ANIMATED GIFS

Animated GIFS are amazingly good fun. There are a number of GIF editors on the market. (I use GIF Construction Set ®) There are a number of useful techniques in GIF animation and plenty of help on the Web to help develop your skills.

My tips are to do with reducing GIF size. Not everybody is patient enough to hang around while your fabulously impressive GIF has finished downloading. As always make it good, but make it small. Here's how to reduce the size of animated GIFS.

  1. LIMIT THE PALETTE. GIF graphics index the colours you use. The wider the range of colours you use the bigger the resulting file. If you limit the range of colours to say 16 you will concentrate your mind regarding design, but create a much smaller GIF file. That's not so important with a single GIF, but if you have an animation built up of say 30 or 40 frames then you are talking about a very large GIF indeed.

  2. DON'T ANIMATE THE WHOLE GRAPHIC IF YOU DON'T NEED TO. Most graphic editors will allow you to use much smaller images to animate just that part of the graphic which is actually going to move.

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