The YouTube Channel Art for Mygrafico
One of the first tasks when building a YouTubeTM channel for your company is to apply your company branding into custom channel art, which is the header image and icon at the top of your channel page. When creating the channel art for Mygrafico, I needed to consider several brand details, including the color scheme and the lion illustration that appears throughout the website and store. Also there was a custom font used in the company logo.
Keeping the brand graphics and color scheme is one way to build brand awareness for a company. But that doesn't mean that you must not vary from these. When you do, try to keep at least one familiar design element. However, to introduce their new channel, I wanted to use all the original branding graphics.
The latest update in the YouTube channel layout includes the large header image, which is popular on most social websites. YouTube offers a great template to use for designing custom channel art. The first thing that you will notice about the template is its large size of 2560 x 1440 pixels. As the same channel art will be viewed on many devices from TV, mobile, computers and more, this large sized image accommodates large and retina display screens. For those smaller screens, the art is scaled to fit. How small will it scale before you get that horizontal scroll bar? The magic number, called the "safe area" on the template, is 1546 x 423 pixels. The difference between the maximum and minimum horizontal area is 507 pixels on each side of the safe area. On some tablets, which use a 1855 x 423 pixel space, some of these extra pixels are used. On the other hand, the safe zone is scaled down to fit iOS and Android devices.
So what can we do about that extra, mostly unused, space on each side and the larger space above and below the safe area, which is seen only on TV sized displays. There are many possible answers to that question.
One option I've seen frequently used is to use the same image that is displayed in the safe area, but enlarged to fit within the entire 2560 x 1440 pixels as a background image. Usually this background image is blurred so as not to compete with the image in the safe area. However, I wanted to do something a little different for Mygrafico.
One background image used frequently as a background in Mygrafico banners on their website slider is the sunburst. So I drew a sunburst background image in IllustratorR, using the color scheme from the website. I then sized the sunburst so that it fit within the 2560 x 1440 pixels, with the center of the sunburst at the bottom of the safe area.
https://www.mygrafico.com/
Keeping the brand graphics and color scheme is one way to build brand awareness for a company. But that doesn't mean that you must not vary from these. When you do, try to keep at least one familiar design element. However, to introduce their new channel, I wanted to use all the original branding graphics.
The latest update in the YouTube channel layout includes the large header image, which is popular on most social websites. YouTube offers a great template to use for designing custom channel art. The first thing that you will notice about the template is its large size of 2560 x 1440 pixels. As the same channel art will be viewed on many devices from TV, mobile, computers and more, this large sized image accommodates large and retina display screens. For those smaller screens, the art is scaled to fit. How small will it scale before you get that horizontal scroll bar? The magic number, called the "safe area" on the template, is 1546 x 423 pixels. The difference between the maximum and minimum horizontal area is 507 pixels on each side of the safe area. On some tablets, which use a 1855 x 423 pixel space, some of these extra pixels are used. On the other hand, the safe zone is scaled down to fit iOS and Android devices.
So what can we do about that extra, mostly unused, space on each side and the larger space above and below the safe area, which is seen only on TV sized displays. There are many possible answers to that question.
One option I've seen frequently used is to use the same image that is displayed in the safe area, but enlarged to fit within the entire 2560 x 1440 pixels as a background image. Usually this background image is blurred so as not to compete with the image in the safe area. However, I wanted to do something a little different for Mygrafico.
One background image used frequently as a background in Mygrafico banners on their website slider is the sunburst. So I drew a sunburst background image in IllustratorR, using the color scheme from the website. I then sized the sunburst so that it fit within the 2560 x 1440 pixels, with the center of the sunburst at the bottom of the safe area.
https://www.mygrafico.com/
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