The Only Guide You’ll Ever Need to Learn GIF Design That Get Shared Like Crazy

The Only Guide You’ll Ever Need to Learn GIF Design That Get Shared Like Crazy

Part 1 Principles for Great GIF Design

Creating GIFs for infotainment or casual information sharing is the current talk of the trend. You might have visibly landed across a heap of tantalizing GIFs in blogs, social media posts, product promotion websites and almost every other domain you can possibly think of. Using GIFs for any type of content promotion is bound to captivate the target audience in impressive multiplicities. Ever wondered what’s the cue behind the mass appeal that GIFs create? Well, an obvious answer is the stunning GIF design.

When going for GIF creation and selection, design plays the key role in creating considerable buzz about the information being transmitted. To add impact to your creation, you need to pay considerable attention to its design implications, thus ensuring that the right things get presented in the right way. Outlined below are some amazing principles you can use to enhance your GIF design to the next level:

01Ensure Accuracy and Preciseness

The primary concern you need to be attentive about while designing a GIF is its preciseness. Ensure ban exactness of information and confine your creation to the theme and requirement of your creation, like, the message you want to deliver or the impact you want to create through the GIF. Balance your creativity within specific content parameters and avoid getting carried away or overdoing on the beautifying aspect.

As an example, it is visibly not appealing to add a wholesome mix of 15 shades and 20 different elements in a nature-based GIF. You will end up getting too harsh on the viewers’ eyes, confusing them with a hoard of speeding elements and banging colors. You can instead stick to 2 or 3 frames with an intelligent mix of 2 complementary shades.

02Maintain Visual Identity

An important aspect to keep in mind while attempting to design GIF is, it should visually relate to the underlying content. For instance, if you are intending a brand promotion through your GIF, lay stress on adding elements like, brand definition, product specifications, know-how of your work patterns, etc. ensure that your content flows naturally and has exactness.

Other alternatives are, using your product logo as the GIF background, character representation of your brand or using some explicit product oriented themes. While, you are free to pick anything that suits your preferences and needs, just make sure that using it in your GIF adds value to your brand instead of giving an out of the box feel.

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03Cut Down on Unnecessary Frames

Have you ever encountered a halt in the natural loop of your GIF out of nowhere? While pondering over the underlying cause, it is a common assumption to take this as an animation fallacy, but that’s evidently not the case. The actual culprits behind this glitch are those extra frames that contribute towards nothing but adding weight to an already heavy file.

To set this straight, you should switch to removing any extra frames, while saving a particular one which you may stretch to a desired duration according to the break point of your contents in the GIF. However, take caution to maintain the visual quality of your GIF while you remove those extra frames.

04Make Your GIF Accessible

You should always adhere to the concern of accessibility while creating a GIF. The reason being, your content is visibly going to get mass attention across the web and you cannot filter out visitors, make sure your GIF is easily accessible to all kind of users, particularly those with vision limitations, like, epileptic patients or the ones using screen readers.

Focus on describing your GIF content with alt text and using a limited blinking and flashing rate. In case your GIF content is primarily text based, take care to limit the effective color and image movement and adjust the frames rates to avoid constant and quick movement of image frames when adding many clips on a single page.

Pay additional heed to the auto play feature of your GIFs. It can be visibly annoying to be welcomed on a site homepage with GIFs enjoying an auto play session of their own. You can alternatively, incorporate a ‘Click to Play’ option or grant your site visitors the liberty to decide on what is to be played when.

05Use Storyboards

When aiming to create visibly appealing GIFs, you need to lay considerable stress on choosing an apt background story. Don’t get misled by the wrong assumption of using any random background, owing to the short play duration of GIFs. An impressive solution to this concern is taking the help of a storyboard to keep track of your GIF’s content flow.

Using a storyboard is quite effective means of being in line with the direction of content movement, rescuing you from the hustle of going off the track. This comes explicitly handy when you are working with a team of creators. The storyboard is there to keep everything at the exact place, thus improving member communications and boosting up the design process.

