Having a good theme for your YouTube channel is important if you are promoting any particular service using videos. YouTube allows you to edit the default settings and colours by choosing your preferred values in the ‘themes and colors’ tab from the setting (edit channel) page.

As you can see here, I have chosen ‘Sunlight’ as my preferred Theme for my YouTube channel.

If you scroll down the page, you have find a link that allows you to configure ‘advanced options’ for the theme. It allows you to configure the background colour, font, background image and so on.

You can make the changes in here and it will be reflected in your channel.

How to create a custom theme from scratch?

You can also upload your own theme to your YouTube channel. In order to create a theme, please follow these instructions:

1. Go to your channel in YouTube and sign out of the account, so that the ‘Edit channel’ options are not displayed (see the picture shown below)

2. Maximise your browser window (press F11 if you are using Firefox or Chrome) and press the print screen button. You may note that sometimes you may have to hit ‘ctrl+0’ if the page has been zoomed by the browser (if you are using a wider screen resolution).

3. Now you have copied the screen to your clipboard. Hit F11 again to exit the full screen

4. Open to your favourite image editor (GIMP or GNU Paint – if you are using Linux ;  Photoshop, MS Paint or Paint.NET if you are using Windows) and paste the image into the editor (by pressing ‘Ctrl+v’ )

5. This is your template layout. You can edit this template to suit your needs.

How to upload / install the custom theme in YouTube?

Sign in to your YouTube account and go to your channel. Click on the ‘themes and colors’ tab and scroll down. Enable advanced options and click on the ‘upload’ button next to the ‘Background image’ option and upload your theme from your computer.

Now set all transparency values to 100% (see the screen shot shown below):

Done!

Downloading themes from other websites

There are many websites that are offering YouTube themes for free. You can go to any one of the following websites and download the themes.

Website 1  -   MyTubeDesign.com: In my opinion, this is the best site to get YouTube themes for your channel. They have categorized all the themes and most of the themes are available for free. They also offer custom channel designs for YouTube partners.

Website 2-   BackgroundTube.com: Here also you can find many YouTube themes. But the only annoying thing is that you need to fill out some surveys if you want to download some the themes that are available!

Website 3 -  YTLayouts.net : This is equally good as the first one. Moreover, all the themes in this website are available for free and they are also offer Photoshop tutorials if you want to create your own theme. But the number of themes is less than the first one.

After downloading theme, please follow the instruction given above to ‘install’ the new theme.