Free Resources for Your Next Profile Design
YouTube allows you to control many aspects of your channel design, but sometimes finding images, design inspiration, or free image-editing software, can be a pain. So, I’ve put together a resource list here of some free stuff that will ignite your creative spark!
When redesigning your channel profile, keep a few things in mind:
- Readability is key. If you have yellow text on a white background, I’m not going to even bother trying to read your channel page. If you have an animated gif in the background flashing me into a seizure, the back button becomes my best friend. Don’t turn viewers away on purpose!
- Copyrights. Not every photo you find online is free for you to use. In fact, most of them aren’t. You don’t want to get yourself in trouble by using someone else’s creative works without their permission. Below, I’ll show you a few places where you can find great images that you can use for free.
- Banners and Icons. YouTube Partners have a few additional channel design options, including big banners across the top of their profiles. Use this space wisely and include a “call to action” such as ‘subscribe!’ or ‘click here for my blog’. If you don’t tell people what you want them to do on your site, they won’t know.
The following is written with YouTubers in mind, but these resources will work for any profile, from MySpace to Facebook to Twitter. Okay, now let’s move on to the resources. Follow the links below, after reading through the whole article, for some wonderful, free software, stock photography and inspiration.
1. IMAGE EDITING – GIMP is a free photo editing program. With many features similar to what you’d find in Photoshop, most of your image editing can be done here. GIMP might carry a bit of a learning curve if you’re used to Paint or Photoshop, but your time invested in learning the program will not be wasted, you’ll come out with much better looking icons, background images and banners. The GIMP website also includes a wiki where users can find additional helpful information. But what if you need some photos to start editing? Continue on to the next section where I’ll map out a few free stock photography sites.
2. STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY – Little-known fact: some of our YouTube friends actually create free stock photography! The very easy-on-the-eyes Kristina italktosnakes (aka Monday on the fiveawesomegirls) runs a stock photography site called Intergalactic Stock. You don’t need permission to use Kristina’s stock in your own creations, but you do need to credit her and e-mail or message her about where you use it. So show her your channel if you decide to use any of her images. Other free stock websites include StockVault (all images are free to use in personal and non-commercial works) and FreeRangeStock (images are free to use in both personal and commercial works).
3. DESIGN CONCEPTS & INSPIRATION – Not sure how well blue stripes go with green polka dots? It’s okay, not all of us were born with an eye for design, but there are a few tools out there to help us. Adboe’s Kuler is a really neat, interactive site that lets you build personalized color swatches, or use swatches created by others. You can even upload a favorite photo and Kuler will pull your color swatches from it. Cool! No more trying to find colors that match your favorite sunset, just upload a picture of it and Kuler will spit out a swatch ready for you to pull colors from.
If you’re ready to move beyond colors and get into layout, The Best Designs site showcases exactly that, some of the best designed sites on the web! Stroll through some of these beautifully designed sites if you’re stuck with a case of designer’s block (you know, like writer’s block, only while you’re in GIMP instead of Word).
Once you’ve used GIMP to create a bold background, an eye-catching icon and have decided on your color swatch of choice for text and table boxes, you may need to host your images online. Photobucket and (to a lesser extent) flickr are both free and allow you to link to your images offsite.
If you use any additional resources, or find any along the way to creating your perfect profile, please, leave them below in the comments so others can utilize them (myself included!).
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10 Responses to “Free Resources for Your Next Profile Design”
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August 25th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Actually, flickr’s community guidelines state that “pages on other web sites that display content hosted on flickr.com must provide a link from each photo or video back to its page on Flickr.”
So it actually is not recommended that it be used to host images for external sites, especially where you have limited control over what can go on a page (i.e., a Youtube channel).
August 25th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
Noted. Thank you Tim.
August 25th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
Any time.
August 26th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Thank you Alan! I’ve wanted to get an interesting background for my channel for a while. I will definitely use this information.
August 26th, 2008 at 10:32 pm
if you want to try another free version of photoshop,
you might want to try the demo version of pixelmator
you can do all of the same stuff as if you had bought it
but all you have to do is download it
i havent used it much but my dad has and loves it
August 27th, 2008 at 7:26 pm
I just wanted to throw out squidfingers for background patterns.
Free for noncommercial use, just credit them on your channel. Click my name for their website.
December 1st, 2008 at 12:28 pm
Thanks for sharing with us your knowledge and wisdom about designing our profile pages for YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, etc… I’ll be leaving here having discovered a couple of real gems of information. I’m especially loving the ‘Adobe Kuler’ right now.
Also, to add to your useful list of resources, I run a couple of websites that fall into the category of ‘Photo & Image Hosting Resources’. Perhaps they may be of interest to you and your readers. So here goes…
iBanter Photo Pimp
A FREE image hosting site, with a twist. Upload your photos and then pimp them out with some fun and great-looking photo elements. Registering is optional, but member’s images are not subject to any time or bandwidth limits (like the limits imposed by PhotoBucket, etc).
http://photopimp.ibanter.co.uk
iBanter Comic Creator
Bring your photos and other images to life by turning them into a comic strip that lets them tell your story. Add speech bubbles, fun dress-up items, cool looking photo elements, filter effects and more.
http://comics.ibanter.co.uk
Thanks for letting me share these with you, as I know that you’ll have loads of fun using my sites…
December 31st, 2008 at 5:56 pm
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January 3rd, 2009 at 12:17 pm
Wow,this is great! Thanks!! It’s perfect time for us as we just got back to Spain & one of our goals is to figure how to add a Partners banner.
So glad I found you!
January 6th, 2009 at 11:12 am
A good plugin/hack for the GIMP is GIMPShop, it gives the GIMP a more, photoshop-ish appearance, while still accomplishing the same things, or course. I’ve been using it for a while, and it’s just easier than having the numerous amount of windows open that you’d have open using the typical version of the GIMP. Anywho, thanks for the info :”D