For the Fun of It - The Golden Age of Gifs

giphy, gifs, and no i'm not talking about jiff/gifs

Today we’re going to take a journey back in time… a long, long time ago…. picture it- it’s 2013. Someone replies all to an email at work with this gif.

And it’s the first time you’ve seen it!! HA HA HA (you might laugh to yourself).
GIFs have become so ubiquitous now that they’ve become “cringe”, but back in the late oughts, they were really exciting! So let’s take a trip down memory lane with gifs that I made!

I was really excited about gifs back in 2013! I was actually finishing up my time at JibJab, and had lead a GIF app for the better part of a year. GIFs weren’t new, but internet was finally getting fast enough that they could be peppered throughout conversations without it taking a million years to load. It was also easier than ever for normal people to make GIFs- there were browser-based GIF makers, and stop motion GIF makers for your phone.

There were even “top GIFs” of the year retrospectives!

I had started playing around the format because it was the perfect bite-sized intersection between an image, and animation.

Most of these are from the 2012-2014 era!

GIPHY was just starting! I was actually one of their early featured artists, and was even paid to make some GIFs back in the day.

I found myself making GIFs most often with my phone, at lunch hour, or where I could play with real life objects and animation (and not have to use my computer at all.)

I also got into cinemagraphs (which I still find to be just the most beautiful things to look at, like little video poems)

I still wish I had finished my short story with cinemagraph illustrations- I’m not sure I could stand to read old writing from that era.

The GIF app I was working on never got off the ground.Imagine a reaction gif though, where your face is in place of Picard’s… that’s the idea.

have you ever made a GIF? are you Gen Z and do you think all of this is just so ~ millenial ~?

ok love u bye