Create a Custom Background for YouTube Channels

May 30, 2010 8 Comments by Michael

There must be hundreds of tutorials online for creating custom backgrounds for your YouTube Channel. I spent hours (days?) searching and sifting through tutorials that were either spam, had broken links, were poor quality, and/or provided Adobe Photoshop templates that didn’t properly fit the constraints of a YouTube Channel. I finally stumbled on the tutorial below from Tech Support Gone Bad, a great YouTube Channel for new product reviews and technical tutorials.

The tutorial provides an Adobe Photoshop template that fits nearly perfectly with the current YouTube “2.0″ Channel Layout. The narrator does a great job of walking through the customization process, although I suggest having a working knowledge of Photoshop to save yourself some frustration.

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I used this template and tutorial myself to create the current YouTube Channel background for CoZiggy. Here are the steps I followed to create it:

  1. Downloaded the template file at octosites.com/downloads/ytbg2.psd
  2. Opened the file in Adobe Photoshop CS4 (you can use any recent version)
  3. Re-sized the black box in “layer 3″ by shrinking it about 20 pixels on either side, which made a tighter fit around the channel content (go to View > Show Rulers and eyeball the re-size)
  4. Inserted a black-to-white gradient from top to bottom on the “background” layer (illustrated in the video)
  5. Filter > Distort > Ocean Ripple for the background effect
  6. Added the CoZiggy logo on the right side of the page and the text and images on the left side
  7. Created a separate 1600 pixel wide white “serrated” edge, then inserted this at the top of the page
  8. Deleted the “white area” layer to make the top serrated edge look fluid with the top menu bar on YouTube Channel pages. Check out the CoZiggy Channel to see what I mean.
  9. Added a white color overlay to “layer 3″ (the black box in the middle)
  10. Decreased the size of the outer glow to 5 px
  11. File > Save for Web & Devices and saved the final design as a JPEG (use the highest image quality while keeping the file size under 256KB)
  12. Uploaded the final design to CoZiggy’s Channel

Related posts:

  1. Create a Custom Background for Twitter Pages
Other Video Tutorials
Michael

About the author

Michael is a social marketing enthusiast and owner of CoZiggy.com, co-founder at Unibridge Projects and caretaker of his mischievous dog Jimmy (pictured).

8 Responses to “Create a Custom Background for YouTube Channels”

  1. Randee Prvitt says:
    June 16, 2010 at 6:25 am

    you have a great page here, lots of good stuff :)

  2. Meridith Cocroft says:
    June 18, 2010 at 4:36 pm

    it’s pretty cool to find a blog done by someone with not dissimilar views. Do you have an RSS feed somewhere?

  3. Create a Custom Background for Twitter Pages says:
    June 20, 2010 at 6:29 pm

    [...] wallpaper for Twitter is different than other social media portals (like YouTube) in the sense that Twitter automatically left aligns any uploaded background image rather then [...]

  4. Creating a Custom Twitter Wallpaper Background for Twitter | Pixel Clouds says:
    June 21, 2010 at 12:23 pm

    [...] wallpaper for Twitter is different than other social media portals (like YouTube) in the sense that Twitter automatically left aligns any uploaded background image rather then [...]

  5. Michael says:
    June 21, 2010 at 1:02 pm

    Yup. Upper right hand corner of the page, next to the search bar.

  6. Fern Colbenson says:
    June 23, 2010 at 4:49 am

    Heya¡­my very first comment on your site. ,I have been reading your blog for a while and thought I would completely pop in and drop a friendly note. . It is great stuff indeed. I also wanted to ask..is there a way to subscribe to your site via email?

  7. Michael says:
    June 23, 2010 at 11:01 am

    There sure is Fern. Just go to the Subscribe section and you can sign up there.

  8. Florinda Yeropoli says:
    June 23, 2010 at 5:19 pm

    A big thank you for your blog article.Thanks Again.

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