16 - Joseph Blaze

Josip Blažević, better known online as Joseph Blaze, is a 26 year old digital designer from Croatia, specializing in YouTube thumbnails. He’s been making thumbnails since 2018 and has worked with over 150 YouTube channels, helping them improve their thumbnail game — whether they have 20K or 20M subscribers.

In his spare time, he runs projects like Unlayered. (Yes, it’s me writing this — and yes, it feels very weird.) 😅

Twitter (X) → x.com/thejosephblaze
Instagram → instagram.com/thejosephblaze
YouTube → youtube.com/@josephblaze
TikTok → tiktok.com/@thejosephblaze
YT Jobs → ytjobs.co/@blaze
Portfolio → blazemedia.hr

In this video, Arun managed to get his hands on phones smuggled out of North Korea. He was never meant to use them — let alone have full access to them and film a YouTube video — because North Korea’s regime definitely doesn’t want anyone showing the world the poor conditions an average North Korean lives under.

Someone smuggled these phones from North Korea to South Korea (which is illegal, obviously), and since Arun was making a video on them to show it to the entire world, his team and I were working on the thumbnail options.

As you can see in the starting assets image below, the actual devices look pretty normal and uninteresting. At first glance, you’d have no idea they were smuggled out of North Korea.

We made few different thumbnail variations for this video, but let’s focus on the journey of how we created the thumbnail that ultimately won YouTube’s A/B testing.

Given how competitive thumbnails are, we needed to find a way to convey the entire message in one second to a random person scrolling by. That’s why we had to adjust the phones and add more North Korean symbolism—things like peeled-off stickers suggesting the device is confidential or stolen.

The initial concept was something similar to the Vertu investigation board thumbnail, but with enough differences so it would be instantly recognizable as a completely new video.

The brief suggested Arun and both phones centered, a North Korean flag with a burned effect on the left side of the board, a Kim Jong Un polaroid on the right, and “SMUGGLED” text above the polaroid.

In the first previews I sent, I followed the brief exactly, but it ended up looking cluttered. Everything felt all over the place and needed heavy simplification. What seems like a strong idea on paper or in a rough sketch doesn’t always translate well into a YouTube thumbnail.

Design-wise, I used assets from the Thumbnails+ pack to build the pinboard layout since it already had everything I needed (backgrounds, red lines, fire burning effects, red pins), so I didn’t have to waste time hunting for those elements online.

As for the North Korean flag and the Kim Jong Un polaroid, those were basically one-shot with AI and then properly comped inside Photoshop.

You can also notice I tried keeping the red phone mostly original by manually adding a random barcode and a worn-out red star on the back. For the second phone, I first tried editing it manually, but it made more sense to generate it with AI. There’s no point doing it manually when new models like Nano Banana are absolutely crushing it. I had to generate it a few times, but the whole thing took barely 5–10 minutes.

Here came the first round of revisions, where we agreed on the following:

After applying everything we agreed on, I sent new previews, alongside a version featuring only one phone (which is clearer at a glance, especially with the background still being somewhat busy).

We also previewed how the single-phone variant looked next to two random videos on a YouTube homepage mockup:

From that, we decided it was best to make the background as minimal as possible, and it made an immediate difference when comparing the two side-by-side.

In the end, we landed on a single phone, a simple minimal dark-blue background with a vignette, focus on Arun + the device, and the phone featuring half-peeled “classified” tags plus a small red star.

Below is the full collection of all thumbnail variations we created throughout the process. Since it was an important video, it was crucial to prepare multiple comps to test in case the video underperformed, allowing us to run additional A/B tests.

If you found this edition of Unlayered helpful, please consider sharing it with someone who might benefit from this workflow too! 💙