25 - Shaheer

Shaheer Kashif is a 20-year-old thumbnail designer & strategist from Pakistan. He’s always loved bringing ideas to life, especially ideas that can be executed quickly, which made thumbnails the perfect medium for him.

He started his journey in 2023, focusing on photo manipulations and posters first, but eventually turned to YouTube thumbnails.

Since then, he’s worked with 30+ YouTube channels and clients like Hostinger, Simon Squibb, and Patrick Zeinali. Shaheer is available for hire.

Twitter (X) → x.com/shaheerkreates
Website → shaheerkreates.com

I’ve known Bryan (YouTube Strategist for Patrick Zeinali) for a while now, and we’ve worked on a couple of projects together. He's amazing to work with and one of those clients who fully cooperates throughout the entire process.

He reached out to me about this video with a short brief. It was a collaboration between Patrick and another popular cooking channel, Nick DiGiovanni. (pretty sure everyone knows him, but mentioning it just in case)

The initial brief included only the title, a rough cut of the video, and a few assets for Nick and Pat. He also shared some thumbnail inspirations he thought we could base our direction on.

The most interesting part of this project was the deadline, just two days. Considering I had other projects to complete as well, I knew this was going to be fun and stressful at the same time 😅

Based on the brief provided, I immediately started researching.

My process when coming up with ideas for the thumbnails is to first look for inspiration, I first watch the intro, or sometimes the full video to understand what it’s really about.

After that, I mainly look at videos within the same niche, and sometimes outside the niche on YouTube. If I still can’t find something strong, I look at movie posters and other designs on Pinterest as well.

My main focus with this is to always highlight the video’s most interesting angle in a way that immediately communicates what the video is about to the target audience, while also creating curiosity about what they can expect next.

After my research, I came across a thumbnail idea that I felt would work best here and look the cleanest.

After discussing it with Bryan and going back and forth on the initial inspirations and this concept, we landed on this idea. Since we had planned to have 3–4 gadgets in the thumbnail (all with text above them indicating their levels) this type of composition made the most sense and worked best visually and looked clean overall.

Apart from the initial images of Nick and Pat provided by Bryan, I feel it’s important to define the overall direction for the thumbnail before you gather assets.

With Pat’s channel, the goal isn’t necessarily to show exactly what’s in the video, but rather to use elements that effectively convey the video’s message, even if it’s something that is not present in the video. This gave me some creative freedom to decide what to include and what to leave out.

So first, I went looking on Google and I found this pizza maker and orange juicer which I really liked because of their vibrant, eye-catching color, techy and futuristic look.

During my research phase for getting inspirations, I came across one of Pat’s Videos (coincidentally it was with Nick too) and it featured a futuristic toaster which I really liked. So I got permission from Bryan and decided to use it for this thumbnail too!

The Steak Laser Cooker (or whatever you call it) was generated using AI, unfortunately I only have a screenshot of the prompt from the time and do not have the full prompt with me otherwise I would've shared it here.

With all the assets gathered and everything laid out, I moved on to the fun part.

I quickly realized that fitting all four gadgets into the thumbnail would make it way too cluttered, so the orange juicer had to go.

I’ll admit, I didn’t put much thought into how I was going to fit both Nick and Pat into the thumbnail. The original composition we based this on was designed for just one character. At one point, I knew something wasn’t working—mainly the character poses and the lighting. The thumbnail was starting to look very mediocre, and I was struggling a bit to make it work honestly.

But like most designers do, I took a short break to clear my head and rethink the approach. I started experimenting with different poses using AI, generated new poses for both Nick and Pat, did manual face swapping for both and adjusted the lighting. That’s when things finally clicked. It took the thumbnail from looking average to a really strong composition.

In the end, I swapped the wooden table for a stainless steel countertop since it looked cleaner and allowed for nice reflections. I then ran it through the Camera Raw filter and Magnific Upscaler to bring everything together and added the text.

I use an HP Victus 16 gaming laptop, which I’ve connected to my main monitor to give me a dual-screen setup. I do plan to upgrade the monitor soon though since it’s quite old.

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