30 - Maksym Tarasov

Maksym Tarasov is a 21-year-old Ukrainian thumbnail designer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. He currently works full-time as a thumbnail designer for—you may have heard of him—MrBeast.

He began his journey in 2022 while studying Visual Communication at Edinburgh College. In just two years, he went from freelancing and developing his craft to working for the biggest YouTuber in the world.

He has worked with creators such as Preston, Nick DiGiovanni, Brianna, Neagle, Browney, Jesse James West, Jeff Nippard, and The Boys, among many others.

Twitter (X) → x.com/maksymdesigner

Jesse is definitely one of my favourite clients of all time. He’s very involved in the creative process and genuinely cares about getting the best possible results, both in terms of the asset and the workflow, so it’s always been fun working together.

Quick context on this specific thumbnail and video: for this video, we created four different thumbnail concepts to test, since the video itself had huge potential to pull numbers and is currently sitting at 10 million views.

But unfortunately, the video underperformed during the first 24 hours. Because of that, we decided to create one extra concept—the one you’re reading about now—to see if we could give the video a second push and improve its performance.

We were heavily inspired by realism of Michele Khare’s thumbnails along with Jesse’s own concepts for previous videos so the idea was to combine them all together focusing only on realism but making it stand out.

Here is the asset I had to start working. The photo itself is S-tier so 70% of the work has been covered for me and that’s what makes your thumbnail feel super authentic and realistic.

When working on a super realistic thumbnail it’s really important to have things to emphasize while still remaining it realistic. In this case the idea was to show Jesse smaller, weaker against SWAT team so I’ve started with cutting out all boys separately and adjust the composition making guys on the sides bigger and more massive.

I used the Liquify tool (before Nano Banana era so yeah, don’t use it now lol) to make boys more jacked, helping overall glance view which helps the thumb stand out a bit more.

To adjust the helmets and vests, I used ChatGPT (before the Nano Banana era, so yeah, don’t use it now please) to generate more gear-packed soldiers. Then you simply do manual (big word in 2026) work in Photoshop – adjusting helmets, colors, and highlights – so they feel integrated into the scene.

For the background, I used Ideogram to create this generation. The key was getting a higher-angle shot than usual, which I struggled with at first, but I eventually ended up with a really solid and clean result.

When I provided the first background option, Jesse noted that it felt a bit too empty. We discussed what could be added to give it more context without over-cluttering the thumbnail, and we ended up adding this grenade smoke, which really emphasizes the danger of the location and works perfectly for that quick viewer glance.

Important details included adding wounds and a blue eye to Jesse, which makes him look much more dangerous and helps convey the idea. These small details really matter in the end when it comes to selling the idea.

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