banner ads, animated GIFs

The Foghorn Magazine, Banner Ad

This week I had a nice chance to do some graphic design. This is my first effort at a banner ad for my wife's wonderful and hilarious web magazine, The Foghorn. She plans to feature the ad on Dinosaur Comics, among other places. Powered by the economically interesting Project Wonderful ad service.

The ad is only 117x30 pixels in the "button" size, which is minuscule. To have more content and to seem more attractive, I decided to make an animated GIF instead of a static picture.

It was an interesting process to make an animated GIF. I used The GIMP and layers to create the animation. There are over 60 frames of animation. I have a renewed respect for animators and I appreciate the tedium and effort required to make cartoons. The dynamics of bouncing were interesting to play with to make it look good - I have linear starts and sweeps, but after bouncing the graphics decelerate in a quasi-quadratic fashion, which looks pretty good.

It plays at proper speed in Firefox but not in Internet Explorer. IE seems to cap out at about 10fps. I suspect this is not a performance thing, I think it is probably a CYA liability thing for Microsoft - at 15Hz or so one might be able to create a pathological animated GIF that could induce seizures in some people, ala Pokemon.