Let’s say tomorrow is the SOTU (State of the Union) address by the US President & you’ve analysed the speeches & there are 10 interesting insights you want to publish as one grand complicated interactive story. DON’T do it. If you are going to attempt to create a full-fledged interactive story it might take a lot of time & you might miss the bus. Instead, you could pick the most interesting insights and publish them as simple GIF stories on Twitter.
Bloomberg’s tictoc Twitter handle chose to answer just a few simple questions during the run-up to Trump’s 2019 SOTU address. Here are two of them.
- Who spoke the longest in terms of time? (since the time debates were televised)
- Who spoke the most number of words?
They chose to communicate these in GIF form with some simple but impactful design & animation techniques.
GIFs that speak stories
Here’s some work that our own folk have created. Gramener’s Data Artist, Hari Nag, created this gif for a feature called Numbers This Week.
Gramener’s Associate Lead Designer, Ramya Mylavarapu, created these for the Inktober series.
If you are ambitious, you may also want to try something like the NY Times’ gif animations during the 2016 Olympics.
How to create GIFs easily
How do we create stuff like these? Here is a nice tutorial that teaches how to create GIFs using Photoshop. This tutorial explains how Illustrator & Photoshop can be combined to create a gif. You can create gifs using Sketch as well.
Hari & Ramya are experts at creating gif stories. Please bug them at hari.kumar@gramener.com & ramya.mylavarapu@gramener.com
Happy Storytelling! Remember, you can say it with GIFs.
I just love to post gifs in my stories but don’t know how to create it for stories. After reading this blog I came to know how to create it. Thank you for posting a valuable article. I will take all of these tips in consideration to create gifs.
GIF always attracts my mind and this article has also because I dint know that I can create GIF. Thanks for this article and keep posting.