06Focus on Creating Loops

Consider creating an animated motion loop for your GIF allowing a repeated and comprehensive view of your content. Looping projects a deeper observation of the clip and its contents in a seamless transition. However, creating an infinite motion loop in GIFs is quite tricky, as you need to pay utmost concern to ensure a smooth content flow and chances of even the slightest errors are not entertained.

Any loopholes in placement of your GIF elements will get noticed within a blink and lead to an unsatisfactory user experience. Hence, you need to check each of your content frames separately to eliminate chances of possible errors. If you are a beginner, try working with geometrical animations to get the initial pickup. This will be advantageous in deciding the exact element positions at the start and end of the GIF.

07Make Use of Motion Blur

Using the concept of motion blur is pivotal in providing a natural flow and feel to your GIF, which, in an otherwise case would ordinarily appear as a mere collection of static images clubbed together. This would give a wobbling feel with unsteady frame movements to your viewers. The motion blur effect potentially ensures a smooth content flow, and your GIF looks like a short video captured from a camera.

08Stick to a Reduced File Size

Creating GIF of within a standard size range is quite difficult, owing to the fact that these are shared across a variety of media platforms, each having a different file size constraint. It is, however, recommended to stick to a file size as low as possible to escape the notch of modifying the same, ener5y time you need to work with the GIF on a different platform.

Listed below are a few ways to limit your GIF to a lower file size:

● Restrict your GIF to a frame count under 150, exceeding which, it will get difficult to export the GIF to most of the commonly visited social media and content sharing platforms.

● When your GIF is ready to export, adjust its lossy parameter between 5 and 10 to boost the file compression rate. Look for a setting that decreases the effective file size without compromising with the overall GIF design.

● Restrict to a minimum possible color usage. This will not only intensify the GIF design, but also contribute in maintaining a decreased file size. You can instead, focus on playing with animations or adjusting your image frames to longer play durations.

● Don’t experiment with multiple background gradients in your GIF. You can select from either a completely opaque, or a totally transparent background. Adding unnecessary gradients will end up giving your GIF a hazy look, along with a visibly large file that will be difficult to export non any platform.

Part 2 Amazing Examples of Animated Gifs in Web Design

GIFs are an effective means of adding appeal to brand promotions and achieving improved market buildup by delivering just the right content in the most captivating and interesting ways. You can use them as creative web design tools to add spark to your product sites, which can potentially boost the market value and reach of your product by multiplying the number of visitors to your site.

Discussed below are some stunning examples of using animated GIFs to enhance commercial web design, which you can use to create a significant buzz about your product among a target audience:

01Marie Weber

This is a shoe designer company in France, famous for its classy, handmade shoes. On visiting the company’s site, you are welcomed by a simple and subtle, animated product logo on each page. This animated logo is a masterpiece in itself, telling you the about the lavishness of the associated product.

On navigating further, you will find animated elements, like; shoe images and collection names, which appear on the screen before a zoom out. There are underlined links that pop up to animate beneath the name, indicating the link you are going to visit.

02Wonderful Weekends Festival

This is an absolute animation delight, where the welcome page of the site greets you with vibrant pieces in motion, and a pop up box informs you of the festival’s arrival time and asks you to select one from the options of ‘Play Now’ or ‘Show Me the Festival’.

As you click to make a choice, the Google brand shines with associated colors. As you continue to browse through the site, pages open up with brand color animations, along with colored active links flashing on the pages.

03Google

This is a brand name that needs no introduction. Google has launched its ‘Your Plan, Your Planet’ site to infuse awareness about environment conservation and eco friendly lifestyles, guiding visitors on ways and means of introducing related changes. The site greets you with a simple layout, with a short text moving in and getting still. Click on ‘Let’s Get Started’ and you will see 4 amazingly animated icons that open up to more vibrant animations.

Tap any one of the swinging refrigerator door, the illuminated light bulb, the running faucet or the teddy bear waving at you, to land on a schema that informs you about effective means of improving on conservation in within your selected section. This is a perfect example of using animations as a marketing strategy to captivate people’s attention on a subject that evidently turns them off.

