39 - Kream

Kream is a thumbnail designer from the Philippines who’s been designing for around 5 years, starting with gaming thumbnails before getting obsessed with making thumbnails look as realistic and natural as possible.

People started noticing his work once he got into IRL thumbnails and got voted to be featured on Unlayered twice. Ironically, he didn’t get featured on the first one because his thumbnail only had like 2 layers… here’s the “late” preview:

Twitter (X) → x.com/KreamKreativ

This challenge was mainly an excuse for me to finally test PKGD.ai properly after promising them feedback for months. Since it was sponsored by them anyway, I figured I could hit two birds with one stone: test the site and maybe win the prize money too.

Before designing, I usually spend time visualizing the scene. Once I have the idea in my head, I start recalling thumbnails with a similar energy or composition.

For this thumbnail, I immediately thought about making 4FUN fishing on a boat while a delivery guy walks through the water to reach him. The main inspiration came from a couple of Charles & Mélanie thumbnails, especially because of how realistic and cinematic they felt. I believe they were designed by Lucien, and they heavily inspired the composition and overall vibe of this design.

For composition, I usually start by generating prompts first. I use ChatGPT to help me describe the exact scene I want to see so I can generate the image that’s already in my head. Once AI gives me a good base, that’s where I start tweaking the composition in Photoshop and cleaning everything up.

Most of my process is honestly just moving things around until the thumbnail feels believable and natural. I care a lot about composition, so even if most of the assets are AI generated, I still spend time manually adjusting positions, spacing, and small details to make everything feel realistic.

I started with a base image generated with AI based on the scene and composition I already had in mind.

After bringing it into Photoshop, I adjusted the framing by making the delivery guy bigger, repositioning his arms, the boat, adding Pizza Hut branding, and adding small realism details like water droplets and a wet pizza box.

One of the biggest changes was turning the environment from an ocean into a lake. Since the delivery guy was supposed to be walking through the water, I felt trees and mountains made the scene much more believable than the open ocean.

After finalizing the composition and environment, I face swapped the original AI generated character with the client. I replaced the face, body, and shirt so the thumbnail matched 4FUN more accurately while still keeping the original pose and lighting from the generated image.

At this stage, I realized I forgot to update the shirt color in the water reflection after changing 4FUN’s shirt to blue. The reflection still had the original white shirt from the generated image. I honestly don’t know if nobody noticed or if people were just being nice lol.

After fixing that, I finished everything off in Camera Raw with some final color adjustments.

I really enjoyed working on this thumbnail—it’s probably one of my best thumbnails both concept-wise and process-wise.

My workstation is pretty minimalist mainly because I hate cleaning I like keeping everything simple and distraction free so I can focus more instead of having a bunch of random stuff on my desk.

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