YouTube Banner Maker for Rappers

A channel banner is the widest, emptiest image an artist has to fill, and most of it gets cropped. This tool generates a wide landscape picture from your answer to "What should the banner show?" and tells the model to keep the subject in the centre third, where it survives the crop.

The optional "Name on the banner" box puts your rap name on the image. If you saved a name with "Use this" on a name generator, it is filled in for you in capitals. Five styles are available: Cinematic photo, Graffiti wall, Neon, Minimal dark and Collage.

The output is a wide landscape image with a Download button. YouTube publishes its own banner dimensions and a safe area, and they change from time to time, so compare the downloaded file with the current guidance in YouTube Studio and resize or crop it there.

Think in three vertical bands. The middle band holds the one thing that matters: a lit window, a figure, a sign. The left and right bands hold atmosphere that can be lost without anyone noticing, like sky, wall, road or crowd blur. Say that in the description: "in the centre" is a phrase the model understands.

Choose a scene that says what kind of channel it is. Studio gear says music, a block at night says street, a stage says performance. Here are scene descriptions to paste into the first box.

• City skyline at dusk with one studio window lit up in the centre
• A long brick wall, a single microphone on a stand in the centre, empty street
• Rows of speakers fading into fog, a lone figure from behind in the middle
• A night market street with a glowing sign in the centre, blurred crowd either side
• A mixing desk seen from above, centred, cables trailing off to both edges

YouTube shows the same banner file differently on each screen. A TV shows nearly the whole image. A desktop browser shows a wide, short strip across the middle. A phone shows a narrower piece of that strip. Only a small central rectangle appears everywhere, and that is the safe area: keep the name in the centre third and it will be inside it.

Text is the fragile part. A name in the image can be misspelled by the model, and it can be sliced by the crop. One reliable approach is to generate the banner with the name box empty, then add your name in an editor at the exact spot the YouTube preview shows as safe.

• Name and any tagline in the central third, vertically centred
• Nothing important within the outer quarters of the image
• Banner colours that match your latest cover art
• Check the result on a phone, not only on the computer you made it on