YouTube — The Finished Assets
The real files, rendered from the export artboards — upload these
172YouTube banner & logo
The channel's own furniture, as opposed to any one video's: the 2560×1440 banner and the 1546×423 rectangle inside it that is the only part every device shows, the profile photo that has to survive being 24 pixels wide, the video watermark, and the playlist covers.
The finished assets
Not mockups — the real files, rendered at true size from HTML artboards in brand-content-creation/youtube/export/ that use the system's own tokens, fonts and glyph subset. The light banner is derived from the dark one by palette substitution, so the two cannot drift in geometry. Regeneration is one headless-Chrome command per file, documented in the export README.
The banner, and the only part of it anyone sees
A YouTube banner is one 2560×1440 file cropped four different ways, and only the middle 1546×423 survives all of them. Design that rectangle first and extend the background outward — the common failure is the reverse, a composition laid across the full canvas that looks right in the design tool and arrives on a phone with its title half gone.
YouTube Banner — The Four Crops
One 2560×1440 file, cropped four different ways — and only the middle 1546×423 survives all of them
The banners
Three, each shown with the phone crop directly underneath so the claim is checkable rather than asserted. The default answers the only two questions a first-time visitor has — what is this channel, and how often does it publish.
YouTube Banner — Namaste Salesforce
Three banners, each with the phone crop underneath it — dark, light, and a course launch
The profile photo
Square in, circle out, and it spends most of its life at 24 pixels in a comment thread. That, not the 800×800 upload, is the size it has to be designed for.
YouTube Profile Photo
800×800 square, shown as a circle — and it has to survive being 24px in a comment
Icons — playlists, watermark, links
One tile with the glyph and the words swapped, so a shelf of eight playlists reads as one channel rather than eight decisions. Glyphs come from the system's own Phosphor subset — a cover using an icon the site does not ship is a cover nobody can rebuild.
YouTube Channel Icons
Playlist covers, the 150×150 video watermark, and the link row — one glyph family, one tile
Every asset, and its real size
BANNER | 2560 × 1440, 16:9, under 6 MB | Safe area 1546 × 423, centred. Keep the bottom-left of it clear — the avatar overlaps that corner. |
AVATAR | 800 × 800, square, under 4 MB | Rendered as a circle. Solid navy ground, mark only, no text, no transparency. |
WATERMARK | 150 × 150 PNG, transparent | Bottom-right of every video at about 70% opacity, for the whole runtime. |
PLAYLIST | 1280 × 720 | Same tile every time: index top-left, glyph top-right, name and count bottom-left. |
THUMBNAIL | 1280 × 720, under 2 MB | On the Thumbnails page — it belongs to a video, not to the channel. |
END SCREEN | last 20 seconds | On the Promo page. Same geometry as the lesson end card. |
What goes wrong
On the banner
- Anything readable outside the middle 1546×423. It exists on your monitor and nowhere else.
- A launch banner left up after the launch. Nothing says “abandoned” more clearly than an enrolment that closed in March.
- Content in the bottom-left of the safe box, where the avatar lands on top of it.
- A subscriber count. It is stale the day you upload it, and it is already on the page.
On the avatar and icons
- The wordmark in the circle. Legible in the design tool, a grey smudge in a comment.
- A transparent avatar — it becomes a white disc on one theme and a black one on the other.
- A second accent colour across the playlist shelf. Brand blue is the only saturated colour; eight hues is eight brands.
- Emoji or stock icons anywhere. The Phosphor subset is the icon set.