Emotes, and Why Branding Matters for Streamers

Published in

GameWisp’s Game Whispers

4 min readJul 18, 2017

Gamewisp has been offering GW exclusive emotes for some time now, and now, Twitch has made its ever-illusive emotes feature available to Affiliates. This inclusion means that there will be a massive influx of affiliated streamers on the hunt for high quality, professional artwork to accompany their viewers’ experience and here’s why.

Challenge accepted

Life is inherently difficult. We face challenges in everything we do, and for some, these challenges are amplified due to circumstances. But some of the unique challenges artists face are to help solve complex issues, challenge people’s perceptions of what they once thought to be “the norm,” or to visually define one’s brand.

Artists, or more specifically hired/commissioned artists, are tasked with bringing visions to life, and solving visual problems. Graphic designers are asked to convey messages through visuals. Illustrators, are tasked with telling a story through their art. Portrait artists are tasked with capturing the essence of a person, physically and sometimes emotionally. You get the picture.

I love the thrill and challenge of transforming a blank surface into a visual experience. Being able to impact someone else through my art (whether functional or purely for aesthetics) is an incredibly humbling, eye opening, and beautiful experience.

Branding For Impact

This leads me to a very important point for aspiring streamers and content creators. Having a consistent, and coherent “brand” presence is crucial for helping your viewers internalize your content, and identify you amongst a crowd full of millions of other streamers. The streaming market is so heavily saturated that in order to stand out, you must make your content unique. And the basis for creating a unique experience is visually communicating who you are, and what makes you special.

“Brand Identity”

Branding is one of the first steps to making a splash in this ocean. It isn’t however, a guaranteed way to “make it big” as streamer — many pieces must be aligned to get there. But having banners, information tabs, profile images, social media images, thumbnails, overlays, stickers, business cards, logos, and lastly, emotes, all help tell the story of who you are, and what kind of experience people will have consuming your content.

Emotes=Branding

You may have heard me use the word “branding” a few times in this article. In its very essence, branding is how people identify, and ultimately connect with you, your service, or your product. Think of every “popular” person or business, and think of the first image you see when you think of them. That image, is more often than not, their logo, or an image that they specifically targeted so that you would recognize them, and draw that connection. What could initially be perceived as incidental dissonance, may actually be subliminal advertising. Emotes, are a perfect example of subliminal advertising. In their very application, they can be used in other people’s chats and spark conversation. “Whoa, that emote is awesome, who’s is it? Who did it?” This creates a dialogue between viewers, and streamers that ties into your own brand. (side note, don’t go into other people’s streams spamming your emotes, that’s rude)

As such, to get a good, quality emote, one must find an artist! While I won’t get into the nitty-gritty of the other intricacies and challenges with being a designer in today’s “need it fast, need it cheap” society, I can offer this bit of advice. Get yourself a designer who takes pride in quality over quantity, and think about channel art and emotes as an investment. Emotes are a big part of why people subscribe to twitch channels, so keep that in mind when getting some artwork priced and save up that extra cash to take care of the artist, so that they in turn, take damned good care of you.

Happy streaming loves!

Will “Black Oni” Wiggins

Find Black Oni here:

Emotes, and Why Branding Matters for Streamers

Written by Caroline Engle