If you had asked me 15 years ago if using animated gifs was a good idea I would have said an emphatic NO!
If you weren’t using the web that long ago, here’s a reminder of how they looked back then.
Remember the ‘Under construction’, and the famous dancing baby?
Best forgotten. They were pretty primitive – although the dancing baby was kinda interesting. Another overused animated gif was the flashing *NEW* for when you added new content.
Here’s a page full of them just in case you need to see more.
Here’s the history of the animated gif.
If you watched the video you’ll already know that the animated gif made a resurgence in the last few years, especially on Tumblr, and more tools were available to create animated gifs.
If you want to create your own animated gif then there’s heaps of mobile and desktop apps.
I love the animated gif to make a point about a tv show or movie that isn’t as easy to get across in a still photo. It might be a series of animated gifs, or just one. Or they’ve become a bit of an artform as in the one above. Do you know the TV show it’s referencing?
Don’t forget if you add an animated gif into your website, like all images, add alt text for web accessibility purposes. But think about the purpose of it in the first place. The gif above is starting to do my head in so for me it would really depend on the type of content I’m posting, and the message I’m trying to convey.
But to the pronunciation of gif, ie jif and gif? I’m a gif girl (with the hard g sound). How about you?
