Style combination · Contrasts

Internet Ugly × YouTube Thumbnail Style

Its parent: early thumbnails were as crude as its pictures, with bright arrows drawn on and MS Paint–looking images (MrBeast's, before Appleby rebuilt them with colour and contrast), and both caption pictures in white capitals outlined in black. Use Internet Ugly when the picture should look quick, crude and made for a crowd to remix, and the thumbnail style when one creator's polished, retouched face has to sell a single video.

From the research on YouTube Thumbnail Style (the 'YouTube Face')

Mix them and make something Internet Ugly YouTube Thumbnail Style

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from YouTube Thumbnail Style, their arrangement from YouTube Thumbnail Style, the finish from Internet Ugly. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular YouTube Thumbnail Style (the 'YouTube Face')

Type from Internet Ugly: All caps
Condensed display
Colour from YouTube Thumbnail Style: Full polychrome
Complementary clash
Form from YouTube Thumbnail Style: Naturalistic depiction
Restrained accents
Composition from YouTube Thumbnail Style: Full bleed
Single focal point
Surface from Internet Ugly: Glitch
Hard offset shadow

YouTube Thumbnail Style avoids glitch: this is where the two pull against each other, which is the point of the contrast.

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Internet Ugly

Wow

Anton, standing in for Impact (Geoffrey Lee, Stephenson Blake, 1965), set white with a black outline

Text · YouTube Thumbnail Style

The custom thumbnail of YouTube's creator economy: a 16:9 still made to be read at fingernail size in a feed of recommendations. One brightly lit, retouched face, for years the open-mouthed 'YouTube Face' and since 2023 more often a closed-mouth smile, fills about a third of the frame against a simplified, saturated photomontage, with an enlarged prop, a red arrow and at most a few words in heavy white letters outlined in black. Versions are A/B-tested for watch time.

Nunito; YouTube Thumbnail Style used Heavy, comic-style display capitals, white with a thick black outline, a word or two in a corner and A heavy rounded sans in lowercase, white with a black outline and drop shadow, as a label beside a red arrow

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from YouTube Thumbnail Style, with a counter-accent from Internet Ugly. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular YouTube Thumbnail Style (the 'YouTube Face')

#0d0d0d ground · 36%
#ffffff ink · 14%
#ffd400 accent · 18%
#1f8fff accent · 14%
#e61e2a accent · 10%
#f2a37a accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #0d0d0d;
  --ink: #ffffff;
  --accent-1: #ffd400;
  --accent-2: #1f8fff;
  --accent-3: #e61e2a;
  --accent-4: #f2a37a;
  --font-display: "Anton", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Nunito", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular: Most meme templates are photographs of real people, often children, or licensed stock. Success Kid is Laney Griner's son: the photo has been licensed to advertisers, and in January 2020 she sent a cease-and-desist letter to a congressman whose fundraising campaign used it without permission. Distracted Boyfriend is microstock, and its photographer says use without a proper licence is not allowed. License a template or make a new picture for commercial or political work. Check what a format means now: some characters that spread through 4chan were taken up as hate symbols (the ADL listed Pepe the Frog, Matt Furie's 2005 Boy's Club character, in 2016, while noting that most uses are not hateful). Reaction images of Black people posted by non-Black users and brands read as digital blackface (Lauren Michele Jackson, Teen Vogue, 2017), and deep-fried memes came out of Black Twitter, so credit where formats come from. When brands and campaigns borrow a format, its makers often protest or drop it (Douglas).

YouTube Thumbnail Style (the 'YouTube Face'): Thumbnails sell with real faces, so do not put a real person's likeness, a celebrity's, a stranger's or a child's, into a thumbnail without their consent, and never pass off a generated face as a real creator's. Do not promise what the video does not deliver: YouTube's own tests pick the thumbnail with the most watch time, not the most clicks, and custom thumbnails must follow its Community Guidelines, which bar nudity or sexually provocative images, hate speech, violence and harmful or dangerous content. Treat before-and-after body pictures with care and do not shame anyone's body for a click, and do not use sexualised images of people as bait.

The two styles

2003–present · Global / networked, North America Internet Ugly & Meme Vernacular A deliberately amateur image dialect of forums, imageboards and social feeds, named 'Internet Ugly' by Nick Douglas in 2014. Figures are drawn with a mouse in MS Paint, photos are found and crudely pasted together, and captions shout in white Impact capitals with a black outline, top and bottom, or in Comic Sans. Re-saving and 'deep-frying' wear the pixels down. The joke's setup and punchline are the layout, and every template is made for a crowd to copy; some are clean stock photos that only the labels make a meme. 2012–present · North America, Global / networked YouTube Thumbnail Style (the 'YouTube Face') The custom thumbnail of YouTube's creator economy: a 16:9 still made to be read at fingernail size in a feed of recommendations. One brightly lit, retouched face, for years the open-mouthed 'YouTube Face' and since 2023 more often a closed-mouth smile, fills about a third of the frame against a simplified, saturated photomontage, with an enlarged prop, a red arrow and at most a few words in heavy white letters outlined in black. Versions are A/B-tested for watch time.