Gifs Animation

Gifs Animation

Motion is the effect and some of the best motion is the natural effects we capture in our everyday life. It's easy to use an image for a background on your site, maybe just a section but it's not so easy to use a movie. That's where animated gifs come in.

Animated gifs are too easy - just like setting a background image for a div, you specify your animated gif, and that's pretty much it. You now have the animated movie as the background property and with this, you have motion graphics as your background adding much more life to your site, but placed typically at the header section so it doesn't compete with your content.

While emoticons are by far the most popular in the west, their eastern counterparts 'anikaos' (pronounced ani-cows, meaning literally 'animated faces' in Japanese) are becoming more and more popular as interest in Japanese popular culture continues to grow. Anikaos are typically floating spherical blobs bobbing up and down with a cute face depicting any number of emotions and actions. They tend to be used more on forums and are incredibly diverse, ranging from generic white blobs to household animals, peas, and characters from anything between Star Wars and Dragonball-Z. The user-generated nature of anikaos, like most pixel art, means their diversity and numbers continue to multiply.

Yet, beyond the world of communication-aiding emoticons and anikaos, the possibilities are even more varied. People can make literally anything they want in miniature using pixel art - and they do. People love to have things made tiny and love to use them on their websites, MySpace pages, and on Messenger.

A very popular form pixel art at the moment is animated GIFs of Nintendo and Sega characters from the '80s and '90s such as Mario, Kirby, Link, and Sonic the Hedgehog recreated exactly from the 8-bit, 16-bit, and 32-bit games on which they appeared. The current craze for all things retro, especially in gaming, is certainly adding fuel to this. Particularly with girls, animated GIFs of the characters Hello Kitty and Pucca Love are also extremely popular, and can be found on many a MySpace page. Hello Kitty and Pucca Love are very cute characters that are used frequently to personalise web pages and make them more attractive.

The fact that both Hello Kitty and Pucca Love have huge merchandising markets 'offline' easily explains their popularity in this respect. Likewise with both sexes, Pokemon animated GIFs are extremely popular, particularly on MySpace and gaming sites. The cuteness of many Pokemon characters and the fact they are already computer game sprites makes them perfectly convertable into animated GIFs.

Gifs Animation