Whether you are a pro live streamer or just a beginner, most likely you already understand that a sweet and neat design comes first. One simply cannot overestimate the importance of individual Overlays, logos, banners, etc. Not only do they create a unique image, but they also show your dedication and commitment, which in turn attracts more viewers. Luckily, there are lots of amazing tools that can help you with these tasks, including live Stream overlay makers and banner makers. Well, that’s where this article comes in handy.

What are the main design elements of a video stream?

Let’s get things straight. People rarely remember streamers with basic overlays and without a cool logo. Therefore, we need to describe the main design elements that can help you enhance your live stream. These are:

• Overlays
• Banners
• Panels
• Alerts
• Logo
• Watermark

Overlays

An impressive custom overlay is a golden key to success, especially for gamers. Your live stream overlay is basically a layout on the screen your audience sees. Stream Overlay Makers allow you to add different fancy rectangular, triangular, or circular shapes and adjust their size and position at any given time. Overlays can even be animated, although it may cost you some money.

Banners

A live stream banner, also known as a cover image, is typically a 1200 x 380px picture your audience sees when you are AFK or offline. Viewers see only the banner and nothing else. Therefore, these cover images are mainly used to give your viewers crucial information about your live stream, like your schedule, partnerships, and content info. In other words, use a stream banner to present yourself.

Panels

This element is probably the most informative of your live stream design. The custom images, called panels, allow your viewers to learn more about you and your live stream. Typical categories include:

• About
• Live stream rules
• Sponsors
• Social media links
• Equipment
• Tips and donations

Alerts

While many streamers use generic animated pop-ups from Streamlabs, wouldn’t it be cooler to create unique alerts with some catchy sounds? Alerts are used to highlight new followers, subscriptions, tips, donations, hosts, and many more.

Logo

A live stream logo helps users find your channel among the hundreds of others. It is a unique and straightforward way to present yourself. The logo needs to be visually catchy and versatile. Moreover, it has to be appropriate so you don’t get into any sort of trouble with it.

Watermark

A watermark is basically your logo embedded in your live video. Often, it is small and located somewhere in the corner so it doesn’t interfere with the live video. People use watermarks for copyright matters and to help viewers identify the streamer.

Tools to make overlays, banners, panels, and more

Now that we know all the design elements, the question is how to make those custom overlays and fancy alerts. Although it may require some creativity, the process is super easy. You just pick an app, which will do all the technical and challenging things for you. Here’s a short guide on such tools.

Canva

Canva allows you to create beautiful designs for nearly anything. This amazing service has hundreds of free templates for banners and logos ready to be used. It is suitable for everyone since designer skills are not required. Unfortunately, only the paid version allows you to create custom designs. Free users can only adjust the banners’ size. Moreover, only the paid option will enable you to export your designs as GIFs or MP4 videos.

Snappa

It turns out graphic designers are a thing of the past — or at least Snappa suggests so. The service offers an enormous image library, hundreds of banner templates, and the most popular banner dimension presets. With the help of Snappa, you can repurpose your banners in just a few clicks. Plus, they have awesome guides on how to use their services. Also, Snappa’s free option is more than enough to make a unique, memorable Twitch banner.

Crello

Crello’s templates are specifically designed for YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, and other popular platforms. Two words can describe Crello: professionalism and diversity. Free users have access to more than 30,000 fantastic banner templates and a whopping 140-million-image library. Anyone can upload their unique fonts and pictures.

Adobe Spark

It seems the iconic brand always has something to offer in every possible field. Once again, Adobe brings a high-quality product to the table, which allows you to create rather remarkable Twitch banners. Unfortunately, free users have somewhat limited features to work with in Adobe Spark — no unique designs, no premium templates, the unkillable Adobe Spark watermark, etc. Of course, all these troubles are non-factors if you consider buying the product.

Placeit

Struggling to come up with a logo for your Twitch channel? Not only does Placeit help you create a live stream logo of your dreams, but it also offers thousands of fresh banner templates to choose from. Everything is customizable. The downside, however, is that you have to pay to use the Placeit banner and logo maker.

Advanced Overlay Maker (by Nerd or Die)

Finally, we’ve come to the juicy stuff: custom live stream overlays and alerts. For six years, the guys from Nerd or Die have been creating amazing overlays for all kinds of streamers. But nowadays, you can do it all by yourself using their simple live stream overlay maker. The app allows you to create unique overlays, which work with every popular streaming platform, including Twitch, Mixer, YouTube Live, Facebook Live, etc.

Strexm

As an affordable alternative to Nerd or Die, Strexm offers you 200+ overlay designs to make your live stream smooth and slick. The service has overlays designed explicitly for the most popular video games, including LoL, Dota 2, FIFA, Call of Duty, etc. And most importantly, you don’t have to spend a single penny! Simply connect Strexm with Twitch and choose your overlay.

Visuals by Impulse

Visuals by Impulse offers custom stream overlays, animated alerts, banners, panels, and more. If you really want to finetune every little aspect of your channel, look no further. New premium designs are added weekly. Visuals by Impulse supports OBS Studio, Streamlabs, and StreamElements, as well as every streaming platform.

All these amazing tools can help you customize your live stream in a unique way. The only thing left to do after making sure your live stream stands out is to share it with the world. And the best way to do that is to multistream on every possible platform all at once. Restream Studio does exactly that and more! You can use all your previously created custom overlays, panels, and banners and multistream on 30+ platforms right from your browser. Isn’t that great?

Wrapping up

We understand that it can be a bit overwhelming to wrap your head around all those tools and their functionality. That’s why we’ve done it for you! Here’s what you can do with all the services described above.