Sam McCraw
Are you looking to create a professional-looking facecam border for your live streams but don’t have the design experience needed to create your own from scratch?
Well, we’re here to help.
In this article, we’re going to show you how you can easily create a facecam overlay for your live streams without needing to use design software such as Photoshop.
Jump to a specific section:
- Overview
- Creating a facecam border with Placeit
- Creating a facecam border with Canva
- Alternative tools
- Other good resources
- Using Photoshop
#1 Overview
There are quite a few online design tools that can help you create awesome designs for your stream and two such tools are Placeit and Canva.
Both make it incredibly easy and quick to make high-quality designs.
Before we get started there are a couple of alternative options for facecam border designs that might be a better fit for you if you don’t want to create one yourself using online design tools:
- You could hire a designer from Fiverr to create them for you
- You could buy pre-made templates and packs from a site like OWN3D
What is a facecam border?
A facecam border (also known as a webcam overlay) is a graphic that sits over your live stream feed. It’s typically just a border around your webcam footage to make it look good as it sits over your gameplay.
You can see an example of a webcam overlay in action in the image below:
Having a high-quality webcam overlay helps your channel and streams look more professional and can help
Facecam border size, dimensions, format:
Make sure when creating your webcam overlays to stick to the ideal specifications:
- Dimensions: No larger than 1920px wide and 1080px high (16:9 or 4:3 ratios work best)
- File size: 10 MB max
- Format: Can be JPG, PNG, or GIF
#2 Creating a facecam border with Placeit
Placeit is an incredibly easy-to-use online design tool. All you have to do is select one of their pre-designed templates and customize it to your liking.
They offer plenty of templates for streamers such as logos, banners, stream screens, overlays, YouTube templates, and of course, facecam borders too.
Step 1 – Choose a template:
Navigate to the facecam borders section on Placeit, browse through them, and select a template that you like (there’s a lot to choose from):
There are a few things you can do here to make your search easier:
- Sort the templates in order of ‘Best Selling’ to have the most popular templates at the top. This option is under the drop-down menu on the left sidebar:
- If you like any of the templates you can ‘Favorite’ them. ‘Favorite’ a template by hovering on it and clicking the heart icon at the top right of the thumbnail (you’ll need to be signed into a Placeit account to do this):
- To see all the templates you’ve ‘favorited’ hover over your username at the top right side of the screen and click on ‘My Favorites’:
- If you’re looking for 100% free facecam border templates you can also get these on Placeit. Again go to the drop-down menu on the left sidebar and click on the ‘free’ option to put all the free templates at the top of the list:
All the free templates have a ‘FREE’ ribbon at the top left side of their thumbnail.
When you’ve got your chosen template just click on it to begin editing it.
Step 2 – Customize your template:
This is roughly how the editor will look when it loads (there may be some slightly different options depending on the facecam border template you choose):
If you scroll down the page you’ll see some template presets (different versions of your chosen panel template) and also similar templates to the one you’ve chosen:
Back up to the editor, on the left side you have a few customization options to go through:
- You can edit the text fields – including the text color and font type
- Add additional text fields
- Click the eye icon to hide or show a text field
- Upload your own image or logo to the design
Any changes you make will take effect instantly.
If you want to save your edits and come back to them later you can do so, but you’ll need to create a Placeit account (free signup) to have this option.
You just click on the ‘Save Draft’ at the top right of the template editor and this will saved to your account for you to come back to later.
On the right side of the editor there are some more options:
- You can customize the:
- Frame design and color
- Background color
- Add additional graphics
- Background image (search and choose for a new one or upload your own)
- Make the background transparent
In terms of the actual elements on the design, the text and webcam frame elements can be moved around and resized.
Step 3 – Download your template:
When you’ve completed your customizations and are happy with your design it’s time to download it.
There are a couple of options, you can do one of the following:
- Buy an individual template -Twitch panels cost $2.95
- Get an unlimited subscription for $14.95 (monthly) or $89.69 (annual) which lets you download as many designs as you want.
- If it’s a free template you can download the template completely for free, all you will need is a free Placeit account
Facecam borders we made with Placeit:
We made these facecam borders on PLaceit, it took us about 5 minutes in total:
Commercial usage of the templates:
Placeit has thankfully created a page that outlines their license in a ‘human-readable’ format so everything is pretty clear.
Anything you create on Placeit is copyright free and can be used for commercial purposes. You can even sell and trademark the designs you make on Placeit!
Obviously, this means you can use any Twitch panels you create on your channel with no problems.
Check out the full details of the Placeit license here.
What else you can do on Placeit:
If you’re a streamer then Placeit has even more to offer you. You can easily create the following with their tool:
- Logos and animated logos
- Overlays
- Panels
- Offline banners
- Starting soon screens
- Chanel banners
- Intros
- Merch designs
- And so much more
Click here to see all the Twitch templates on Placeit.
