How to make a YouTube channel intro

Kario Team · October 24, 2026 · 2 min read

A channel intro is your name and your mark, a few seconds long, timed to music. Kario builds one from a line about your channel: it draws the mark, sets the name and animates both to the beat of a track from its royalty-free library.

The video above is a 6.5-second intro Kario made for Tiny Orbit, a science channel.

What happens in it

• On the first beat, an orange planet appears.
• Half a second later, a moon slides out of it and orbits once, drawing a ring as it goes. The ring closes on a beat, with a chime.
• On the music's drop, three seconds in, the planet and its ring shrink into the O of TINY ORBIT, and the letters rise in around them.
• "Science in five minutes" follows a beat later. The moon keeps orbiting and the camera pushes in slowly, so it's still moving when it cuts to your video.
• Two layers of stars drift behind it the whole time, the nearer one faster.

Keep it short

YouTube's audience retention report has an "Intro" moment: the share of viewers still watching after the first 30 seconds (YouTube Help). The intro spends some of those seconds, so a few is enough. Put it after your opening line rather than before it, so viewers know why to stay before they see the name.

What to send

• The channel's name and a line on what it's about.
• Your logo, if you have one. If you don't, describe the idea, and Kario draws a mark from shapes, like Tiny Orbit's planet.
• The feel and the colours: playful or calm, bright or dark.
• The length. Tiny Orbit's runs 6.5 seconds.

Using it

Export an MP4 to put at the start of each video, or a transparent MOV or WebM to lay the intro over your own footage. A renamed series or a new colour is a line in the chat, and the rest of the intro stays as it is. Ask for a vertical version for Shorts too: it comes as a board in the same project.