Thumbnail sketching

Thumbnail sketching is part of the designer repertoire and refers to a series of small drawings used to quickly explore a variety of design ideas which can be worked out either in physical or electronic format. In the digital realm, and particularly on social media platforms, a thumbnail sketch is about a small, clickable image representing a larger piece of content. This can be a video (as seen on YouTube), an article, a webpage, or a product. Thumbnails are the first thing users see when they encounter online content. And so a well-designed, appealing thumbnail can attract viewer attention, give a preview of the content, and significantly improve the engagement rate directly impacting the click-through rate of the content. Moreover, YouTube’s post-pandemic boom has helped create a microeconomy for thumbnail designers. Indeed for YouTubers, thumbnails are serious business, as they can make or break a video's reach. But designers are seeing the rise of text-to-image tools such as Midjourney and AlphaCTR with a mix of anxiety and curiosity. Curiosity because these tools can produce thumbnails within minutes, rather than hours, as with conventional software, and anxiety because these tools feed on other people’s work raising concerns about copyright infringement. Yet, in technical terms, what thumbnail designers are doing when using text-to-image generation AI tools is simply to incorporate AI into their workflow to create customised visuals. To compete with AI generated thumbnails, human thumbnail designers have to be very good, particularly as thumbnail sketching has wide application in the creative industries, a field where generative AI is evolving fast. Source: https://restofworld.org/2023/youtube-thumbnail-ai/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB