How to Create a Full Twitch Emote Pack: Step-by-Step Guide
How to plan, design and export a complete Twitch emote pack — from choosing an art style to batch-exporting every emote at all required sizes.
Affiliates start with 1 emote slot. Design your single best emote first — the one that represents your channel most. You'll unlock more slots as your subscriber count grows.
A full emote pack is a set of 5–10 custom emotes that work together visually and give your community a complete range of reactions. Having a cohesive pack — rather than a random collection of individual emotes — makes your channel feel polished and gives subscribers a stronger reason to stick around. Here's how to plan and produce one from scratch.
Before opening any design software, decide on the visual language of your pack. The most successful emote packs have a single consistent art style, colour palette, and a character or mascot as their centrepiece.
- •Choose a style: cartoon, chibi, pixel art, or flat illustration. Pick one and stick to it.
- •Pick a colour palette of 3–5 main colours. Consistent colours tie the pack together visually.
- •Decide on a mascot or central character — this could be your avatar, a game character, or an original creation.
- •Identify the 5 core emotions you want to cover: hype, laugh, cry, lurk, and rage cover most chat scenarios.
A typical starter pack of 5 emotes covers the highest-use reactions in chat. Here's a proven lineup:
| Slot | Emote type | When viewers use it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hype / celebration | Big plays, wins, epic moments |
| 2 | Laugh / LUL | Funny moments, streamer fails |
| 3 | Sad / cry | Bad luck, losses, sad news |
| 4 | Lurk | Viewer is watching but not chatting |
| 5 | Rage | Frustrating moments, bad RNG |
You have two options: create the artwork yourself or commission an artist. If creating yourself, vector tools like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape give the best results for clean downscaling. If commissioning, platforms like Fiverr and ArtStation have many artists specialising in Twitch emotes.
- •Request artwork at 1000 × 1000 px minimum, on a transparent background.
- •Ask for the full set in one order — a single artist ensures visual consistency.
- •Brief the artist with your colour palette, style reference, and the 5 emotions you need.
- •Review each emote at 28 px (using EmoteForge's preview) before approving the commission.
Once you have all your emote artwork, you need to export every emote at 28, 56 and 112 px — that's 15 files for a 5-emote pack. Doing this manually is tedious and error-prone. EmoteForge's Bulk Emote Pack tool lets you upload all your emotes at once and exports a single ZIP containing every file at every size, named correctly, ready to upload.
- •Open the Bulk Emote Pack tool and drop all your source PNG files.
- •The tool processes each one to 28, 56 and 112 px.
- •Download the ZIP — files are organised per emote with correct naming.
- •Upload each set to Twitch Creator Dashboard → Emotes.
- •Also upload to 7TV and BTTV for extended reach.
Emote names are how viewers trigger them in chat. A good emote name is short (under 12 characters), memorable, descriptive, and includes your channel name as a prefix to avoid conflicts. For example: YourNameHype, YourNameLUL, YourNameRage.
- •Announce in a stream with a screen showing all emotes and their names.
- •Pin a chat message with emote names during the reveal stream.
- •Add a channel panel showing all subscriber emotes.
- •Post a preview image on social media to attract new subscribers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Affiliates start with 1 emote slot. Design your single best emote first — the one that represents your channel most. You'll unlock more slots as your subscriber count grows.
Flat, cartoon, and chibi styles with bold outlines tend to read best at small sizes. Highly detailed realistic styles are difficult to make readable at 28 px.
Use EmoteForge's Bulk Emote Pack tool — upload all your source images at once and download a single ZIP with every emote at 28, 56 and 112 px.
If you want the export side handled automatically, open the relevant EmoteForge tool and generate every required size in one pass.
Export your emote pack in bulk