31 - Sarim

Abdul Samad Sarim is a 20-year-old thumbnail designer based in Pakistan. Growing up, he always had an appreciation for art and loved to translate his ideas into sketches. And when he was 14, he discovered Photoshop, which, unknown to him, marked the beginning of his journey.

From the ages of 14 to 18, he made posters and art for fun. But after turning 18, he approached Photoshop in a more professional manner and started designing thumbnails. Sarim is available for hire.

Twitter (X) → x.com/AbdulSamadhere

Hi there, everyone! 👋 This was the brief for the Thumbnails 101 Weekly Challenge #42, where the challenge was themed around the documentary style. I felt that visualizing the darker side of the industry, including exploitation, would be a strong hook for the thumbnail.

So I proceeded to research how this idea has been approached in the past, using Pinterest as a tool for inspiration — one of the best tools out there for inspiration, highly recommend it!

These inspirations helped me understand the main idea and the message — "this luxurious diamond jewelry comes with a dark and bloody price." With that in mind, I moved on to sketching how I wanted it to look.

Although Sketch 01 was a strong concept, I still wanted to explore more since it was a challenge. I kept sketching until I found something that clicked. By the time I reached Concept 4, I had a clear direction in mind: I wanted to combine a skeleton hand, blood, and a diamond ring.

I then had an idea — why not show a first-person perspective of someone proposing and opening a ring box? I tried sketching it out, but I couldn't get the angle quite right. So, I started looking for references on Pinterest and came across this banger of a poster by Sergio Ingravalle.

I used that poster as an image reference in Nano Banana Pro (one of the best AI models) to generate a skeleton hand holding a ring box with a diamond ring, which gave me this output, which was quite promising.

The next step was adjusting the image to be dark and moody to fit the theme and vibe I was going for.

To achieve this, I used the Camera Raw filter, decreasing the exposure, increasing highlights, lowering shadows, and increasing texture, clarity, and sharpness. This helped the image fit the tone of the thumbnail.

I then adjusted the color palette to simplify it by desaturating the bones, increasing the intensity of the red, and giving the diamond a slightly blue tint. For the text, I used a blackletter font, as neither serif nor sans-serif fit the tone.

For anyone interested, the font is UnifrakturCook.

The final output, however, still appeared somewhat simplistic and plain. So, like any other designer, I took a break to refresh my thinking process.

Coming back, I identified three things the image lacked: brightness, highlights, and texture.

So I used a simple exposure adjustment layer to tackle this. For the texture, I wanted to go for a nice film grain look but couldn't find anything fitting on Freepik or Texture Labs. (These are my go-to sites for textures — just for this project, I couldn't find anything fitting, but they are still great resources.)

A simple Google search led me to some incredible film grain textures by Ulitski on Behance. I used the first texture twice — one layer set to Lighter Color at 60% opacity and another set to Subtract.

This helped elevate the image a lot and gave it a final cohesive, polished look.

Overall, I was quite happy with how the final thumbnail came out. 😀

My workstation at the moment is something a minimalist would love: just a laptop and a mouse. Haha, though I do plan to upgrade, since it's getting quite old.

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