Kye is a digital artist focused on helping creators build their brands both on and offline. Since first picking up Photoshop back in 2008, he’s had a career in traditional graphic design, but shifted focus heavily to thumbnails and other YouTuber-related projects this year.
He’s worked on projects for MrBeast, ISHOWSPEED, Nick DiGiovanni, Airrack, and many more. Kye is available for hire.
Twitter (X) → https://x.com/pffawk
Thumbnail Portfolio → https://pffawk.com/
Design Portfolio → https://www.kyepirrie.com/
Featured design
Overview
I’ve worked with Riley and NO1 Creative for many months now, and we’ve really honed in on his style and branding on the channel. I handle the design, while NO1 takes care of ideation and concept sketches. Helping creators establish a visual style that is recognizable and consistent is a huge part of how I approach all my thumbnails.
Since the biz/finance niche isn’t so much about spectacle and shock factor, I aim to create super clean, highly polished designs that position Riley as a professional, trusted leader in the space. It’s important to understand your client’s goals as a brand to help develop a visual identity beyond securing those clicks.
Initial Sketch
The initial sketch NO1 Creative provided immediately screamed that this wasn’t going to just need Photoshop work to look great. Sure, plenty of folks would just skew some icons and offset them with some shading for a pseudo-3D effect, but I wanted to really get these app icons to pop.
Assets
Stripping everything down to the original assets just goes to show that where you start is 80% of the work, the rest is really just polish.
I started with a big cleanup in Camera Raw to bring all the colors of Riley back to true-to-life, generated a handful of “office” backgrounds with Ideogram before settling on this version.
I then combined hand tracing app icons in Adobe Illustrator with some simple extrudes and texturing in Blender to create the icons. (Make sure to enable transparency in your render settings or you’ll hate your life once you’re back in Photoshop.)
Composition
Compositionally, I wanted everything to feel balanced, but still give clear hierarchy to the subjects in frame.
The circular composition feels like a target 🎯 that draws the viewer’s eye directly to Riley’s face highlighting the curiosity in his face. I maintained a general rule of thirds vertical split to help the viewer understand that there were good options, bad options, and Riley was who would be explaining the reasons behind them.
These are all things the viewer can understand in a split second, but the organization is key. If the apps had been more random in placement without a clear division between good/bad, the thumbnail would easily become too confusing.
Unlayered
The rest is just polish!
Match background lighting to Riley (it’s much easier to make your backgrounds match your client assets than the other way around)
Restore color and boost saturation in skin tones (brighter isn’t always better if you want rich skin tones)
Brightened up the icons and added some fake reflections to help settle them into the room
Added the checkmarks and X’s (simple outer glow and bevel/emboss goes a long way)
A final gradient overlay to help tie everything together
Workstation
Workstation 95% of the time lol
Software
Adobe Illustrator - hand tracing app icons
Blender - 3D modeling and render
Adobe Photoshop - composition and color grade
Ideogram - background generation
Hardware
2024 16” Macbook Pro - Apple M4 Pro, 24GB RAM, 500GB Storage
No mouse because I like to finger paint
Couch
3 Dogs, 3 Cats, 4 Rabbits, 3 Reptiles, and 2 Frogs to keep me company
1. Coming from a traditional design background, what’s something you’ve learned from working with creators that really changed how you approach thumbnails?
Assets. Are. Everything. In traditional design, yes it can be frustrating when a client sends over a small PNG of their logo and you've got to spend the time vectorizing it, but it's easy to charge for and the client has something they can reuse forever. With thumbnails, the assets dictate the success of the thumbnail in my opinion. Yes everyone's running everything through AI and getting reasonable results, but it's still a million times better when a client will take specific photos for a specific thumbnail with the correct lighting and angles. The clients who are willing to take those photos usually end up just being better clients in the long run as well.
2. What’s a common request creators make that you feel actually hurts their thumbnails?
The most common thing I think I run into is scope creep. Some of the best performing thumbnails have a person, an object, and a clean background, and that's it. Tons of folks try to cram everything they can in to tell the full story in the thumbnail, but that's not the point. Stripping down the subjects to the absolute minimum needed to spark curiosity is all that's needed, save for a bit of polish for realism. Clutter makes a thumbnail harder to read at scrolling speed, and is just a waste of time in most cases.
3. When you’re browsing YouTube, what kind of video packaging (thumbnails + titles) tends to grab your attention the most?
Kind of what I just mentioned, a super clean thumbnail with a prominent character and the important subject matter with good color theory is always an attention grabber for me, even if it's not content I'll ever watch. I'm older than most in this space (just turned 32 the other day) so a lot of what I watch is automotive, golf, or when I need to learn something, so I never really get pulled in by "I Survived X Days Doing X Thing" or crazier titles like that. Give me a solid SEO style title that tells me what the story is and I'm in.
4. If you were starting from scratch today and wanted to get into thumbnail design, what would your game plan be?
If I was starting over, the biggest thing I'd do is ignore all the advice you see on Twitter/X. Don't immediately start trying to refresh thumbnails for videos that already exist. If you've never made a thumbnail, you're probably going to suck and that's okay. No one gets mad when kids try to do something for the first time and it comes out bad, so give yourself some grace and room to learn. I'd find a few creators that I like, and then just make up videos that they might create, and create something that's totally fake. When you come at it from the angle of "here's what I would've done" and it's not that good, it's a surefire way to not get clients. Practice with fake stuff, hop in the Thumbnails 101 server to get feedback and interact with other people on this side of the industry, and just get decent. You don't need to work with MrBeast to make a good living. There are tons of niches on YouTube, and they ALL need thumbnails. Find a simpler niche and dive into that, then branch out as your skills develop.
5. What’s your favorite thumbnail you’ve made, and what makes it special?
My favorite thumbnail is probably for "I Tested 1-Star Restaurants" from Nick DiGiovanni. It's definitely a bit on the over-the-top side, but still very much rooted in realism and I really love how it came out. It's mainly red, white, and black, and just pops super hard.
Kye’s favorite thumbnail
6. Extra advice no one asked for:
If you follow the all the nonsense you see on socials, it's just a race to the bottom. There will ALWAYS be someone who works for less, and there will ALWAYS be someone who is better than you. The great thing is, there also will ALWAYS be more clients than there are designers. Just focus on your craft, post work often, treat the clients you do get with great respect and good communication, and the work will continue to come. The bar is extremely low.
If you found this edition of Unlayered helpful, please consider sharing it with someone who might benefit from this workflow too! 💙