Conclusion:
If you want an easy way to quickly create an incredible-looking facecam border for your live streams then Placeit is one of the best options out there.
The only downside with the tool is that it is a little bit basic in terms of the customization options and resizing some of the design elements is a bit tricky at times.
However, the huge number and quality of the templates they offer are great so you’re bound to find a lot of designs that have the look and feel you’re going for with your stream!
#3 Creating facecam border with Canva
Canva is another online design tool that is super easy to use. They have a huge variety of different templates and tools to help you create incredible designs with ease.
With Canva you can also create your own designs by modifying existing templates that they have provided but we’re going to show you how to create a facecam border from scratch because it’s so easy to do in Canva.
We won’t show you all the different ways to use Canva, so if you need a full run-through we recommend watching this video.
Step 1 – Click ‘Create a design’:
Go to the homepage on Canva and click the ‘Create a design’ button at the top right. Then click the ‘Custom dimensions’ option and put in 1920x1080px, and click ‘Create a new design’.
Step 2 – Create your facecam border:
On the left side of the editor click on ‘Elements’, go to the ‘Shapes’ category and find a shape that fits with the look you want for your facecam border (we chose a normal rectangle):
There are plenty of elements you can use to create a great-looking facecam border. Not all of the elements on Canva are free to use however, some are for Canva Pro users only.
Note: To see only the free elements on Canva click the filter button in the search bar and select free elements only:
To ensure your facecam border is the correct dimensions, stretch it out to the edges of the canvas (1920 x 1080 px) and this will ensure that it is the correct dimensions:
Everything you see in the design we have done so far was 100% free to use, so this is hows it possible to create great-looking designs for free.
However, if you’re looking to have as many options as possible we recommend trying out Canva Pro free for 30 days.
Step 3 – Download your design:
When you’ve completed all the customizations and are happy with your final faacecam border design it’s time to download it.
We recommend you download ot as a PNG file to get the best possible quality:
When it comes to downloading your designs you have more options with a Canva Pro account (you can try it for free for 30 days) such as being able to download files with a transparent background and compress your files, making the file sizes significantly smaller.
If you’ve used any premium elements you’ll either have to pay for them individually or subscribe to Canva Pro to get unlimited access.
This is the pricing breakdown for Canva Pro:
Facecam borders we made with Canva:
We made another couple of facecam borders with Canva.
Again it took us no time at all to create each facecam border:
Commercial usage of the templates:
This is the breakdown for Canva license:
What else you can do on Canva:
When it comes to creating more stream designs you can a lot on Canva including:
- Creating a Twitch logo (one of the best gaming logo makers)
- Offline banners (here’s how to make an offline banner on Canva)
- Channel banners (one of the best Twitch channel banner makers)
- Alerts
- Twitch panels (a good Twitch panel maker)
- Twitch sub badges (again, one of the best Twitch sub badge makers)
Get a transparent background for free:
If you don’t want to pay for Canva Pro you can still remove the background of static designs for free using a tool called Kapwing (You can also use a tool called Removal.ai).
Go to Kapwing’s image background remover:
Upload a design, click on the uploaded image, select ‘Erase’ from the right side menu, then select the ‘Magic Wand’ button, click on the image background, and then click ‘Remove Pixels’ from the right side menu:
The background should be removed, but you may have to repeat that process a few times to get all parts of the background.
Eventually you should have removed all of the background and can click ‘Done’:
On the next screen click ‘Export Image’, and then you can finally download your Twitch overlay design with a transparent background:
Conclusion:
Canva is another incredible option for creating facecam borders and other stream designs for your channel.
It takes a bit more time and efforts than using Placeit’s but the customization options are far superior. So if you want to customize every aspect of your facecam border design (and create incredible designs for free) then Canva is a good option for you.
#4 Alternative Tools
If you check out Placeit and Canva, and they’re not quite what you’re after there are a few alternatives that we also recommend.
We tested out a lot of tools when we created our ‘Stream overlay Makers‘ article, so we recommend checking that out for alternative options.
#5 Other resources
Sites to buy premade facecam borders and other stream designs and packs:
Video on how to add a facecam border to your live streams:
#6 Using Photoshop
If you want to use Photoshop to create your facecam border here’s a good video showing you how:
Final thoughts
So, there you have it, that’s how you can quickly, easily, and affordably create a high-quality facecam border for your live streams using online design tools.
No matter what your skill level when it comes to design you will have no trouble creating something that looks great, and since Placeit and Canva, have so many templates and options there’s no reason why you can’t create something that looks incredible.
Enjoy creating! Oh, and if you have any questions, comments, or have suggestions for other awesome Twitch panel tools, leave a comment below!
