youtube-thumbnaillisted

# YouTube Thumbnail Design thumbnails for high click-through on YouTube, for **this** niche: founders, agency operators, systems and AI tooling. The job is one second of attention on a 5-inch screen, in a feed, against nine competitors whose frames have already been measured. Three decisions run the whole skill and none is a matter of taste: 1. **The angle** (step 1b). The claim the frame makes, the beat that proves it, and the title that claim wants. Decided before the picture, because it decides the video too. 2. **Face variant or faceless variant** (step 3). Decided by what the video is about. 3. **How it is executed** (step 7): designer handoff, real-pixel composite, or model generation. Decided by who executes and by whether a real person is in the frame. **A face variant is composited from real pixels, never generated.** The model draws a frame only when nothing real has to be preserved in it. See below. **Pick the template before you write a word of the frame (step 5c).** Camera, ground, light, palette, depth and type placement live in a named template, never invented per run: that is why one set gave two good frames and four poor ones and the good ones taught the next set nothing. `scripts/thumbnail-template.ts list`, then [`references/templates.md`](references/templates.md). A concept naming none is unfinished. **The render-mode gate is the template's `route`, and it is mechanical now.** On a face frame the only routes are `photo`, `composite` and `e