Long Story Short
Back to the future: Welcome back to the Gif.
- Work.
- Branding.
Here’s something we don’t see all the time: an old, outdated format returning to glory after years hanging around on the sidelines. The humble animated GIF has been peering in as the new kids came in and replaced it, damn kids with their better quality and useful features. PNGs brought transparency, SVG appeared with the promise of animated wonaer, and the once universally loved and/or hated GIF slowly drifted out of use, dreaming of the good days gone by.
So now, much to the surprise of all of us this ageing format suddenly finds a new lease of life and is brought back into the fold – let back into the cool gang and allowed once more to strut it’s banana-suited stuff. It’s not a too dissimilar story for vinyl, currently receiving a deserved revival after cassette, CD, Minidisk (remember that?), and ‘insert digital audio file format of choice here’ appeared, disappeared, triumphed, tumbled etc. etc…
So what about the humble GIF? Back in the day the wonder of transparency in an image made them all the rage in the early days of the web, even if it did leave us with a pixilated fuzzy white line around the edge. That 256 colour limit? No problem, our screens weren’t going to notice the difference anyway, and we could play that fun game in photoshop where you tried to cut it down to as few colours as possible for a smaller file size as the majority of us were still on dial-up internet. Those were the days.
But the real treat – animation. We could animate right out of photoshop. No flash, no video – just awesome image to image looping animations. And boy did we animate:
So the real question is what can you do to grab attention, before your inbox becomes a crazed blurry mess of bouncing icons and moving video? What would really grab the attention of your customers, so when they open an email newsletter from you they are knocked socks-less? Simple can be effective see the above it doesn’t need to be a bespoke animated wonder, just a little movement to engage and surprise can make all the difference. Did it get you to read this article? If so, have a think about what you could do next time. If you want a hand coming up with ideas or implementing them get in touch, we’d be happy to put on our banana suit.
For more information on using animated GIFs in emails, see this awesome article below:
