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Description

One of the niches I’ve found as a freelance artist is designing and illustrating stickers, emojis, and emotes for communities on platforms like Discord and Twitch. While all commercial art exists to communicate a message, emotes pose unique design challenges that I really enjoy tackling.
1. The importance of character pose, expression and silhouette is amplified
Emotes are typically displayed at crazy small sizes when in use on platforms like Discord and Twitch. This means that clarity and exaggeration are super important to make sure that the people using those emotes can actually understand what they’re meant to represent.
2. They need to be versatile
If the use-case for an emote is too specific, it’ll rarely get used and just end up wasting space on the server. This means that the design has to be common enough to get regular use, while being compelling enough to be worth using.
3. They need to express an emotion better than words
If the design of an emote isn’t compelling enough, or the emotion it expresses isn’t powerful or interesting, users will just write whatever they need to say instead. A great emote encapsulates emotions that are complicated to explain, but easy to understand in a single image. You’ll see them spammed over and over again in a Twitch chat has a community comes together to express their excitement or anger or laughter.
Aside from all that, it’s also really satisfying to watch people organically use my artwork in their conversations. It’s cool to make stuff that resonates with people so much that they choose to use it as a tool for self expression.
Do you have an online community, and need some bespoke emotes to help solidify your community identity and foster more active communication? I’d love to help you out!

Description

One of the niches I’ve found as a freelance artist is designing and illustrating stickers, emojis, and emotes for communities on platforms like Discord and Twitch. While all commercial art exists to communicate a message, emotes pose unique design challenges that I really enjoy tackling.
1. The importance of character pose, expression and silhouette is amplified
Emotes are typically displayed at crazy small sizes when in use on platforms like Discord and Twitch. This means that clarity and exaggeration are super important to make sure that the people using those emotes can actually understand what they’re meant to represent.
2. They need to be versatile
If the use-case for an emote is too specific, it’ll rarely get used and just end up wasting space on the server. This means that the design has to be common enough to get regular use, while being compelling enough to be worth using.
3. They need to express an emotion better than words
If the design of an emote isn’t compelling enough, or the emotion it expresses isn’t powerful or interesting, users will just write whatever they need to say instead. A great emote encapsulates emotions that are complicated to explain, but easy to understand in a single image. You’ll see them spammed over and over again in a Twitch chat has a community comes together to express their excitement or anger or laughter.
Aside from all that, it’s also really satisfying to watch people organically use my artwork in their conversations. It’s cool to make stuff that resonates with people so much that they choose to use it as a tool for self expression.
Do you have an online community, and need some bespoke emotes to help solidify your community identity and foster more active communication? I’d love to help you out!