Saturday, September 28, 2013

GIFing around.

Over the past year I caught myself often spending hours browsing through GIF blogs. Whether I was giggling or going through them with a serious face, the common thing was my admiration for their authors' ability to tell a story in so little frames.

GIF stands for Graphic Interchange Format and is basically an image file which stores multiple images inside itself and thus gives the illusion of movement. It was introduced back in 1987. when the format was called 87A. Later, the enhanced version got the name 89A, until it was finally named GIF.
GIFs were very popular back in the first days of Internet and in the last few years they have gone through a sort of renaissance.

Here are some of my favorite GIF blog discoveries.

First stop,  musichistoryingifs.com.  The name says it all: the author decided to give his point of view on history of music through animated 8-bit graphics, accompanied with some witty short descriptions for each graphic .



And my personal favorite:

via  musichistoryingifs.com


Next stop hexeosis.tumblr.com . I like the idea behind the blog and that is the author's attempt to visually present infinity through his hypnotic geometric GIFs. 




via  hexeosis.tumblr.com


And then there's thegifconnoisseur.tumblr.com.  This one I love because it's an endless source for other GIF blogs. As we know, nowadays everything is a remix of a remix and this blog is a perfect example of that. The author actually uses other artists' GIFs and puts his Connoisseur on them. And his Connoisseur is no other than Norman Rockwell's Connoisseur, who, just like in the original painting, is mysteriously exploring the artwork in front of him with his back turned away from us so we don't know if he's actually liking or disliking it.




via http://thegifconnoisseur.tumblr.com/


Oh and yes, since 2012. GIF is officially not only a noun but a verb also, so saying to GIF is just as normal as saying  to Google or to Photoshop.