Here Derral Eves explains how to create a custom banner for a YouTube channel and give free templates to make creating a banner image much easier.

You’ll learn step by step how to customize your YouTube one channel banner 2013, and with free templates…

0:13 Alright, you ready to create that custom banner for your YouTube channel? well, what we’re going to do is go to pixlr.com and click on the advanced editor then go ahead and find the template. I put it on my desktop here, and let’s go ahead and upload it.

0:38 Ok, now that we have the template open I don’t want you to get overwhelmed with this. It’s really more simpler than what it looks. Ok, and I’m going to walk you right through it. So the first thing we’re going to do is move your cursor over to the layers here and I want you to scroll down all the way to the bottom and double click on this lock. Ok, and let me kind of tell you a little bit about YouTube’s banner for the one channel design, it’s basically a responsive banner and it will resize itself depending on what device you’re looking at. So if you’re on a desktop computer it’s going to be a certain size, if you’re on a tablet or an ipad, nexus7 it’s going to be a different size, a mobile device it’s going to be a different size. But I don’t want you to get really, really overwhelmed with this because it’s really easy, I’ve made it super easy.

1:20 So let’s go ahead and click off the complication here. And the first thing that you need to do to create your banner is come up to layers here and I want you to click on this where it says “open image as layer”. Ok now that I have my picture uploaded here what I want to do is position it so that it’s perfect for our banner design.

Now let’s move over to layers and let’s activate “logo safe area”. And you’re going to see that this gray box is around here. Now this gray box is basically what all the devices are going to see. This place right here is for your picture or your avatar that’s on your YouTube channel and just be aware of that. And I noticed that the snowboarder is being cut off right here so what we want to do is move him so you can click on this little move tool right here make sure that your layer is selected and let’s just kind of adjust him where we want him to be. Ok, that looks really cool with the sun coming through, but notice right over here it’s going to be cut off, so on the TV view and also the desktop view it’s going to look a little funky here.

So we’re going to need to modify that. Now let’s come up to edit and what we want to do is go into “free transform” and what you’ll want to do is hold down your shift key and then move this bounding box get it right positioned so it goes right to the edge, and then hit enter or return.

2:44 Let’s make this banner a little bit more interesting. let’s go ahead and click on the type tool here, click here, let’s go ahead and make it a snowboarding TV and you can select different fonts and it has all the Google fonts that are here, it’s really, really cool. You can change the size, let’s go ahead and make that 94 and bold/italics, let’s keep it white, if you want to change the color you can just change the color there, it’s really cool. But let’s just keep it white. And let’s go ahead and move it, click the moving tool, let’s just select it and move it over here a little bit. And let’s go ahead and add some effects, so to do that you can come over here to the layers to look in make sure that the text is selected here and let’s click this icon and that’s for your styles and you can see that they have shadows, I like the shadow so let’s go ahead and put a little shadow on there, get the distance here right, change the opacity, hit ok. Another thing I like to do is change the mode, so let’s go ahead and change the mode and let’s make it an overlay.

4:28 Now let’s upload this banner to YouTube, just go to your channel, make sure you’re logged in, roll over your banner and you’ll have this little icon that shows up that pencil, click on that and click “edit artwork”. And what we’ll do now is browse our computer here for our brand new banner that we just saved and let’s go ahead and upload, it’s going to take a second. And Wala!

Watch the steps here…