How to Make Gifs for Decoration and Banners

The neat thing about gifs is that they can show motion with out being a video and taking up lots of space on your computer or if you don't have a video camera. It's also good for adding graphics with your basic MS paint.

A gif is just a series of photos crammed together. Like a super fast slide show. So it can be stored on Photobucket or server for use with hyperlinks.

You would think that making a gif would require a whole bunch of photos, like video is a mass series of photos, but your mind naturally fills in the blank spaces. Also gif software has a place where you can alternate the speed to what looks good and set it to just keep rotating thru. A super fast slide show repeating.

This tiger one is only 2 separate photos. The moving water is just tiny specs made with MS paint. Waterfalls aren't so hard after all!

Our powerful mind knows what water looks like so it fills in the motion.

Personally I like to make use my own photos when I can.

So another great use for gifs is making Myspace comment goodies like "thanks for the add"
Usually you see a lot of the glitter gifs from Webfetti. But when you can make your own, it shows personality and branding.

Your banners can be put into your blogs, Myspace, sigs, or where ever.

To make the banner above I just used one border with the cat and only changed the sparkles in 3 different times, saving each one. That is and easy one, because you don't have to worry about accidently moving the frame. You load all your photos into the Gig animator and work on timing.

<a href="THE SITE URL HERE"><img src="YOUR BANNER LINK HERE"/></a>

If the Gif is too small of larger you can ad height="180px" in at the end between " and the / and adjust it.

You can even make fancier banner for affiliate marketing, like this one.

Here's the company I got my gif maker from, Active GIF Creator They are very nice and will help you quickly. I have no affiliate with them, it's just the GIF maker I got comfortable with.
You can use their trial version, but it will put "not registered" in each GIF.
Once you pay for it, there are no words except the ones you want.

This is what the above gif looks like as individual photos. It only took 4 to do.

This one for my Cat Fame lens took as many photos as words I wanted to use.

It was easy to do. Just make the one frame with pic, then change the word, saving each word as a separate photo.

Stars/glitter are easy to do, though the bigger you make the photo the finer the star tips will be. They are just straight lines. Make them as uniform as possible to look better. Practice!

To make this fine fellow I had to make 3 different photos, each one has the squid in the same position, so I put marks to help me make sure it's in the right spot and I can pull the side out for a work area.

I flipped some of the legs and moved them a little differently in each photo. The marks and spacer are easily fixed back up in the Gif creator.

My gif creator has a paint feature which puts up a strip of all the colors used in the photo, so colors are easily matched.

After fixing them up, I adjust the timing and maybe switch the order around until I like it.

Here's his HTML, feel free to take and use him.

<p align="center"><img src="http://i306.photobucket.com/albums/nn263/motorpurrr/Gifs%20Rock/mainsquidgifdude.gif" border="0" alt="squidoo gif,squid" height="320px"/></p>

This above is my addition to the Monrail cat mania. I just had to make him all chromey. LOL

You can make long spacers, tall skinny things for the side or a photo, square, tiny, large.

You may used a series of real photos, real photos with changes or things added to them, MS paint made, and so on. Here's a spacer I made for SandySpider.

I had made her a bigger one, so I just made each frame smaller, flipped and copied it, then made a strip of 6, just moving them around a little in each photo. Only 3 photos.

Way easy! But you need to practice and get familiar with you Gif program.

Here's some dancing money. All I did was copy the first photo I made, paste it down in a slightly different position and changed the legs. Only 3 photos

You may take and use the dancing money.

<p align="center"><img src="http://i306.photobucket.com/albums/nn263/motorpurrr/Gifs%20Rock/moneydancegif.gif" border="0" alt="gif,spacer" height="100px"/></p>

And some jewels too!

<p align="center"><img src="http://i306.photobucket.com/albums/nn263/motorpurrr/Gifs%20Rock/gemgifbanner.gif" border="0" alt="squidoo decor,spacer,jewelry" height="50px"/></p>

Flowers for you!

<p align="center"><img src="http://i306.photobucket.com/albums/nn263/motorpurrr/Gifs%20Rock/thankyousquidoopinksquid.gif" border="0" alt="squid" height="130px"/></p>

Really you may use any of my stuff on Photobucket.
I would be flattered! I wont move or change them once they are there, I add new stuff all the time. If you have a Photobucket account just mouse over the photo and aan option to copy to your albums will appear.

There is a list of albums on the side and a very long list of tags. There are spacers, lightned backgrounds, cephalopods, flowers, trains, and much more.

Below are other lenses that will help you do tos of cool things with decorations.