About a week ago was my friend Isaiah’s birthday, and I wanted to make something for him. We had both wanted to get into live streaming games on a platform called Twitch. And a lot of people who live stream games use overlays. Overlays are basically an image or text that will go over your game. For example:
He has a follower count, a camera overlay, and a subscriber count. All of those are overlays that he added to his stream. When he plays the game, he doesn’t see all of the overlays, but only the viewers do. Overlays can be added using streaming software like OBS Studio (Open Broadcasting Software). Overlays can also be useful for reading chat or donations sent to the streamer.
And since my friend wanted to start live streaming games, he had asked me if I could design an overlay for him that would feature a chatbox, alerts (such as donations and subscribers,) a follow goal, and a subscriber goal. He laid out the design on a piece of paper where he wanted everything. Here is a picture sketch he provided me with:
The important thing is to get the right size. In Canva, I used the presentation size because that would fill the entire screen. I also needed to export as png as Canva has a transparent background option when you export it. And here is the final result:
(one thing to note the text is mainly not on because he has to configure that on his own computer)