YouTube Thumbnail Design — guide skill for images & thumbnails

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Design YouTube thumbnails that read on a phone: dimensions, contrast, safe zones, text and faces.

• Type: Guide · Images & thumbnails
• Slug: inference-sh-youtube-thumbnail-design
• Status: live
• Publisher: inference.sh (vendor, verified)
• License: MIT
• Source: https://github.com/inference-sh/skills/tree/main/guides/design/youtube-thumbnail-design
• Works in: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI
• Requires: inference.sh account, belt CLI (belt login)
• Cost: Billed by inference.sh
• Adoption: 11 installs, 781 GitHub stars (skills.sh, 2026-10-26)

What it does

A YouTube thumbnail design guide: exact dimensions, contrast rules, mobile preview, safe zones, text placement, facial-expression psychology and A/B testing. FLUX and Seedream generate the image through inference.sh.

Use when

• A thumbnail for a video
• Improving click-through on existing thumbnails

Install

• Claude Code: npx skills add inference-sh/skills --skill youtube-thumbnail-design -a claude-code
• Codex: npx skills add inference-sh/skills --skill youtube-thumbnail-design -a codex
• Cursor: npx skills add inference-sh/skills --skill youtube-thumbnail-design -a cursor
• Gemini CLI: npx skills add inference-sh/skills --skill youtube-thumbnail-design -a gemini-cli

Models it drives: flux_dev, seedream

Used for

• YouTube thumbnails and covers: High-CTR thumbnails and vertical covers, in a few options to choose from.

More images & thumbnails skills

• Higgsfield YouTube Thumbnail: Design truthful, high-CTR YouTube thumbnails and vertical covers with up to three consistent faces.
• Slack GIF Creator: Make animated GIFs that pass Slack's limits: 128×128 emoji or 480×480 message GIFs, validated on export.
• PixiJS GIFs: Load, play and control animated GIFs inside a PixiJS v8 scene.
• AI Image Generation: Generate images with 50+ models from one CLI: GPT Image 2.5, FLUX, Gemini, Grok, Seedream, Reve and more.
• Background Removal: Cut subjects out of photos into clean transparent PNGs with BiRefNet.
• FLUX Image: Generate and restyle images with FLUX Dev LoRA and FLUX.2 Klein, including custom LoRA styles.

Run the generation on varg

varg is one API key for the models these skills drive — Seedance 2.5, Kling 4, Veo 3.1, Wan 3, Nano Banana 2.1, GPT Image 2.5, ElevenLabs v4 and 200+ more — billed in credits, with a cost estimate before anything runs.

• Claude Code: claude plugin marketplace add vargHQ/skills && claude plugin install varg@varg (skill + hosted MCP)
• Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, OpenClaw: npx skills add vargHQ/skills --skill varg-ai -a <agent> -y
• Claude.ai, ChatGPT, any MCP client: connect https://mcp.varg.ai/mcp
• API key: https://varg.ai/dashboard/api · Model specs: https://varg.ai/models/llms.txt