What makes a good comic thumbnail?

[indianajonas]

I'm not talking about the thumbnails for the episodes but the main cover thumbnail. The first thing people see when they find your comic.

As an example this is the thumbnail for the series I'm currently working on, I think it's technically decent but I don't think it really pulls people in like I want to. Does anyone have any tips for this particular thumbnail or thumbnails in general?

Thumbnails, thumbnails, thumbnails...

[VibrantFox]

Almost anytime this question pops up the main place i tend to direct people to is this Medium article from Tapas here:

Judging A Series By Its Thumbnail – Tapas App – Medium

[Zaboem]

When zoomed in a creating a beautiful thumbnail that one loves, it can be easy to forget that it will be the actual size of a nail on your thumb when viewed by the audience. All of that detail will be lost, and your elegant text will be unreadable. Try holding your thumb out in front of your. Step backward away from your image until that image looks the same size as your thumb -- or the size of just your thumb's nail if you are ambitious. If it still looks good at that distance, you are on the right track.

[inkythoughts]

in general I'd say, especially "cover art" somehow needs to tell the audience at least to some degree what's going on, or raise actually intriguing questions. with your current thumbnail, we don't really get any information about either the type of story they are in or their character dynamic. They just look ... friendly. Which is not enough to raise any questions or create intrigue.
Another thing as oftentimes pointed out here https://forums.tapas.io/t/judging-a-series-by-its-icon-and-design-tips/11573 quite often is that you don't need the actual title within the thumbnail as it already shows underneath the thumbnail on tapas. It just wastes precious space!

I really like your colour scheme though, it's very hamonious!

[indianajonas]

Nice thread! I will have a look around it!

I super agree about that point so I remade my cover to have a bit more story to it. I think it's a bit better.

It's gonna be interesting to see if this helps anything

[amortelito]

LOL, I legitimately want to read this because of the pictures. I think is a good choice to have a very simple bold color in the background because some readers will find you on their phones, and thumbnails are often small and is hard to distinguish detail.