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GIF animations to document blogs

Jan Cumps

In the past I used videos, with talk, or without talk, to explain dynamic behaviour of projects.
Lately, when I thought it made sense, I switched to short snippets showing behaviour. And when short enough (seconds) to animated GIFs.

image
I don't really like the silent videos, but the silent GIFs in a story work for me.
Like Jupyter executable notebooks, this allows to show behaviour. It also makes blogs a bit "busy/alive" depending on taste.

Thoughts?

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  • I think GIFs are interesting and are fun to experiment with. I definitely consider myself a beginner at GIFs lol  I also have a difficult time creating gif with a small filesize from video.

    A cause and effect GIF like the following I think adds great value:

    image

    And its only 85 kB Stuck out tongue

    Here is a GIF with good intentions, but is difficult to understand on its own.

    image

    It was intended to show the circuit sleeping at 700 nA, but it is difficult to make that out just looking at the GIF on its own.

    Freehand video turned into a GIF doesn't look that great either.

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  • I think GIFs are interesting and are fun to experiment with. I definitely consider myself a beginner at GIFs lol  I also have a difficult time creating gif with a small filesize from video.

    A cause and effect GIF like the following I think adds great value:

    image

    And its only 85 kB Stuck out tongue

    Here is a GIF with good intentions, but is difficult to understand on its own.

    image

    It was intended to show the circuit sleeping at 700 nA, but it is difficult to make that out just looking at the GIF on its own.

    Freehand video turned into a GIF doesn't look that great either.

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  • in reply to scottiebabe

    One of the previous Community Managers once mentioned something that has stuck with me.. he once stated that when writing a blog, there's no need to write what is in a photo, because people can see for themselves what is in the photo. I thought that was pretty useful insight, because then it made me think what is in a photo? The way I interpreted it, is that if I'm writing a blog, then my photo(s) should be able to describe themselves, i.e. make the photo clear, or at least have arrows or annotation to place focus in the right place, and then the text doesn't need to describe the photo. Not saying I always manage to observe this, but it has helped as a guideline for me.  The 700nA GIF would not be clear so would need text to explain, by which point perhaps the GIF may be of very limited use.