Any new or even more seasoned YouTube creator will tell you thumbnails are a tricky beast to master. Gaining the skills of a graphic designer whilst trying to also learn compelling and enticing as a matter of course can be a long road to walk down.

The latter can be expedited by finding a good coach or a group of like-minded creators to bounce ideas off. The former requires more finessed tools to create with.

You can invest in a course to learn Photoshop, to master Affinity or Pixelmator. Not a bad way to go, but that doesn’t help you with the thumbnail you need for your very next video.

This is where newer apps, software, and sites like Canva, Figma, Adobe Creative Cloud Express (formerly Spark), and template sites like PlaceIt come in.

These tools come to help you make ready-to-go thumbnails and other creative assets for your channel and social media. Not starting with a blank canvas can be helpful to get you past the “creative block” that is the question, “what will look good or appealing?” Modifying a pre-designed template where you can customize anything that you see down to the color, fonts, images, etc. can be a huge benefit in not only time-saving but being able to apply your branding to an already pleasing asset to make it your own.

In this video, I use one such tool – PlaceIt – to create a thumbnail for a YouTube video. Not only that, I take it one step further and do it all on a mobile phone!

If you want to try PlaceIt yourself, check it out here: https://dhyt.link/placeit

Note, the link to PlaceIt is an affiliate link, which I will earn a commission if you purchase a one-off asset or subscription.