The planet of GIF
Written by Susi Doherty
Updated: February 2019
What is a GIF?
All Aconryms notes that there are actually 44 different meanings for GIF – from Global Income Fund to Guniee Airlines to Guaranteed Investment Funds.
This dip into the world of GIFs is (take a breath…):
“The Graphics Interchange Format (better known by its acronym GIF /ˈdʒɪf/ JIF or /ˈɡɪf/ GHIF) is a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability.” GIF – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
To those of us that remember pre-computer days, it is rather like a computerised flip book!
DID YOU KNOW?
- The first GIF (arguably as these things often are) is “Dancing Baby,” also called “Baby Cha-Cha,” (remember Ally McBeal?!): you can see it here Burning Pixel
- GIFs compress the quality of images to 256 colours, (compare that to 16.7 million colours in a JPEG).
- It’s not just dancing babies, cats and bananas! News outlets use them: The Guardian, Republican Debate
- GIF was made Word of the Year in 2012
- You can make your own GIFS from You Tube (usual copyright warnings) here: GIFS
- There is a Twitter account devoted entirely to GIFs (no surprise there really!)
- There are some really funny takes on the GIF here on Ad Week
and National Cat Day
- There actually are some interesting uses of GIFs for marketing. Take a look at this article by www.business2community.com
- It is easy to make your own GIF. Try Make A Gif and Gif Creator
Here’s one I made earlier on a shoot with Liz just using my iPhone (NB she’s more of a cat person!):
So there you have it, there’s more to the world of GIFs than you may have realised! Have a play. Send me any you find that you have used for business – I’d love to hear how they went down with clients!
