It’s no question that everyone loves GIFs. They’re obviously way more fun to scroll through than static images. But the real question is: how do you make a GIF?
It’s surprisingly easy. And, if you're an organization using social media to connect with stakeholders, GIFs can elevate engagement with your audience.
But what do I need?
All you need is AdobePhotoshop and a few images or graphics that you’d like to animate. These can be pictures of staff members you want to highlight, photographs from a recent event that you want to share, or simple vector images that you want to make a little more interesting.
Take our friends at BRAVE, who we’re helping with a campaign where donors will receive face masks to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 *and* support breast cancer survivors. They started with a lot of great photos, but we wanted to take it up a notch with animation to engage even better with their community. Using just the name of the campaign and images of people in the masks, we created an animation that will elevate their social media posts and help attract more attention to the cause.
How does it work?
Photoshop allows for the creation of ‘frame animations’ where you can change visuals within different frames and set the delay between the frames, and then allow them to play on a loop. Sounds confusing? We promise it isn’t, especially if you follow the 10 step tutorial we created for you. Everything is broken down, and you can always contact us if you have more questions.
How to Make a GIF:
1. First, create your document with the correct dimensions.
If you are planning to upload your GIF to Twitter or any other social media accounts, it’s important that the size of the file matches their restrictions. Twitter recommends GIFs with a resolution of 1280 x 1080 pixels (width x height) in their best media practices. We wanted to work with a square file, so we set the dimensions of a new Photoshop file to 1080x1080 pixels.
2. Next, embed the media files that you want to animate within the file.
In order to create a GIF, you are going to need files and images to animate! You might also want to animate text or shapes that can be created directly within Photoshop, and that’s okay. But if you have external media that will be incorporated, it’s important to add that first. Go to ‘File’ > ‘Place Embedded’ and drop in those media files.
Note: These files could be JPEGs, Adobe Illustrator files, or even other Photoshop files!
3. Add a colorful background layer.
Once you have imported your media, you might find that it looks a little plain against the white background. If you want, you can create a colorful background with the rectangle tool, simply by drawing a rectangle the same size as your file and dragging it underneath the other media in the layers panel.
4. Achieve your desired layout.
Next, you need to set up what you want your GIF to actually look like! This means moving around any media you imported, adding text elements using the Type Tool, or adding shapes using the Polygon/Ellipse/Rectangle Tools. When you are working with the different elements in your Photoshop file, make sure you have the layer that contains the element selected before you manipulate it. For now, you will want to keep all of your layers visible, which means they might overlap and not look exactly like the final product. That’s okay! We will toggle visibilities once we start the animation.
5. Add in hand-drawn elements for extra animation.
When creating a GIF like this, you can enhance your visuals by adding the appearance of hand-drawn elements. Using the brush tool, you can add dots, lines or strokes that can later be animating by changing their visibility. Make sure that whatever elements you want to appear at the same time are within the same layer. So, if you are drawing dots, and you want them to appear one size at a time, make sure all dots of the same size are within the same layer.
For example, we wanted to add dots that seemed to grow from the inside out. We started by creating a new layer, and drew a circle of large dots. Then, we added another new layer, decreased the brush size, and drew another circle of dots. We continued these steps until we achieved our desired look. By adding the circles of dots in independent layers, we will be able to animate them more easily later. (You can see we named each layer to keep track of them as well.)
6. Time to animate!
Once you have all of your elements ready, it’s time to animate. To open your Timeline panel, click ‘Window’ > ‘Timeline’, and the animation tab should appear at the bottom of the screen.
7. Create your first frame.
Before we start animating, it’s important to understand how Photoshop creates GIFs. Essentially, you will be creating a timeline of frames that will play one after the other to give the appearance of a short video. Each time you want something to change visually, you need to add a new frame. To make the first frame, click the button that reads “Create Frame Animation”. This will create a frame with all of the elements that are currently visible within your document. You will want to toggle the visibility of the elements so that the first frame resembles how you want your GIF to look when it STARTS playing.
See above: We changed the visibility of all of the media elements so that the GIF starts as a blank background.
8. Add additional frames for your animation.
To add additional frames, click the small box with a ‘+’ inside of it at the bottom of your screen. This will create a second frame that is identical to the first. When you select the second frame, you can change the visibility of elements so that the frames are no longer identical. Keep adding frames and toggling the visibility of your layers until you have all your desired frames.
You can see in the top image that in the second frame, “get” is visible because we changed the layer’s visibility while that frame was selected.
9. Set a delay time for your frames.
If you were to press play with your current animation, it would move so fast that it would be hard to watch. So, you need to set a delay time between each frame. Click the current delay time (which automatically is set to 0 seconds) and Photoshop will provide you with a range of options for timing. For the purposes of this GIF, we set a delay time of 0.5 seconds. All of your frames may have the same delay time, or they may vary due to the nature of the content within each frame.
10. Export your GIF!
To export your GIF, you will need to go to ‘File’ > ‘Export’ > ‘Save for Web’. This will allow you to save the file as an animated .gif file. You can see that the image size is 1080x1080, so it will be safe to upload to Twitter and other social media platforms. Click ‘Save’ and choose where you want to save your file.
If you need to reduce the size of your GIF due to media restrictions, you can change the value in the ‘Percent’ box next to the image size before you save it.
Congratulations! You just made a GIF!
This tutorial covers only the basics of how to create a GIF by toggling visibility. Now that you know how to make a simple animation in Photoshop, you will be able to explore the program more and develop more advanced GIFs. You can elevate your GIFs by changing the positioning of the elements between frames, which will enhance the animation.
Now you have a GIF to share! But how does it fit into the content you've already planned, as well as the other events and important days coming up this month? Download our monthly #ConsciousContent Calendar + Planner to organize all your animated content and get informed about every day of recognition and advocacy you can post about!
And, if this tutorial helped you, let us know!
About the Author: Brooke Elmore is the Social Impact Marketing Intern at Loud + Clear. She is a rising sophomore studying graphic design at Northeastern University, but originally hails from the suburbs of Philadelphia, PA. As a young college student, she is passionate about the cross-section of design, business, and non-profit work, especially how meaningful information design and powerful data visualizations can elevate an organization’s mission. Connect with her by email here.
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