YouTube banner maker
Design channel art at 2560 × 1440 with safe zones showing what's visible on TV, desktop, tablet, and phone.
No watermark. No account needed.
Need better photos of yourself for your channel? Try Fotoria
YouTube banner size and dimensions
YouTube channel art (what most people just call a banner) is 2560 × 1440 pixels, a 16:9 ratio. Only a fraction of that is visible on any one device — see the diagram below.
| Recommended upload | 2560 × 1440 px (16:9) |
|---|---|
| Minimum upload | 2048 × 1152 px (16:9): still valid, just less headroom in the safe area |
| Safe area (visible on every device) | 1546 × 423 px, centered |
| Accepted formats | JPG, PNG, non-animated GIF, BMP |
| Maximum file size | 6 MB |
| Channel icon | Separate from your banner — it never overlaps your channel art. |
Recommended upload size confirmed directly against YouTube's own help center; the rest is a strong, consistent cross-source aggregate — worth a final check against the live page before you rely on it for a launch.
How much of your banner people actually see
Your upload is 2560 × 1440, but almost nobody sees all of it. Every viewer sees at least the innermost box below — TV is the only place the full image shows.
Keep your channel name, logo, and anything else that matters inside the innermost (mobile) box — every template in the gallery below already does this for you. Toggle regions on and off in the editor above to check any one device on its own.
Why 1024×576 looks blurry (and why 2048×1152 is actually fine)
Two different problems get lumped together under "wrong size," so they need two different answers.
1024 × 576 is genuinely too small. That's exactly a quarter of the recommended upload's pixel area — most likely a mix-up with a different spec, maybe a thumbnail size. YouTube has to stretch it to fill the canvas, and since the visible safe area is already a small slice of the full image, whatever detail survives gets stretched further still. It looks soft on every device, not just some.
2048 × 1152 is not a mistake. It's YouTube's documented minimum, still the correct 16:9 shape, and it uploads and displays fine. The only reason to go bigger is headroom: 2560 × 1440 gives the safe area more real pixels to work with, and leaves room if YouTube's own display pipeline ever wants more resolution than it does today.
YouTube banner templates
Should you put your face on your YouTube banner?
People read faces faster than they read anything else. When someone lands on a channel page, the banner is the largest thing in view, and if there's a face in it, that's what they look at first, before the channel name, before the video grid.
YouTube is unusual among platforms here, for two reasons.
Your channel icon never overlaps your channel art. On LinkedIn or X, the profile picture sits on top of the banner and eats a corner of it. On YouTube they're separate elements. So a face in your banner isn't competing with your icon, it's an addition, and you have the whole safe area to work with.
But the safe area is small. Only 1546 × 423 pixels of your 2560 × 1440 upload is visible on every device. That's a wide, shallow strip. A face and your channel name are both fighting for the same narrow band, and on mobile there's no room for a mistake.
So the question is less whether a face belongs and more whether it fits alongside everything else you need in that strip.
Channels where a face does real work
YouTube runs on parasocial trust more than almost any platform. People subscribe to a person as much as a topic.
Educators and explainers. You're asking someone to accept your explanation over a hundred others. A face makes that a person's judgment rather than an anonymous source.
Coaches, trainers, and instructors. Fitness, language, music, business. Anyone whose viewers are deciding whether to follow instructions from you specifically.
Personal finance and career channels. High-stakes advice where "who is this person" is the first question a sensible viewer asks.
Review and opinion channels. The value is your taste. Show whose taste it is.
Podcast and interview channels. The hosts are the product, and a two-shot of the hosts is a genuinely good banner.
Vlog and lifestyle. The format is built on access to a person. Hiding is working against the genre.
Channels where it doesn't help
Gaming channels. Game art, a logo, and your handle usually outperform a portrait. Viewers arrive for the game first.
Faceless channels. A whole successful category: compilations, documentaries, meditation, lofi, automation-built channels. There's nothing to apologize for; a strong wordmark carries the banner fine.
