YouTube / video thumbnail

A click-driving thumbnail or cover for a video — YouTube, Shorts, Reels or TikTok. Packaging for something else rather than an ad in its own right.

When to use it

Any video you publish. The thumbnail is the single biggest lever on click-through rate for YouTube, and it is the most commonly neglected asset in a video workflow.

The thing to get right

There is a dedicated thumbnail pipeline behind this — frameworks, emotion casting, identity locking and multiple takes — reachable as its own tool rather than through the normal ad flow.

The format at a glance

• Output — a still image ad.
• Structure — a single frame, with the copy composited on top.
• Family — Production assets.
• Recipe id — yt_thumbnail, which is what you name when you ask for it by hand or from an agent.

How Hermoso renders it

You do not write a prompt for this. Hermoso reads your brand first — the product, the logo, the palette, the voice — from your website or a short description, then plans the ad against this format: a beat list, the on-screen copy, and the casting if a person appears. The render happens beat by beat, and every word that ends up on screen is composited afterwards by the app rather than painted by the model, so headlines, captions and the end card come out exactly as written instead of warped and half-invented.

If you have a real product photograph, add it. It is the difference between an ad showing your packaging and an ad showing packaging a model imagined, and it is the single biggest quality lever on any product format here.

Related formats

Things that are not an ad but feed one — a video thumbnail, a locked character reference sheet, a restyled interior.

• Interior / real-estate restyle — a listing-grade restyle of an interior/property photo — virtual staging, modern renovation, declutter or day-to-twilight — the SAME room, improved
• Character / model sheet — a multi-view character reference sheet (full body + close-up, turnaround or expression grid) of ONE original person — the identity lock other creatives reference

The full catalog is on the creative recipes index.

Driving it from an agent

Every format on this site is reachable from an AI agent as well as the web studio. Hermoso ships an MCP server, so Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and any other MCP client can call plan_ad to draft the creative and render_ad to produce it, name a format as the recipe, and get a finished file back — with the same brand grounding and the same composited-text guarantees. The MCP and CLI overview covers the setup, and the generated tool reference is the complete list.