Saying It With GIFs

Reading Time: 2 mins

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.

1. Who spoke the longest in terms of time? (since the time debates were televised)
2. Who spoke the most number of words?

They chose to communicate these in GIF form with some simple but impactful design & animation techniques.

Clocking in at roughly 29 minutes, Richard Nixon had the shortest broadcast State of the Union.

Bill Clinton had the longest broadcast #SOTU, which took roughly 1 hour and 28 minutes to deliver pic.twitter.com/YsQbUaXF9I

— Bloomberg Originals (@bbgoriginals) February 4, 2019

George Washington used only 1,089 words for his #SOTU speech in 1790.

Jimmy Carter’s 1981 address had 33,667 words pic.twitter.com/3nPNQBtL0V

— Bloomberg Originals (@bbgoriginals) February 5, 2019

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.

🇯🇲 Usain Bolt surged late to win the men’s 100 meters for the third time in a row. https://t.co/LAmPdJ6z4F pic.twitter.com/s5SOs3c24s

— NYT Graphics (@nytgraphics) August 15, 2016

Katie Ledecky crushed her own World Record in the 400-meter freestyle – here's our recap. https://t.co/vu2xbjLNTB pic.twitter.com/UJKnYKJKgh

— NYT Graphics (@nytgraphics) August 8, 2016

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.