The Truth Behind Scroll-Stopping Thumbnails w/ Brittney Carlini | Ep 452

Brittney Carlini (0:00)

Be better than AI, because also a lot of people, which is like the emergence of AI in the last few months, everybody is making thumbnails that look the same, and there's pushback from creators happening for it. So I think there is still a chance, AI is super daunting, but I think there's still going to be a need for thumbnail designers for at least a couple more years, I'm hoping.

My name is Brittney Carlini, and you are listening to The Futur.

Chris Do (0:29)

So for people who don't know who you are, can you please introduce yourself, say your full name, and tell us a little bit about your backstory?

Brittney Carlini (0:36)

Yeah. So I'm Brittney Carlini. I've been a thumbnail strategist and designer full time since 2022, because that's when I went to my first vid summit. And so like prior to that, I was freelancing graphic design. But then I found this like YouTube world because my husband started a YouTube channel, and I had the graphic design background, and we couldn't afford to like outsource that to somebody.

So I was like, okay, I'm going to teach myself Photoshop. And then I started doing thumbnails for him. And they were quite bad for like a year and a half. But then they started getting good. And when they did, his friends kind of came out of the woodworks, and they're like, yo, like who does your thumbnails? And if they knew I was doing them, they would ask if I had availability to do them for them as well.

And then it kind of just started growing like that. And then that's when I went to the 2022 Vid Summit. Got so inspired because that was my first like real YouTube experience. And also there's just such a market gap for thumbnails. So I was like, I think I'm just going to go all in and like really niche down and do that.

Chris Do (1:43)

That's amazing. Okay. A lot of different things going on here. So your husband was essentially the guinea pig.

In the time in which you worked on his channel, what did you learn from doing that that made the thumbnails start to work?

Brittney Carlini (1:56)

I think really with thumbnails, it's a lot of reps. And even with the designers I train, there's so much I can teach them and show them. But at the end of the day, it kind of does become reps. So for me, it took a year and a half of reps. I had no references, no one to help guide me. He had a decent eye for packaging at the time. So he helped me kind of get better with it. And then he introduced his friend, Leon, to me, who was one of my first additional thumbnail clients. And he had a really good eye for packaging. And so when we started working together, he was like really, really intense with his feedback to me.

And at first I was kind of like put off by it because I thought I was doing things right from like my traditional graphic design background. But what I learned is I actually had to like unlearn some stuff that I learned from traditional graphic design to make like a successful thumbnail. Because like there are a lot of overlapping principles and things, but there are things that change. Like negative space doesn't really exist in thumbnails. That's like we want to close up the gaps. We don't want any breathing room to some extent.

Chris Do (3:04)

Yeah. I'm curious what Leon said to you. Do you recall any of the specific things he said to you, which was like, yo, bro, I'll step back. But then it turned out to be true.

Brittney Carlini (3:13)

Probably like increasing the texture on his skin. We'll use this video for an example.

He was doing a video on focusing better or something like that, or how to decrease your dopamine, dopamine detox, something along those lines. The concept was him putting this microscopic pill up to his eye, and then the composition is this really zoomed in image of his eye and the comparison between that and the pill.

At first, I think what I did was, I just edited it in a clean way, where I probably made his skin look good, enhanced the colors, the lighting, but didn't really adapt the details of that concept. After so many revisions and notes from him, we added a bunch of very red veins to the eye. We added additional redness to the eye just to show stress or sleep deprivation, like the before taking the pill for the benefits. So he had to walk me through a lot of building upon the story because it's like, maybe I was good at editing certain visual elements, but I obviously had no grasp on thumbnail concepts and the psychology behind them and evoking intrigue. There was this other thumbnail where he's holding a bar of soap, but it's made of steel.