thumbnail-design

thumbnail-design is a skill for Claude Code from social-media-skills/skills. It costs 223 tokens per session (1,654 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A YouTube thumbnail design skill focused on making the small preview image clear, honest, and easy to understand on a phone.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps develop thumbnail concepts, choose text, prepare design briefs, and plan A/B tests, where different versions are compared to see which performs better.
Why use it?
It helps solve weak click-through rates caused by unclear thumbnails, repeated title text, or misleading visual promises.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the social-media-skills plugin — 106 skills shipped together

Good fit It helps develop thumbnail concepts, choose text, prepare design briefs, and plan A/B tests, where different versions are compared to see which performs better.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/social-media-skills/skills/thumbnail-design
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add social-media-skills/skills --skill thumbnail-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/social-media-skills/skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install social-media-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 106 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for thumbnail-design

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/social-media-skills/skills/thumbnail-design/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/social-media-skills/skills/thumbnail-design)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/social-media-skills/skills/thumbnail-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/social-media-skills/skills/thumbnail-design/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for thumbnail-design

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/social-media-skills/skills/thumbnail-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/social-media-skills/skills/thumbnail-design.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 223 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,654 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00223 $0.01654
Opus 5 $0.00112 $0.00827
Sonnet 5 $0.00045 $0.00331
Haiku 4.5 $0.00022 $0.00165

Measured 8d ago against content hash 1a9a4bf79eb4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

thumbnail-design scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/thumbnail-design/SKILL.md · 96 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 96 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

thumbnail-design

A design-craft skill — write the promise, design the concept + text, produce the brief, and plan the A/B test. The agent designs + briefs + plans; a human or image tool makes the raster; the YouTube thumbnail is uploaded + tested natively (no WoopSocial field).

The POV: a promise, not a poster — designed as a unit with the title

A thumbnail drives ~70–80% of click decisions, and the viewer decides in under a second — so its job is the click that leads to a watch. Two rules anchor everything: the thumbnail + title are one unit (the thumbnail shows, the title tells — they never repeat), and it's a promise, not a poster. That second rule is enforced by the platform: YouTube's native A/B test picks the winner by watch-time share, not raw CTR, so a misleading high-click thumbnail loses to an honest one. Design for mobile first — most viewing is on a phone, where simplicity and contrast win.

Read these first

  1. brand-profile — channel style/template (for consistency).
  2. the video and its title (often from youtube-publishing-and-metadata/youtube-long-form/ youtube-shorts).

The framework: CLICK

(Depth: references/the-click-framework.md.)

  • C — Clarify the promise: one-sentence promise; thumbnail + title as a unit (show vs tell, never repeat); promise not poster.
  • L — Lead with one focal point: one/two hero elements, minimal background, parseable in <1s; one directional element.
  • I — Invoke genuine emotion: expressive genuine face + gaze if it adds context (skip it otherwise); match the expression to the content.
  • C — Contrast + concise text: complementary high contrast (avoid YouTube red/white, 60-30-10, B&W test, light+dark); 0–4 bold sans-serif words + outline, not a title duplicate; mobile-legible at ~168×94; safe zones; 1280×720, 16:9.
  • K — Keep testing: 3 meaningfully-different concepts, one variable; native Test & Compare picks by watch-time share (not Shorts, needs traffic); a human uploads + runs it; keep a log; brand-consistent template.

Read the full file on GitHub · 96 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 8d ago First seen · 96 lines · 223 tokens per session scan A 1a9a4bf79eb4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

thumbnail-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository social-media-skills/skills (77 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 223 tokens to every session and 1,654 once invoked, about $0.0011 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

smart-illustrator

An image-generation tool for adding illustrations to articles, creating slide presentations and infographics, or making cover images and thumbnails. It can also create prompts without generating the images.

axtonliu/smart-illustrator · 131 tokens

xiaohongshu-cover

An AI-assisted cover design tool for Xiaohongshu notes, which are short posts on a Chinese social media platform. It studies visual elements from popular covers and produces design suggestions matched to the post's subject.

redfox-data/redfox-community · 103 tokens

wechat-cover

An AI design tool for planning cover images for WeChat Official Account articles. It studies visual patterns from popular articles and uses them to suggest cover designs related to the article’s subject.

redfox-data/redfox-community · 110 tokens

design-landing-page

Generate a deliverable landing-page HTML file (NOT a screenshot artifact). 1440px design width, mobile-responsive (CSS-only, no JS). Sections: hero (full-viewport) + 3 feature blocks + CTA. Designed to be opened in a browser, iterated on, and deployed as-is. Reads ./design/ /DESIGN.md, tokens.css, and components.html.…

slogsdon/skills-design · 108 tokens

design-system

Generate a brand-agnostic DESIGN.md (Google design.md spec format) plus tokens.css and showcase.html for any branding project. Reads ./design/ /DESIGN-PLAN.md if present, otherwise asks for an inline brief. Use AFTER design-plan and BEFORE design-ui-components. Triggers include "design system for [brand]", "build a…

slogsdon/skills-design · 87 tokens

design-carousel-slide

Generate a LinkedIn / Instagram multi-slide carousel — single HTML file with N square 1080×1080 .canvas divs, each representing one slide. Default N=5 (cover + 3 content + closing CTA). Cover and closing always use the brand's most distinctive treatments; middle slides are content-led. Reads ./design/ /DESIGN.md…

slogsdon/skills-design · 111 tokens