One of the common threads you’ll notice among the biggest Twitch channels is that they all have a design that’s pleasing to the eye and serves as a form of branding. Making your Twitch channel look awesome is important to provide audiences with a visual appeal to visit your channel and stay there.
In addition to this, designing your channel the right way will make it easier for people to find your streams and social media platforms to boost your following. You can design your Twitch channel with a variety of elements that range from overlays and panels to alerts and offline images.
This post covers some of the main aspects to consider when it comes to designing your Twitch channel to make it look professional and represent who you are and what you live stream.
Branding
Ensuring that you include your branding throughout your Twitch channel design is key to helping your channel grow and look professional. It’s important to have a great design that has a visual appeal, but you also want to ensure that it represents you as a brand.
One of the key elements of branding and design is to have a logo. Making your logo unique and eye-catching while clearly getting across the idea of your brand is important. It will be a creative process that may require you to try out different logos until you make the right one.
Keeping your brand design often works better as it lets you still be unique while letting people know what your brand is.
Panels
When it comes to using panels, Twitch Overlays usually downscales the quality and they recommend you to use panels that are 320 x 200px large. Many people prefer to use panels that are around 600 x 300px due to how Twitch lowers the quality. This way, you can ensure that your panel quality looks as good as possible. Twitch will resize images that are above 600 x 320px which can distort the quality.Â
When designing your panels, be sure to include the information that you think is relevant for viewers to know about you. Panels can be a great way to show people your social media links, community guidelines, an about section, sponsors, partnerships, equipment that you use, and donations.
Letting people know that you accept donations/tips can be a fantastic way to earn extra money and for people who love your streams to support your channel. When you’re starting out, it may be best to put a donations link later on as it can seem desperate, to begin with.
Creating Exciting Overlays
Overlays are a major element to consider when making your Twitch channel look great. When you’re making Twitch Overlays, you can include your webcam, webcam border, upcoming events, logos, sponsors, subscribers, and any other information that you think people should be able to see.
There are no set things to include in your overlay, but including the elements mentioned above will help new viewers have an easier time knowing what your channel is about.
When it comes to how many overlay extensions you use, it’s ideal to not have so many to the point where everything becomes cluttered. You may need to experiment and see what elements of your overlays are causing distractions from your streams and which ones can stay.
When your live streaming games, keeping the view of the webcam smaller is usually best so that it doesn’t get in the way of the gameplay. Be sure not to cover up too many parts of the screen while you’re playing so that people aren’t missing out on any important parts of the gameplay.
Lastly, keeping all of the aspects of your overlays organized is ideal for letting viewers see the information clearly without it being a big distraction. If you are going to use animations instead of strictly static overlays, ask yourself whether it’s something that viewers will appreciate or whether it will get tiresome over time.
Custom Alerts
Creating custom alerts is a lot of fun and part of the overlay feature. It lets you put a mini celebration animation on the screen for things like when you gain a new follower. This can be a fun way to let you and others know who has joined the community and you can give them a little shoutout.
You can take advantage of custom alerts by having them relate more specifically to your live streams and the colors that are used for your overall brand design.
However, if you’ve been gaining a lot of followers during your live streams, you may want to consider making these alerts less distracting otherwise they can start to become annoying.
Offline Images
You’ll want to consider what your Twitch channel looks like when you’re offline. You can create an image that looks great for when people are visiting your channel when you’re offline. You can place something on the video player, such as a message about when you’ll next be streaming.
In addition to this, you can take this as an opportunity to plug your sponsors and social media platforms to get new viewers to follow and keep up to date with you. Uploading an offline image is super easy by going to the dashboard, settings, channel, video play banner, and selecting the image that you want to upload.
Conclusion
You may want to hire people to create the various banners and overlays for you if you don’t feel too confident in that area. This can help your channel look more professional from top to bottom.
Looking at Twitch channel design resources to learn how to do things yourself is also an option to consider to do everything yourself.Â
Now that you have a better idea of some of the steps you can take to make your Twitch channel look better, you can begin integrating these tips. Making your channel look visually appealing is important, but so is getting across your brand in an easily digestible way.