Emotes for streamers

When creating emotes for a stream, technical and artistic skills come together. Both are equally as important for a high value product.

Creating emotes for a content creator is no simple task. Emotes represent the channel, creator and community not only within the stream itself, but also in other streams.

When it comes to creating emotes for a stream, it is incredibly important to capture the style and vibe of the stream, the streamer and channel, as well as make emotes that are different enough from one another, yet look unified together. Another big aspect about emotes is that they have to be 'readable' even on an incredibly small scale. The scale and visual limitations vary slightly from website to website, for example the emotes that I made for her Twitch need to be clear even on a 28x28 pixels scale.

How to find customers?

Finding your customers can be as difficult as the work itself. In freelance-style of work, you need to be discoverable both organically and un-organically. For example SissyThatGame, my customer, is a content creator, whom I first discovered on Mixer, who then moved to Twitch. She contacted me about emotes after seeing me in her stream as a viewer, and after seeing emotes I had made for other channels. She wanted to have custom art for her, and we had a business meeting about the style, flavor and inspirations of hers, where I gathered notes and references of things, colorations and already existing graphics that she had, to come up with the new visual style and goal of her emotes.

After few attempts, trial and error, we settled on the colors, rendering style and feeling for her emotes. The community, streamer and myself are very pleased with the outcome, and because the emotes are so fitting and unique, viewers frequently ask about the artist. Organic discoverability?

Thanks to Twitches new ‘artist badge’ & ‘artist contribution’ system, anyone can see the artists information when inspecting an emote, which helps a lot in finding new customers organically in site and getting new commissions. When it comes to pricing emote commissions, its important to do your market research against other artists. Compare the time, effort and value of the final products you produce to that of your peer artists, and price accordingly. Its very important not to underprice or overprice your work, because your time, efforts and expertise have value, as well as other artists. It's important to remember that most of the time streamers will make money with your emotes, if not directly, indirectly, and they bring huge value to the user-experience of streams.

I have also been hired to make other types of graphics for the customers channel as well. I will be working on making ‘panel art’ which are graphics that convey information about the channel, streamer and community for the first time viewers. These often include pictures, text and filler graphics.