04Pete Nottage

Designed explicitly as a hiring site for voice presenter Pete Nottage, this website tells you everything about the actor and the credibility of hiring him. The site lands among the best examples of web animation usage. The welcome page of the site greets you with the brand logo. Tap on the red swipe and you will get to know that the brand infuses vibrancy to something that’s originally dull.

Next, you will find a plethora of dynamic and elegant animations in a plying plane, cityscape, flowing sea and sailing boats, moving cars and excusive motion graphics on each building. Visiting the animated site links provides you an insight of the actor’s personality. In the ‘About’ section, you can find a headshot animation, that disappears on clicking, and is followed by a more dynamic motion snippet.

05Zamzar

This one is an online file conversion site and lives up to its tagline ‘File Conversion Made Easy’ through a concrete animation on the welcome page. The file conversion on this site is quick, 3-step process, with a blinking animation indicating the current conversion stage.

For instance, when you are at the first step of selecting a file to convert, the animation shoes a blinking glow on number 1. This continues for the rest of the steps, till your file is finally converted into the desired file format.

06Blizzard: Warcraft III Reforged

Warcraft was one complete heaven of adventure and thrill for console gamers. While the enticing cutscenes with stunning motion graphics were an absolute favorite, the game had a plenty of other exciting elements.

The relaunched game (Warcraft III Reforged) website has a mix of gaming adventures and cutscenes running in the site’s background with the game title and pitch appearing as an overlaid animation. On navigating through the site, you will find classy animated elements that take you on a nostalgic trip of the original game.

Part 3 Learn How to Create and Add Gifs to Interactive Layouts in Filmora

Now that you are quite familiar with the utility of GIFs in almost every market field, and have seen stunning examples of GIF design and usage for an impressive brand promotion, let’s take a dive into creating and using these motion clips to make interactive graphic layouts for websites, social media blogs and posts, and a variety of other applications that require some brilliant imagery for market promotion.

When looking for the perfect GIF designer software, Wondershare Filmora Video Editor is the most affordable pick. This is a free and an enhanced GIF design tool, packed with world class and premium quality features that are most suitable for giving the much appreciated professional touch to your graphic artwork. Here’s how you can work with Filmora to make alluring graphic layouts:

Step 1: Launch Filmora

The software is readily compatible to your Windows and MacOS devices and you don’t even require a signup to use the application. Just download and install the software in your preferred device and launch the same to reach the software’s welcome interface.

Filmora Free Download Link:

Step 2: Upload Media Files

Select and import the desired media files from your device to upload them to the Filmora timeline. You can either pick a video or choose a series of static images.

Step 3: Add to Timeline

Once imported, you need to add the selected files to the software’s editor timeline. You can use the ‘Drag and Drop’ method to get this done.

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Step 4: Explore Your Editing Skills

As already stated, the Filmora effects library is an extensive inventory of stunning features to compliment your artwork with matchless class. You are free to choose from tons of image and video editing effects and filters suited to your GIF content to create excellent pieces of graphic art.

When starting to customize your GIF in Filmora, you can begin with cropping and trimming your images or video to the perfect part, or even cut and split them to ward off unwanted portions, or rotate and flip the images to set them in the perfect orientation.

You can further add elements like, graphic transitions, overlays, animations and texts, and etc., to customize your artwork to your heart’s content. The software’s audio-visual library facilitates you with around 300 audio-visual effects and music choices to supplement your creation with a conducive sound feel. You can also make adjustments in frame speed and play durations to get the best most snippet ever!

You are granted the liberty to choose almost any common file format to create and customize GIFs in Filmora. A more convincing feature is, the software does not leave a watermark on your artwork and you can easily share your creation across media platforms.

Step 5: Save and Export

Once your creation satisfies you, save it to your device with a .gif extension, from where it can be exported to various media sharing platforms with ease.

● Key Takeaways from This Episode →