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Most platforms take one image and generate what they need. Twitch does that for some slots and refuses to for the two that matter most — emotes and badges — because at the sizes those are displayed, automatic scaling produces mush.
The offline screen deserves more attention than it usually gets. For any channel that is not live right now — which is most channels, most of the time — it is the largest thing a visitor sees, sitting exactly where the stream would be. A channel with no offline screen shows a generic placeholder to everyone who arrives between streams.
Every emote must be provided at 28 × 28, 56 × 56 and 112 × 112 pixels, each under 25 KB, as PNG with transparency.
Twitch will scale a 112 down for you. Letting it is the single most common mistake emote artists make, because 28 × 28 is 784 pixels in total and automatic reduction turns a detailed design into a coloured blur at that size.
The 28 is also the one people see. It is the size used in chat — the whole point of an emote. The 112 appears in the emote picker and in tooltips, which is to say: in the place where you evaluate it and almost nowhere else.
So the right process is to draw the 112, then open the 28 and fix it by hand: thicken lines that vanished, remove detail that became noise, push the contrast up, simplify the silhouette until it reads. It is the same argument as an ICO file holding several hand-made sizes, and for the same reason.
What survives at 28 pixels: one face or one object, a strong outline, two or three clearly distinct colours. What does not: text of any kind, thin lines, gradients, small facial features, anything with a background.
This constraint is specific to chat emotes and easy to miss, because you almost certainly designed yours while looking at dark mode.
Twitch chat runs in both themes, and the same emote has to be legible on both. A dark emote with no outline disappears into dark chat; a pale one disappears into light chat.
The standard solution is a contrasting outline — a light rim on a dark design, or the reverse — or a design with enough internal contrast that neither background swallows it. Check both before uploading; it costs a minute and it is the difference between an emote that gets used and one that does not.
And because emotes are transparent PNGs, never export them through a format without an alpha channel. A transparent PNG converted to JPEG arrives as a black square.
Subscriber badges need 18 × 18, 36 × 36 and 72 × 72 pixels, under 25 KB each.
Eighteen pixels is 324 pixels in total — smaller than an emote and smaller than a favicon. There is room for one simple shape in two or three colours and nothing else. Badge sets that work are usually a single recognisable silhouette with a colour that changes by tier, rather than a different illustration at each level.
This is the most commonly wasted opportunity on a Twitch channel.
Panels are the blocks underneath the stream holding your schedule, rules, links and equipment list. Each panel has both an image and a text description field — and most channels put all their words inside the image and leave the text field empty.
That turns a panel into a picture of text, which means the words cannot be selected, copied, searched, translated, read by a screen reader, or clicked if they are links. The image is also fixed at 320 pixels wide while the text reflows properly.
The arrangement that works: use the image as a header — a title bar, an icon, a piece of branding, typically 320 × 100 — and put the actual content in the description field below it. Links in that field are clickable; links drawn inside an image are not.
At 1920 × 1080 this is the most generous canvas Twitch gives you, and it is seen at whatever size the player happens to be — full width on a desktop, a few centimetres on a phone.
So the same rule as every other banner applies: a few large words, not a paragraph. Channel name, when you stream, and one way to find you elsewhere. Anything smaller than that becomes unreadable on mobile, and the schedule written in small type is exactly the part that someone arriving between streams wanted to read.