About Animations -- Animated GIF Images
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When they are first starting out with Web graphics, most people only have an interest in working with still photos, while the more advanced may wish to try their hand at simple animations for a particular purpose. An animated gif is quite simply a layered series of usually same-sized graphics connected, normally, by using some gif animation application program -- they may be presented as a continuous slide show of totally different images, or as actually moving figures/text. They are sort of similar to those old time boardwalk moving picture viewers where a series of still images were flipped by turning a handle, and the images appeared to move.
I shall not get involved in how to make simple animated gifs at this point, but apps for their making may be found by doing a web SEARCH, using Giggle, my name for that popular search engine that usually gives you thousands of possible links which you have to spend hours fishing through to find what you are actually looking for! So much for high-techy convenience!
I usually start by making 4 or 5 equal-sized graphic files, relatively small, with or without text --
T E X T -- I have at least 50 font types which I have discovered and liked over the years, collected in the font folder of my computer hard drive -- but all font types are NOT created equal for sharpness/crispness when added to an image -- one must experiment to see which fonts make the clearest, best, most easily readable resulting picture -- some, with thinnish line form really suck, but they may potentially be enhanced by using a larger font and/or BOLD.
Due to the coarseness and relative darkness of my header pic, above, it was sort of difficult to choose a font which was readable -- I could have made just about any font much larger, but it would then have covered the dog, and my object was to allow the image of the dog to be more or less visible -- had the base image to have been the same lighter tone as this page background pic, I could have used many different fonts and colors and they would have been OK.
An example of a gif-making app is the one I use -- (1995-2000) -- for my very simplistic animations -- I vaguely recall that it is only available for Macs, but there are others available for PCs -- here are examples of some of the ones I have experimented with thus far --
animita.gif
-- and a variation --
and a variation
Another way to do basically the same thing is by using JavaScript, a html language which allows you to do many specialized things on a web page -- I used a html code recipe which someone sent me to do a couple animations before I discovered -- -- one of my first examples of the JavaScript variety is seen
If you are interested in how to do this kind of animation, you can find the html coding by getting the PAGE SOURCE from your browser and fishing for the code -- it is relatively simple, but the code does take up space/loading time, even though actually hidden on your visible page. I rarely use JavaScript except for my countdown counters -- and that took me about a week of trial and error to get it to actually count down, even though I had the recipe!
Countdown to Christmas
Many WOWSER web pages exhibit spectacular effects by the use of Java. My aim has been, from the very start, to present information in the easiest manner possible -- NO music, nothing more cutesy than some smallish animations which I think catch the attention of the viewer and hopefully make a page a tad less boring and more friendly and inviting.
And lastly, I have also used an online animation web site -- -- one of several on the Internet, which allows you to actually make really kewl animated gifs while connected to the WWW -- quite frankly, I prefer doing this kind of work with an application program offline so that I can take my time and experiment a little -- -- two examples are
So there you have it -- I hope these graphics pages have been useful for your photo and other graphic work on your web pages -- I started them on 2 October 2003 and they were originally planned as a single page, but I thought that they would load faster making three separate web pages out of them -- which is only half true because I then decided not to use my usual thumbnails to link to larger pics. These three pages were first put online on 20 October 2003, which very simply means that it took me over two weeks to get them all together -- in a simplistic sort of way, I think they rock!
I wish I would have had this info presented to me when I was just starting out! Keep in mind that I have never taken a class in any of this stuff -- what I learned about these techy issues over the years was simply basically what I tripped over, somewhere, as I tried to do some of the cyber things I was interested in accomplishing -- and have a few Web Awards to show for it -- once you get your web site up and running, remember to apply for my Award for Internet Creativity.
Now it is your turn! I hope that you have as much fun as I have been having!
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