How to Make Twitch Sub Badges: Sizes, Tiers and a Ladder That Matches

Sub badges are the small icons next to a subscriber's name in chat, and they change as the subscription gets older. A good set is one object drawn once and recoloured per milestone, so the ladder reads as rank at a glance. This guide covers the rules and the making.

The rules

• •Three sizes per badge: 72, 36 and 18 pixels, square, PNG with a transparent background, under 25 KB each.
• •Badges are set per subscriber milestone. Twitch supports a long ladder, but most channels use a handful: 1, 2, 3, 6, 9 and 12 months, then yearly steps.
• •Only Affiliates and Partners can upload sub badges, from the Creator Dashboard under Viewer Rewards, then Sub Badges. Badges go through the same review as emotes.

Why one drawing, many colours

At 18 pixels a badge is a coloured dot with a hint of shape. Six different drawings become six unreadable dots. One drawing with a colour that climbs from a cool tier to a hot one gives the viewer a scale they can read without knowing what the object is. The badge generator works this way on purpose: it draws the object once, marks its signature part, and recolours that part per tier.

Making the ladder

1. 1Pick one object with a clear silhouette: a pickaxe, a coffee cup, a paw, a sword, a crown. Avoid anything whose identity lives in fine detail.
2. 2Choose a colour ramp that reads as rank. Cool to warm, dull to bright, silver to gold. Keep the object's outline the same across every tier.
3. 3Generate or draw at 72 pixels or larger, then export 72, 36 and 18 pixel versions of every tier. Check the 18 pixel one against a dark chat background.
4. 4Upload each tier to its milestone in the Creator Dashboard, submit, and wait for review.

Badges and emotes together

A channel's badges and emotes are seen side by side, so they should look like one family: the same colour ramp in the badges as the accent colour in the emotes, or the same object appearing in one emote. The emote pack and the badge generator can start from the same subject for exactly that reason.