Since the start of ETF2L Season 26, the teamfortresstv YouTube channel has been uploading VoD's of matches in the ETF2L Premiership division, and as of recent the ESEA Invite division. And while these VoD's are great for quickly rewatching matches, they're plagued by a common flaw: bad thumbnails.

Now while these thumbnails are completely readable and convey information that is important in the video, the way it conveys this information is through text. The problem with text in thumbnails is that they're too cumbersome and do a poor job at quickly relaying information. Let's take a look at the thumbnail for the ETF2L-P S26 UBF between Se7en and Arctic Foxes.

[img]https://i.imgur.com/FIQZ2aW.png[/img]

The first problem with the thumbnail is the hierarchy of information. When creating an image that needs to be read quickly, it should be high priority to make the most important information of the video take up a large amount of space and contrast with the rest of the image. In the thumbnail, the information that takes up the majority of the image in the background is the map(s), the ETF2L logo, and the TFTV logo, while the teams are relegated to text on the center-down. While the maps are important to a match, it's far more likely that people would look for videos that contain their favourite teams and it'd be much easier to recognize team logos as opposed to having to read the names of each team on the thumbnail or CTRL+F'ing your way through the videos. To add also, it'd be more likely that people would click TFTV videos in their reccommended videos if they were logos, as they'd contrast more in the logo and with the rest of their thumbnails and catch the attention of the user more than the current thumbnail deisgn.

The second problem is the text. The teams are represented not by logos, but rather just by the names of the teams themselves. While using just team names is good for pages, they do terribly for thumbnails, as the names of the teams do not stand out that much and the size of thumbnails mean that the team names do not stand out as well as say, team logos. As well as that, the text used to designate the league season and the position in the group/bracket of the match above the ETF2L logo is horrendous. It's far too small and clashes with the logo; it becomes even worse when it's a long description such as "Season 26, Playoffs Lower Bracket Final". What we get is text that is barely visible on such a small thumbnail and essentially takes up space, clashes with logos, and does nothing to help convey information to the viewer.

As an example, let's look at a thumbnail for ESL Pro League Season 5.

[img]https://i.ytimg.com/vi/AV5guuECkKs/0.jpg[/img]

While the ESL Pro League thumbnails don't convey that much information, what they do is quickly show the most important parts of the video that a user would be interested in. First, it clearly shows that it's a VoD of ESL Pro League via its design. While the TFTV thumbnails do have a semi-consistent design for showing what league it's a VoD from, that is relegated to a logo and a somewhat small one at that. In the case of the ESEA VoD's, a logo that is almost unseeable on certain map backgrounds. Second, the EPL thumbnails have the logos of the teams taking up around 1/3 of the space and the logos contrast from the blue background of the EPL thumbnail template. Because of this, an average viewer can browse through the ESL Counter-Strike YouTube and quickly find their favourite team's ESL Pro League matches.

The TFTV thumbnails are flawed by their inefficency in catching the attention of a user and do not help categorize videos based on the teams that are competing in the match, the league that the match is being played in, or what week or position in the bracket the match is being played in. They instead focus on the fact it's a TFTV broadcast and the map(s) that the match is being played on without a filter, which results in clashing with the logo and the text itself. They do not work well as thumbnails and need to be reworked to focus more on the league that the match is being played in and use the logos of the teams competing in the match. These are more important aspects of a match that need to be relayed quickly to the user in the thumbnail, which is currently not the case.