Sizes and safe areas for YouTube graphics

What to build at

Build at the resolution you edit at. 1920×1080 is the standard for horizontal video and what most channels deliver; 3840×2160 if you edit in 4K. A graphic drawn as shapes and text rather than photographed scales cleanly between them, so building at 1080p and exporting larger costs nothing in sharpness.

Vertical video — Shorts, Reels, TikTok — is 1080×1920. It is a different composition rather than the same one rotated: a bar that reads across a wide frame has nowhere to go in a narrow one.

The bottom belongs to the player

Whenever a viewer moves the mouse or taps the screen, YouTube draws the progress bar and the player controls over the lowest part of the picture. A graphic pinned flush to the bottom edge is the one that gets covered, and it is covered exactly when somebody is interacting — which is when they are most likely to be looking.

Leave a margin. A lower third or a channel bar that sits a little above the very edge reads in both states, and nothing about it looks worse for the gap.

Keep to the middle ninety percent

The old broadcast habit still earns its keep: keep anything that has to be read inside roughly the middle 90% of the frame. Displays crop differently, players letterbox, and phone apps put their own furniture along the edges.

On vertical video the constraint is sharper. The right-hand column carries the like, comment and share buttons, and the bottom carries the caption and the channel name. A vertical graphic that ignores either is a graphic with something on top of it.

Leave room for the end screen

YouTube's own end screen elements — the clickable video thumbnails and the subscribe badge — can be placed over the final five to twenty seconds of a video. They sit where you put them, but the useful positions are the middle and the right.

So an outro graphic should hold the channel mark and the ask where those cards are not, and it should stay on screen for as long as the end screen window lasts. An outro that leaves before the clickable cards do is an outro nobody used.

Questions

What size should a YouTube lower third be?

Build it in your project's own resolution — 1920×1080 for standard video — and keep the text inside roughly the middle 90% of the frame. Text closer to the edge than that is cropped on some displays and covered by player controls on others.

How long can a YouTube end screen be?

YouTube's own end screen elements can be placed over the final five to twenty seconds of a video. Ten to fifteen is the usual choice; an outro graphic should last at least as long as the elements it shares the screen with.

Where do the player controls cover the video?

Along the bottom, whenever the viewer moves the mouse or taps. Keep anything that has to be read above that band rather than flush with the bottom edge.

Can I use the same graphic for Shorts?

Not the same file. Vertical video is 1080×1920 and its right-hand column carries the platform's own buttons, so a horizontal bar ends up half-hidden. Rebuild it as a vertical composition instead.