hey you guys welcome back to a channel the number one place for people who love design
art and all things creative you are watching Dantier and Balogh's channel my name is Laszlo
and in this video i want to show you how i have designed twitch emotes for the first time
right after finding out what twitch emotes are in the first place so this video is a little
bit of a studio blog a little bit of a twitch emote design tutorial and a little bit of a life
lesson on branching out and trying new things as a creative as well it's gonna be fun ready set go
so to make sense of this video i need to start with giving you guys some context i got this
friend who messaged me a couple months ago telling me that he has started a twitch channel where he
does live streamings of himself playing video games and he's going to need a logo i was like
great i don't know much about twitch but i know a lot about branding so talk to me man what do
you have in mind he then went on to explaining his ideas what kind of games he is planning to stream
and how twitch in general is very much like youtube except everything is live and so the
videos and the chat and the comments all of this content creation happens in real time
building this instant very strong sense of community which is something that appeared
to me straight away long story short i put together a logo for him this one to be exact
if you want to know more about the logo concept check out our instagram i made a
very nice post about it but i don't want to use pressure screen time talking about that
here so the logo was done i have put together some social media banners for him and after
he paid quite frankly i thought that's it i'm never gonna hear about this project ever again
fast forward a couple months he messages me again telling me that now he has become a
twitch affiliate which besides giving him a little bit of ad revenue on his channel is now allowing
him to further customize the look and feel of his streaming channel as well so he's gonna need me
to design some twitch emotes and i was like cool man that's fantastic amazing news i don't have a
question though what are twitch emotes and this has opened a full can of worms for me blowing
my mind at the same time now if you are part of the twitch community this is nothing new to you
but i as an outsider was fascinated by the fact that on twitch you can customize your emoticons
emojis which emotes are at the end of the day to further strengthen your brand image and style
so after some initial research i sat down and i started planning out some emotes for his channel
as you can tell by design emotes tend to lean on this chibi cartoony anime style a
lot which makes sense as these things have to be overly expressive while super simple at the same
time given their extremely small scale now most artists tend to go for photoshop or clip studio
paint to put these little designs together but i thought you know what these should be vectors so
i can resize them any way i want later on who knows you might want to make physical match
like actual stickers or veggies out of these one day so i better start big then scale down later
my first idea was to create pixel perfect linework based designs which classic emojis usually are
and then later i can rely on color and shading to dress these up to the desired cartoony look
i mapped out our set of four designs and even started coloring in one of them in two different
ways to show an idea to the client how this will look in the end so i presented the work to him and
he hated it yeah the colors he liked but the overall look and feel of this very clean and
neat line work he just wasn't on board with it was too clean too symmetric too 'android emoji'-like
while missing that cool cheeky handmade element which give twitch emotes their signature flavor
yeah all fair points so we decided to ditch this whole direction and start from zero again
now this time i thought instead of this purist vector designer root i'm gonna go back to my
classical illustrator ways and i'm going to hand draw the basic shapes of these emojis
and then put that into illustrator to create the final line on
now i have to admit this sort of anime/manga style never came naturally to me so i was
somewhat worried what the client would say to these but as soon as i was done and i
showed him the characters he was a 100% on board with them and green-lit coloring straight away
now i thought to further emphasize this handmade look i'm gonna need to
switch to a pixel-based program so i did the coloring in photoshop instead of illustrator
in terms of technique i'm not doing anything mind-blowing here first i fill out the shapes
with some solid colors then i overlay some shadows and lights on top of these color layers
i literally only work with black and white brushes here on top of these new layers which
i have set to overlay mode given the simplistic nature of emotes this would be enough to wrap
up the whole project really but i thought you know what let's take things one step
further and give them a little more color just to make them feel a bit more three-dimensional
i go in with some blacks and whites again this time on a normal layer
so they actually are black and white shades nothing major i keep things very subtle here
and once that is done i add some colors here and there just to make the designs pop
this doesn't sound very professional but all i do here is go on the big color
palette in photoshop and choose a seemingly random shade which in theory shouldn't work
with the initial color scheme and see what happens if i add some of this color anyway
like a little bit of green here and there for example more often than not i end up
getting somewhere really interesting color wise with this trick so yeah try it yourself
okay this is how the final set ended up looking like and after the client agreeing to them all
that's left to do is saving them out the right way now first of all i took them apart i think i
mentioned this in previous videos how whenever i'm being asked to work on a set of different designs
i like to work on them simultaneously you know to oversee the whole process just to make sure
that they visually resemble each other in terms of the line work and the colors and whatnot
so i did that for this one and then later on i took the whole thing apart in photoshop now when
you're saving out twitch emotes there are a couple of things to bear in mind first of all these need
to be transparent png-s so make sure to turn off the white background and your canvas needs to be
a perfect rectangle twitch's website states that the size of your rectangle should be between 112
pixels by 112 pixels and you can go up to 4 096 pixels by 4096 pixels i kept my work to a thousand
by thousand just to make life a little bit easier at this point it wouldn't hurt to do a little bit
of a double check and see how the designs work you know without the background and once you
feel like they are all good to go you can call it a day package them up send them off and done so i
send these over and if i'm not mistaken all you really need to do is upload them to your twitch
channel after which twitch actually goes through them just to make sure that they are up to their
standards and rules and whatnot and usually within a couple of days you got yourself some
custom emojis that your subscribers can use on your channel it's pretty cool now the reason why i
wanted to make this video and document my findings in real time including my mistakes and my research
and all that instead of putting together one of those how to design emotes for twitch tutorial
using photoshop cc kind of videos is because i think if you are a young designer or artist
you will get thrown into this kind of situations quite a lot people will want you to make designs
and artwork for platforms that you are not using platforms you might never even heard of and i
think it's really easy to get scared get cold feet and just turn these projects down by default
thinking that oh well you know what i don't know anything about twitch so you should hire a
designer who specializes in twitch emote design instead while all you really have to do is sit
down pull your sleeves up and spend an hour or so researching and familiarizing yourself with this
new unheard of thing like i'm not much of a gamer i don't really play video games let
alone watch other people play on streams but for me it was quite a nice comforting realization
that my illustrative style actually works for this emote format basically giving me a whole
new avenue a new stream of clientele i would never even have considered targeting by myself hopefully
as my friend's channel grow i get to do more cool stuff like this for him or for others he already
messaged me that eventually he's going to need some key point art and some badges as well god
knows what those things are but i'm willing to find out guys if you enjoy this kind of content
feel free to join our creative crew we aim to give you two videos every week about art design
illustration interior design architecture all those cool things and everything we can find in
between them as always leave a like if you enjoyed this one and i hope to see you this time next week