What FenSkald is
FenSkald is a platform that gives streamers the graphics that appear over their live show: the on-screen chat, the alert when someone subscribes, the bar that fills as a goal gets closer, the countdown for a marathon stream.
The streamer picks a graphic, adjusts it, copies a link, and pastes it into their broadcasting software. From there it runs on its own for the whole show.
I designed and built the whole thing: the brand, every screen, the product itself, and the billing behind it.
The problem
Anyone broadcasting live needs these graphics: they’re what turns a flat video into something that feels live. The problem is where they come from.
The existing tools forced a choice between three bad options: looking dated, costing a steep monthly subscription, or leaving the tool’s own logo on top of the streamer’s video. And they all shared the same underlying flaw: you configured them blind. The streamer adjusted colors and sizes without seeing the result, and only found out how it looked once they were already on air, in front of their audience.
On top of that, something almost none of them solved: plenty of people now broadcast to two platforms at once. With the existing tools you had to build everything twice and keep both copies in sync by hand.
How I solved it
The question that drove the project wasn’t which graphics to build. It was how to keep the streamer from discovering a problem mid-broadcast, when it’s too late to fix it.
Three decisions came out of that, and they define the product:
You see it before you use it. While the streamer adjusts a graphic, it sits right there on screen exactly as it will appear on their broadcast. They can fire test alerts and watch the full animation before it ever goes on air. No more trial and error in front of an audience.
Set it up once, it works everywhere. The streamer connects their accounts and the graphic responds to whatever happens on any of them, with nothing built twice and no copies to keep in sync.
It has to hold up alone. A live graphic sits on screen for hours with nobody watching over it: if it breaks, it breaks in front of the whole audience while the streamer is busy broadcasting. The entire product was built around that requirement.
The result
FenSkald is live at fenskald.com, running on real broadcasts. Today it includes:
- Nine configurable graphics, from the subscription counter to a unified on-screen chat.
- Seven languages, because streamers aren’t all in one country.
- A free plan with no watermark over the video — something most alternatives charge for.
The subscription and billing side is part of the project too: people can pay, renew and cancel, and the account adjusts itself with nobody handling it by hand.
This is the kind of project I enjoy most: one where you have to really understand who it’s for before drawing anything. I did all of it myself, start to finish, which is how I always work.