2 As the web continued to evolve and function began to catch up with form, the animated GIF began to fade from the scene, especially with the advent of comparably fast-loading and high-resolution streaming video formats such as Quicktime and RealVideo. To be fair, some sites used animated GIFs with specific purposes, such as an early version of an American Sign Language site that used animated GIFs to demonstrate signing of individual words. Typically used purely for decoration without any particular function, and sometimes funny at first, then less so each subsequent viewing (like bumper stickers) animated GIFs ranged from benign to prodigiously distracting, best exemplified by that rococo entity: the sparkly unicorn: 1 As web design aesthetics matured and digital video recording, editing, playback and bandwidth became more affordable and feasible, the animated GIF joined the blink tag and comic sans font as the gold, silver, and bronze medals for making a site look like it was ready to party like it’s 1999.Įven so, services like MySpace and fresh waves of web neophytes establishing a personal online space allowed the animated GIF to soldier on. Animated GIFs…provide short animations that typically repeat as long as the GIF is being displayed.” (High Definition) Animated GIFs were at one point one of the few options available for adding video-like elements to a web page. I discuss tools and practical considerations as well as limitations and constraints.Īnimated GIFs are “a series of GIF files saved as one large file. ![]() ![]() GIFs can be displayed simultaneously as a sequence of comic book like panels, allowing for a ‘birds eye view’ of all the steps of a process, viewing and reviewing steps as needed without having to rewind or replay an entire video. This article discusses the changing nature of animated Graphics Interchange Format images (GIFs) as a form of visual communication on the Web, and how that can be adapted for the purposes of information literacy and library instruction.
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