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What's on the program?
As I'm sure you've seen by now, there's not a whole lot of limitations on what can be done with a group of pixels these days. For example: you can bend them, twist them, warp them, tear them, augment their colour, diminish their colour, even create large and small groups of them and choreograph their appearance to work in either harmony or discord. And then, when you've done all that, you can teach them how to dance! Now that's a lot of versatility for something so tiny, it's dwarfed by the point of a pencil!
And if you had a few dozen million bucks, you could create a block-buster movie where dinosaurs are cloned, and look so real because there's so much detail put into the graphic work, and they take over a tropical island theme park, and you can make more than a hundred million bucks from showing it to people!!! Oops, got carried away there, sorry. But you get where I'm going with that, right?
What we'll be talking about in this article is how we 'teach our pixels to dance', in other words, how to animate them. Gif animation has become one of the Web's most popular and interesting characteristics I think. There are hundreds of animation contests going on all over the Internet at any given time, to satisfy the cravings of the average Gif animation enthusiast. It's definitely one of the more 'user-friendly' ways to add some excitement to a site (no plugins required!).
“You don't need to go to Art School to design great looking web sites!”
In ‘The Principles of Beautiful Web Design’, Jason Beaird shows you the simple rules of all good design -- ' rules that even code geeks can use.
In order to create an animated Gif image, you need to use a program that's been designed for that purpose. The more specific it is to serving that purpose, the better its performance will be in ease of use, file optimization, and the creation of a great end product. There are, however, a few new graphics programs out there that have been designed to fulfill more than just this one function, and these still work nicely to create animations. These programs are geared more toward the Web designer crowd, and will also help the Web or Graphic Artist to compress, compile, and even slice'n'dice images for placement within table cells on a Web page. And on top of all that, they also provide a degree of painting and/or drawing capability for the more experienced artist.
Since I myself don't have every different animation program ever made, I'll reference examples here from the ones that I tend to use the most: (before you get started, have a quick look at these samples done with each program)
Corel Xara 2®
Things to note are: it has 17 frames, is 22.3kbs, and uses a 24 colour Adaptive palette (Global Optimized), with no dithering.
Macromedia Flash®
Things to note are: it has 29 frames, is 11.9kbs, and uses the 215 Web safe palette (Global Optimized), with no dithering.
Let's start off by breaking down what's behind an animated Gif, shall we? |