Music channels. Cover art, instruments, or performance shots do more than a portrait.
Topic-first channels. History, science explainers, news roundups, where the subject matter is the draw and a presenter face adds nothing.
Anyone building something they might sell or hand off. A channel built around a face is hard to transfer.
What kind of photo
The signals differ, and matching the wrong one to your content is jarring.
Direct eye contact, warm expression. Approachable. Works for education, coaching, anything where the viewer needs to feel comfortable being taught.
Sharp, well-lit, composed. Credible. The right call for finance, tech, professional advice.
Candid, mid-laugh, in motion. Relatable. Standard for vlogs and community-driven channels.
Exaggerated expression or bold color. Memorable. Deliberate and effective in entertainment, wrong almost everywhere else.
Whatever you pick should match your thumbnails. A polished banner portrait above a row of high-energy thumbnails reads as two different channels.
Placement, given the crops
This is where most channel art fails. Some rules follow from the geometry.
Keep the face inside the mobile safe area. Anything outside 1546 × 423 disappears for most viewers. A face placed near the edges survives on TV and vanishes on a phone.
Put the face on one side, text on the other. Centering both means they collide. Face left with the channel name right, or the reverse: the strip is too shallow to stack them.
Crop tighter than feels natural. In a 423-pixel-tall band, a full upper body shrinks the head to almost nothing. Head and shoulders, cropped close.
Check every device before you export. Toggle TV, desktop, tablet, and mobile in the editor above. A banner that only works on one of them isn't finished.
A good photo does in an instant what a paragraph of description would take much longer to say. On a channel page, where someone is deciding in a couple of seconds whether to scroll your videos or leave, that shortcut is worth more than almost anything else in the frame.
And whether or not a face belongs in your banner, one belongs in your channel icon. That's the image that appears next to every video, every comment, and every search result you'll ever show up in. Fotoria makes professional headshots from photos you already have.
How it works
- 1.Pick a style — gaming, tech, vlog, podcast, education, or music — or start from a plain background.
- 2.Edit your channel name and tagline, or add your own photo as the background.
- 3.Toggle TV, desktop, tablet, and mobile to check your text survives on every device.
- 4.Download at 2560 × 1440 and upload it straight to YouTube Studio.
Use cases
- New channel setup — get channel art sized correctly on the first try.
- Rebranding an existing channel without hiring a designer.
- Testing whether your logo or text survives YouTube's mobile crop before you publish.
- Matching channel art to a new series, event, or seasonal theme.
Frequently asked questions
- What size should a YouTube banner be?
- 2560 × 1440 pixels, a 16:9 ratio. That's YouTube's recommended upload size — the minimum is 2048 × 1152, also valid, just with less room in the safe area.
- Why does my banner look fine on desktop but cropped on mobile?
- YouTube shows a different crop of your banner on every device. Mobile shows the smallest area — about 1546 × 423 pixels, centered — so anything outside that box (including near the edges) simply isn't visible there.
- Is 1024 × 576 a valid YouTube banner size?
- No — it's a quarter of the recommended pixel area and will look stretched and soft once uploaded. It's often confused with a different spec. Use 2560 × 1440.
- Is 2048 × 1152 too small for a YouTube banner?
- No, it's YouTube's documented minimum and still the correct 16:9 shape. 2560 × 1440 just gives you more headroom in the visible safe area.
- Does my channel icon overlap my banner?
- No. Unlike a LinkedIn or X header, your channel icon (profile picture) is a separate element and never sits on top of your channel art.
- What's the maximum file size for a YouTube banner?
- 6 MB. The download from this editor targets well under that.
- Do I need to sign up to use this?
- No. The editor is free and unlimited, and nothing you upload leaves your device.
- Is my photo uploaded anywhere?
- No. If you upload your own background image, it's processed entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, stored, or sent to a server.