Making Cool YouTube Channel backgrounds

Hey guys, this is Mack Kids101. Today I'm going to be showing you how to make awesome YouTube backgrounds in, um, uh, Adobe Fireworks CS3.

So what I mean by awesome YouTube backgrounds is this: these will be on the side, except for they'll look cooler, and you'll have this toolbar on the top. So you can just download this sample thingy from the description of the video and open it with Adobe Fireworks CS3.

Now, you can just click on the window and you'll get all these other side windows. First off, you're going to want to make a box. So you can just click on the box tool, make a box, make the height 2000, the width 2000, make its x-coordinate zero, and the y-coordinate zero. Then you can change it to whatever colors you like. By the way, if you don't know where to get this box, you can just search for preferences and you get that box back up if you accidentally deleted it.

You want to make that the background so it's behind everything else. Let's make that light blue; that looks pretty nice. You can put a gradient behind it, and with gradients, you'll see you'll get different cool effects. Whatever effect you want, you can just… here, let's do ripples. That looks pretty nice.

Next, for this toolbar thing, you go into rounded rectangle and then you can just pick a color. Let's pick black and white; that looks pretty good. Or you can pick like violin orange, pastels, anything you want, emerald green. There's a whole bunch of different stuff. So, um, we're just gonna be doing black and white. There we go!

And now, if you want this background thing to be a different color, you can just make it a different color, or you can put a pattern to it. You can make it like wood to give it cool textures, or you can keep it black. If you keep it black, you'll have this cool effect where it looks like you don't have a background at all. So, um, I'm just gonna be making it, for this example, a darker shade of blue. That looks pretty nice, and we'll give it a gradient like that.

That looks kind of stupid. That looks nice! Okay, so um, then you can just save it, and then when you quit, you'll have this nice YouTube background thingy.

Now, when you apply it, you have to go to Firefox or whatever you want to use, go to YouTube, then you can just go to your account, edit channel, channel design. You're going to want to pick background image. So, um, you can just make sure you can just browse for the image. It has to be up to under 256 kilobytes, so right now this is one megabyte.

So if you have a simple way to reduce the memory, just open it with Adobe Photoshop CS3, then you can say okay. Then you can go, say, file, save for web devices. You can pick which format you want, say PNG, and then this will tell you how much memory it is. You can choose how much, how good quality it is, whether there's transparency or not, and then you can just say save.

And then you can say save, quit, all that, and now you have this. See how much memory that is? 200 kilobytes! And as you can see, it's not open Adobe Stoneage. I'll open up, quit out of that. If you open them both with preview, see, they look pretty much exactly the same. You can't tell the difference between them, even though one's a lot more, but better quality.

And then when you upload them to YouTube, you're going to make sure 'repeat background image' is checked now. And then when you upload it, it should look like this; it'll look nice.

And um, yeah, I hope this helped, and um, thank you for watching. Please subscribe, and goodbye!