How to Create Twitch Profile Banner? Cool 1200x480 Twitch Banners

While Twitch itself is a streaming platform first and foremost, it does not mean that you can only promote yourself with streaming there. Twitch banners also exist on the platform, and both of the different banner types on Twitch are supposed to represent your personality as a content creator. Find out more about Twitch profile banners in this article.

Introduction

Your Twitch banner is one of the most important parts of a Twitch profile for any content creator on the platform, since it is one of the first images that a regular user would see when visiting your Twitch profile. More often than not this image is used to promote the content creator’s brand name or provide useful information, such as streaming schedule.

Twitch banner types

Twitch has several different image types that can be customized by the channel owner, but there are only two different banner types – the video player banner and the profile banner. The video player banner is mostly used when your stream is offline (which is why it is often dubbed as the “offline banner”), and it is fairly straightforward – a 16:9 image with a 1920x1080 pixel size. This particular banner may be less informative in comparison with the profile banner, but it is also something that should be eye-catching and unique to attract more users even when you’re not currently streaming.

A profile banner, on the other hand, is just as important as the profile picture, it is supposed to be associated with the user in multiple different locations with relative consistency – while also being eye-catching and informative. It is important to keep the balance between placing too much information onto a banner and not placing anything at all – and with the size limitations of 1280x400 pixels it might not be as easy as you would think.

It is also important to mention that the latest Twitch UI update has changed the value of both of these banner types – offline banners became more important in terms of personal branding, while profile banners have mostly transferred to the status of background images, making the topic of figuring out how to create the best Twitch profile banner even more complicated than before.

Additionally, Twitch’s mobile app has also been updated, with the profile banner being displayed in its full glory to all mobile users. This kind of disconnect makes figuring out a perfect Twitch profile banner extremely difficult since one may work for desktops, and the other may be at its best when viewed via a mobile app.

How to change Twitch profile banner?

It is possible to change the Twitch background image by logging in to your Twitch account and clicking the “Creator Dashboard” option in the drop-down menu that appears when you click the profile picture. After that, all you have to do is to find the “Settings – Channel” category on the left side of the screen and choose the “Brand” tab near the top of the screen. 

The “Brand” tab offers you a variety of different options, including changing your profile picture, picking your profile accent color (this would be important later) and changing your profile or video player banners. With that being said, you may have noticed that the “Profile Banner” part of the page includes two different options, and not just the “Custom Image” option. The second option is the standard for all new users right now – the ability to generate backgrounds for your Twitch profile with a combination of your profile name and a profile accent color.

The profile accent color is the option we have mentioned earlier, which allows you to pick a color theme for your profile page. However, since this particular option is not particularly interesting to us today, we can move on to the “Custom Image” category.

Twitch profile banner examples

Since the Twitch profile banner is supposed to represent your creative capabilities in the first place, it is rather hard to figure out specific recommendations when it comes to creating your own Twitch banner. What we can do here is to present a number of different examples to try and show all kinds of styles and approaches to Twitch profile banner design.

To make it easier to present multiple different profile banner examples, we have separated these banners into several groups based on their similar approach to banner design. That way they can be used as a Twitch banner template of sorts for your own unique take on this topic.

Our first group of examples uses a similar title card that tells users about the content creator being offline. As you can see, there are three different color themes used here, with each banner representing its own pattern and possibly suggesting its own type of content that the content creator is offering. 

Going by this logic, we can associate example #3 with puzzle games due to its accent on black-and-white color palette and the abundance of geometrical figures in the frame. Example #2 is a bit more abstract and even more simple, with barely anything but the solid background color in it, which may be an indication of this user providing a variety of different content. Example #1, on the other hand, is even less specific, it can be attributed to a Twitch category called “Just Chatting”, or it may just be the general color palette of the content creator in question.

Another group of examples here has the main title “Username is currently OFFLINE” and can be customized in a number of different ways. As such, example #4 has a darker color theme with no bright colors, which makes it possible for the user in question to provide a more serious content. Example #5 is also similar to this idea, providing an extremely simple background image with a single color and a symbol for the right half of the image. Its content positioning is also slightly different, which may be useful when it comes to fitting the same banner for desktop and mobile use cases at the same time.

Alternatively, this same composition of the title can be applied in a more bright and cheerful way. As an example we have banner #6 with a light blue color palette, a variety of nondescript shapes in the background, with the overall theme suggesting a more light-hearted content as a whole. Example #7 goes further into that same idea, using both a more vibrant color scheme and an unusual title font, which heavily leans into the topic of happiness and joy as the main drive of this content creator.

You don’t really have to provide any information about yourself on the banner, either – even though it is highly suggested. However, you can also go for a more to-the-point banner like example #8, which provides nothing but a title card and an abstract shape to attract attention. This is one of the easiest ways to try and create a cool Twitch banner, but it is also more risky since you never know if the abstract imagery would attract or deter potential users.

The last group of examples here changes the overall message on the title card for a little bit – urging people to subscribe to the channel in question, rather than providing current online/offline information. A hand-drawn nature of example #9 may attract more users who are interested in art-related streams, while the main color scheme of example #10 may be the representation of ecology-related content of the user in question.

Conclusion

As with the majority of banner types, a Twitch profile banner is something that is rather hard to standardize,  since it is supposed to be the representative of the content creator as a whole. However, a large part of creating an online banner can be made far easier with solutions such as Viewst – a robust Twitch banner creator that has multiple different templates with an abundance of styles and image sizes for many different platforms and social media networks. With a Twitch banner maker like Viewst it is extremely easy to modify your banner as much as you want – which is possible thanks to Viewst’s user-friendly interface and a long list of different features that are useful when it comes to creating different banner types.