Bring life to your web design

This week whilst designing the new Ruby+Ed Spring Summer web updates I have began developing a selection of animated image files to lift and give life to the page layout.

This technique is nothing new and is something of which the majority of website have incorporated for many years. In more recent years flash based files have been a powerful force within this area of web design but are arguably being brought to there knees with the launch of new apple products of which are dominating the mobile arena and also with the launch of HTML5 bringing with it HTML5 videos giving the designer a more solid and universally sound platform to work from.

All of these video based techniques are brilliant and are sometimes the only option a designer has however are not always cross browser friendly (not all web browsers read these files) especially when it comes to older Internet explorer and FirFox browsers. There are however ways around the cross browser issues but it can sometimes be to in-depth, technical and time consuming getting the page design to cater to all the browsers, especially since we now have a multitude of mobile web devices of which use many different platforms.

So in my opinion if you want a simple animated file then keep the tech simple with the use of a good old fashioned GIF files.

Below are some examples of creative 3D animated gif files I have found on my research travels…

Note the above images are from a 3rd party website, if they do not load correctly then please refresh the page.

More examples can be found here:

http://www.cruzine.com/2011/01/31/animated-gifs/