Animated GIFs

Don't you just love going to a page with plenty of info but everything's just crying out "look at me! Look at ME!!!"? Animated gifs have had plenty of practice at saying that. Not only that, there are so many that aren't convincing. Whoever created it was so busy trying to make the object move, that they didn't take into account the shape transitions of the actual object as it moved. Lost? I'll explain...
Take a bouncing ball for example. Now, if it isn't as hard as a rock, when it hits the ground, it will morph a little (squash up). One way to create convincing animations is to exaggerate this kind of thing so that it morphs a lot. This kind of thing is one of the things that makes a good animator. A good animator will be able to exaggerate all sorts of facial expressions of a character to bring it to life!
For the purposes of this article, we will stick to the good old bouncing ball scenario. If you look closely when it hits the ground, it reaches a pretty strong oval shape before bouncing back to its original shape.
It's a good thing to remember whenever you want a convincing 'cartoon style' animated gif.

Web Design Glossary

CSS

In web design, CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS allows web designers to control the style and layout of websites. One powerful feature of CSS is that styles can be declared in an external style sheet. All web pages can then link to the one style sheet. If you need to update the styles across the whole website, you only need to change one file.

FTP

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. FTP is the common protocol used to transfer files across the internet.

GIF vs JPEG

Many web authors save images in the wrong format. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen a JPEG image on the web when it should really have been saved as a GIF. I can usually tell just by looking at the image.

What is the difference between GIF and JPEG?

GIF

GIFs can display anything up to 256 colors. You can use image editing software (such as Adobe Photoshop or GIMP) to manipulate each individual color to provide you with a nice crisp image. You can also reduce the number of colors so that the image is smaller and loads faster on your web page.