When Adobe Live returned to live streaming on Twitch, I had the amazing opportunity to join the other Adobe Live mods, Wade Acuff and VooDoo Val to stream working on new Twitch assets. I worked on a set of static and animated Twitch emotes, the topics and imagery chosen by the chat. We had an absolute blast switching out who was the host and who was the guest working all day on Adobe Live in studio in San Francisco.
Final Art
The final static emotes from left to right: Sip and Save, Applause, Make It Pop, and Oh Crop. I think these feel really fresh and unique to the Adobe Live Twitch channel to help them standout from other creators on the platform. I also really like that they were chosen by the community, creating a personal connection between the viewers and the channel.
Process
Before the event, I did some research on the best way to quickly and easily create art in Illustrator, animate it, and get a transparent gif to use on Twitch in the sizes needed. I came up with animating it in Adobe Express using their default animations, and adding a bright green or blue background that I could key out in Adobe Premiere Pro, exporting an image sequence, loading that into Adobe Photoshop, and then exporting the gif from Adobe Photoshop with transparency.
Animated Emotes
Twitch emotes are small, 112px square at the largest. They get used in the chat as animated emojis so the movement and details need to be simple and clear with good contrast to hold up not only at small sizes, but for viewers in light and dark mode on the website and app. These are displaying larger here. The animations in Adobe Express were a really quick way to add some simple movement and get them exported within the time constrains of the live stream.
