Checklist

  • Think about the purpose of your animation. Is it intended to tell a story, to draw attention to something or to reinforce your organisation's visual identity or 'brand'?
  • What is the most important visual element of the desired animation - is it a certain message? Is it a specific object or character or text?
  • Once you decide what that important element is, then you must decide how you want it to move: quickly?  Slowly? Do you want it to move from one part of the scene to another?
  • Think about how long you want your animation to run for. Do you want it to appear once or be repeated a few times? Animations can be annoying if they run on a loop!
  • Think about whether you want your animation to blend into your website or whether it will be distributed it as a stand-alone animation?
  • Start with something simple - for example, try to make a dot move from one corner of the frame to another, or make an analogue clock move its hands.  Start using just a few frames, and when you get more confident you can try and add more frames to make your animation smooth, attractive and flowing.
  • Download some existing animations and look at them frame by frame to see how they work.
  • Make your GIF images as small as possible - remember that the browser will load one GIF after another and if the GIFs are huge it will process them very slowly and your animation wont look as good as it could.
  • All the images you want to use to create your animation must be of exactly the same size! The best way is to save your first image under different names/numbers as many times as you want and then make changes to each of them individually. That way you can keep your images the same  size but also make sure that other elements (such as background), stay still when other elements are animated
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