art links in the lower right-hand corner. You can use these to direct viewers to your channel’s website and other social media profiles.

10. LOL Network

You should consistently upload content to your channel so that your viewers have a reason to come back for more. To execute this efficiently, you should have an editorial calendar with a schedule for publishing content.

Your channel art thus becomes an excellent opportunity for you to inform visitors of your upload schedule. This way, they know when to expect new videos from your channel and thus update their calendar accordingly.

Kevin Hart’s Laugh Out Loud Network is an excellent example of how to use your channel art in this way. The channel aims at being the ultimate destination for viewers who want to laugh. New videos are uploaded every Tuesday, Friday, and sometimes on Sundays. This schedule is well captured in the channel’s banner for all visitors.

This is a good inspiration when designing the banner for your YouTube channel.

11. Insider

Apart from collages, you can also use frames and panels to create different sections of your channel’s banner. You could use just one cover image broken up or have a different image in each section. 

This design also combines multiple components on the banner but in a less cluttered arrangement. 

The banner for the Insider YouTube channel utilizes this concept well. The channel presents viewers with news on food, celebrities, science, politics, sports, and many other domains. This theme is expressed in the banner’s design as different frames representing each domain with the insider brand name boldly overlaying it.

You can apply this design idea to your banner if your channel’s content integrates information from many domains.

Tips for making a good YouTube banner

Your channel’s banner is supposed to be attractive and unique. It should convey your channel’s brand identity as best as it can.

The following points should guide you when making your YouTube banner:

• Use high-resolution images for your banner. These make them aesthetically pleasing and interesting.
• Your banner size should have different dimensions based on the device it is being viewed on. The recommended dimensions should be 2560 x 1440 pixels (px), which appears well on devices with large screens such as TVs. The minimum dimension required for upload is 2048 x 1152 px, which can be viewed on all devices as 1546 x 423 px. The maximum dimension for a banner to be viewable on a desktop is 2560 x 423 px, and the appropriate file size should be 6 Mb or less.
• You should have your logo on your channel art and possibly your brand’s tagline. 
• Maintain your brand’s font and color scheme within the banner’s design.
• Do not forget to include links to your other social media channels and website so that visitors can explore your brand further. These will usually show up in the lower right-hand area of the banner.
• If possible, add a call to action to your banner design, such as a subscription prompt to guide visitors on what you would want them to do next. These contribute to conversion goals within your sales funnel.

The guidelines listed above should help you create a YouTube banner that sends a clear message to your audience while maintaining good design principles.

You can also use free YouTube channel art templates available online to help you create your banner. These can be fully customized after you download them.

Wrapping Up

Having a cool YouTube banner doesn’t necessarily mean your channel will be successful. As mentioned initially, it helps make an impression on visitors, but it would all be a waste of time and effort without quality video content.

In addition to having a great banner, you should ensure that you upload high-quality videos to your channel. Do this consistently so that your audience always has something to look forward to. Research has shown that this also improves engagement on your channel.

You can also add some variety to your channel by creating multiple banner designs that you frequently change over a period. This makes your page less boring to visitors. Check out Songlifty’s blog for more examples to inspire your channel design process. You can get tips on creating the best banners and also gain information on general YouTube channel promotion methods.