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Notes on branding a server
19 write-ups of the things that go wrong: a banner that never shows up because of one missing letter in a convar, a Discord slot that does not exist until the server is boosted far enough, a logo exported six times at six slightly different weights. Everything here comes out of building the 20 formats a pack produces.
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The store banner: 1920x500, and the one job it actually has
The store banner sits above a price list, which changes what it is for. This covers the safe strip, the crop behaviour on narrow windows, and what to put there instead of a slogan.
Type that still reads at forty pixels
Four properties decide whether a server name is still a word at small sizes: x-height, stroke contrast, counter size and spacing. Everything else is taste.
The 1500x500 X header, and the parts of it nobody ever sees
The X header is the widest, shallowest slot in a brand pack and the one with the most hidden area. This is what the avatar covers, what the window crops, and what is left to design in.
The in-game watermark: 768x288, alpha, and where it can actually go
The watermark is the only piece of a brand pack that shares the screen with the game. This covers the four places it can sit, the transparency it needs, and the size it is actually drawn at.
Vertical video for a server: making 1080x1920 work for a 16:9 scene
The safe band inside a vertical video, what every platform covers at the top and bottom, and how a wide scene is re-composed rather than cropped.
One logo, seven sizes: the chain from 1024 down to 32 pixels
The seven places a server logo appears, why one source render beats seven separate exports, and the two properties that decide whether a mark survives being 32 pixels tall.
YouTube channel art: 2560x1440, and the only part everyone sees
The three-band structure of a YouTube banner, what each device shows, and why the centre strip is the only part you can design for with confidence.
Twitch graphics for a roleplay server: the sizes and the rules
What the two Twitch slots are for, the exact sizes, where each is set, and the layout rules that follow from how Twitch displays them.
GIF, APNG, WebM or MP4: which one each slot actually takes
A decision table for the four animated formats a server uses, the two properties that decide between them, and what each platform does to a file that picks wrong.
Working a palette out of a logo, a role colour and a city
An applied method for deriving a server palette from artwork, a role colour or a city, and for testing it against the formats rather than against a swatch.
Choosing a colour palette that still works at 40 pixels
A working method for choosing an accent, a secondary, a sky and a horizon, with the specific traps that only show up at small sizes and on dark interfaces.
Animated Discord assets, boost levels and Nitro, untangled
A reference for the five Discord image slots: where each is set, what unlocks animation, what the size caps are and what the crops take.
The gap between a loading screen that works and one somebody made
The details that separate a loading screen somebody built from a template with a name swapped in, from pacing to motion cost to the specific tells.
Setting up a FiveM loading screen, properly
The manifest, the files block, the loading events the client sends, and why a live page beats a video loop on every measure that matters.
How banner_detail and banner_connecting actually work in server.cfg
A walkthrough of the two banner convars, the four reasons a banner fails to appear, and how to host the images so they keep working.
Every FiveM banner size, and where each one actually goes
A reference for the five sizes the FiveM client uses, what each slot does, and the layout constraints that come with each one.
Branding a server across Discord and FiveM as one job, not two
How to treat a FiveM server and its Discord as one identity, including what each surface costs to unlock and what breaks the illusion.
What makes a FiveM server look established before anybody joins
The decision chain a prospective player goes through, the surfaces they see, and the specific signals that make a new server read as a serious one.
The two images a browsing player sees before they click anything
A practical guide to the two graphics the FiveM server browser shows, the crop behaviour of a 17 to 1 strip, and the animation budget it has to fit into.
FAM Tools is an independent studio. We are not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by Take-Two Interactive, Rockstar Games, Cfx.re or the FiveM project, and we neither own nor license any Grand Theft Auto asset. Every graphic shown on this page was drawn and rendered here. Platform names are used only to describe which slot a file is sized for.