YouTube Thumbnail

Design a high-CTR YouTube thumbnail — striking imagery, bold text placement, and emotional face/subject if needed.

Inputs

Name	Type	Required	Default	Description
`title`	text	yes	—	The video title or topic (e.g. "I tried 7 AI tools in 24 hours — here's what happened").
`channel_style`	text	no	bold, high contrast, bright colors, clean design, YouTube tech aesthetic	Channel brand style (e.g. "dark moody gaming", "bright educational", "minimal corporate").
`subject_description`	text	no	—	Optional description of the person or subject to feature (e.g. "a surprised young man in a hoodie").

Thumbnails are the #1 factor in YouTube CTR. Generate a single, maximum-impact 16:9 image.

Before generating, briefly reason about the best thumbnail formula for this topic:

Emotion-first: shocked/curious face if relevant + bold text = high CTR
Text overlay: 3–5 words max, high-contrast (white/yellow on dark, or vice-versa)
Contrast & saturation: thumbnails compete in a grid — they must pop

Subject: {{subject_description}} if provided, otherwise design an object/scene that dramatizes the topic.
Mood: derives from {{channel_style}}.
Composition: rule-of-thirds, subject on left or right with empty space for text.
Style tags: {{channel_style}}, youtube thumbnail composition, ultra detailed, vibrant, high contrast, 16:9.

Call muapi image generate (model=gpt-image-2-text-to-image, aspect_ratio=16:9).

After generation, return:

Suggested overlay text: 3–5 bold words that complement the title {{title}}.
Text placement: where on the canvas to position text (e.g. "bold yellow text, top-right third").
Font recommendation: style suggestion (e.g. "Impact-style all-caps with black outline").

Never put too much text in the prompt — text rendering in image models is unreliable. Guide the user on adding text in post-production (Canva, Photoshop).
If the user already has a channel image or face photo in the session, use muapi image edit to incorporate it.
Suggest A/B variants only if the user asks.

youtube thumbnail, yt thumbnail, thumbnail, video thumbnail, youtube cover

---

This recipe is LLM-orchestrated: read each phase, gather any missing inputs from the user, then call muapi CLI commands. Use muapi auth configure first if MUAPI_API_KEY is unset.
For model IDs without a CLI alias yet, fall back to the raw endpoint via curl -X POST https://api.muapi.ai/api/v1/<endpoint> -H "x-api-key: $MUAPI_API_KEY" -H 'content-type: application/json' -d '{...}' and poll with muapi predict wait <request_id>.
Substitute {{input_name}} placeholders with the user's actual inputs before issuing each call.