livid cradle
Ok, so the video is about the legal case between Dustin Mitchell and Id Software for the trademark called "Doomscroll", which got Mitchell into a legal battle with id back in 2021.
I was wondering if this is an intriguing enough thumbnail to improve the CTR, as well as knowing if the thumbnail is readable enough and understandable enough.
The video's titled "How using this one word got him sued by Id Software"
distant ivy
Need bigger scales if you want to clearly show the two sides being weighed... I assume that's what you're going for
wicked shadow
The entire bottom half of the image is unnecessary (the large round shape - what does that have to do with DOOM or a legal battle?). If it's all part of the same image from which you got the scales, I would agree with Dark House, you can scale up the image so the scales are the only thing you can see
livid cradle
The entire bottom half of the image is unnecessary (the large round shape - what...
I wanted more emphasis on the gavel though
I could have put the doom??? text on the bottom but that's gonna be occluded by the timestamp on the bottom right
is this thumbnail any better anyway?
wicked shadow
I liked the first one how it had the DOOM/ID in the background, but yeah, the second one is a little clearer. That said, not clear enough. Remember, this can be compressed to like, an inch across in places. At that size, the gavel is obscured in the second, and the blurry part of the word becomes a red smudge. But like you said, moving the red word too low risks it getting covered by the timestamp.
My solution, for the timestamp at least, has been to take a screenshot of a thumbnail of a video you've watched on youtube, then in a photo editor, draw black boxes around anything that'll obscure your thumbnail. Delete the original image, save it, and now you have a template of what areas to avoid when crafting the thumbnail.
Doing this, you can maximize space, perhaps hiding the platform the gavel smacks under the timestamp, and having the gavel smash the timestamp itself.
Also, putting a white stroke border around the red word may help it stand out, as it is currently dark on dark, so it blends a bit too much. Not a ton, like 3-5 pixels wide, just enough to separate it
wicked shadow
I wanted more emphasis on the gavel though
In the first one, even with it blown up, I couldn't even tell there was a gavel in the image. When it's compressed to an inch wide, all you'll see is a black shape on the bottom. Second image is much more effective at conveying this message
livid cradle
I liked the first one how it had the DOOM/ID in the background, but yeah, the se...
that helps I assume
this might be better then?
I actually used a still from the current video as I'm editing
wicked shadow
Lol, while it is quite good, I noticed you did add the white border... And then put the red/white word on a red/white background. Basically just pick the color that will separate it most from the background, lol. Maybe even blow it up a tint bit, ad the picelated words are hard to read from a distance. The rest looks quite nice though!
Perhaps you could cut the third question mark off of the second part of Doom slayer, or just push it off screen, since you can't read this slayer part anyway. Thus, you don't need the whole word, just enough to indicate something is missing. That will help you make the word larger without losing definition.
Also, I just put it a bit further away from me to get a better view of what it would look like smaller, and I noticed that the ID kind of runs in with the vignette. Just pushing it right and down a few pixels should help with that
livid cradle
or perhaps remove the vignette would work?
I'll give a shot to removing the vignette
what about now?
@wicked shadow
wicked shadow
Again, the whole thing looks pretty good, except the DOOMslayer part. It could be larger and shoved to the right a bit. It is, after all, the most important part of the thumbnail, the thesis of the video, so it deserves a hefty section of the full image. To help show how important it is for that one bit to be large and visible (which the colors are now very good at), here's a sidebar with your video filled in
You can see, the most visible parts are the american flag and the gavel, things which apply to tons of subjects. But if you grew the DOOM part a bit, it would help the whole image stand out more against big things like VFX or DUMB, or the huge faces people put in their images
side note: removing the vignette was probably a better idea than mine of moving it, you can see how that would obscure a large portion of the thumbnail