Looping GIF Animations by 2nd year students for Digital Illustration

The students in IDES 237 Digital Illustration were asked to create a short looping animated gif that reflected their experience as graphic design students.

The animations will be used as title screens for a forthcoming documentary about graphic design students. Here’s some of our favourites!

Nicole Shewchuk's animated gif (shown above) is intended to be used as a placeholder for missing webpages. It highlights a web designer who's overworked brain gets kicked back into gear by the dreaded 404 page not found notification. If you see it, that means someone's got some work to do!

Here are a few others:

Emily Huynh

When Shayne first introduced Adobe After Effects to us, I knew I wanted to manipulate shapes in size and colour, as a form of animation. Inspired by Swissted, a collection of Swiss style typographic posters, I formed five poster designs which transform into one another. With trial and error, the process took about 12 hours to figure out all the possible functions and features of After Effects. Looking back, I now know there was a much more efficient way to build it. Adobe After Effects is a beast but it’s fun once you’ve figured it out.

Graeme Duckett

When Shayne was showing us examples to inspire us for our animated GIF assignment, I knew immediately that I wanted to make something in a similar style to James Curran’s work. The assignment’s topic was graphic design itself, and my first ideas were to stylize mundane features of being a graphic designer, like waiting for loading bars or watching printers spew paper. But I settled on the theme of trying to come up with creative ideas, and how we like to imagine ourselves as having great ideas instantly and executing them with fervour, but we rarely actually do. I found some videos of James Curran’s process, and followed it as best I could, even though I’d never really animated anything or used AfterEffects before Shayne introduced us to it. The whole thing took roughly 20 hours, maybe more, with a lot of trial and error involved (especially around that infinite zoom effect). But I’m happy with the result.

Mann Chalermwat

After a long day of staring at the computer screen (7 hours, give or take), my eyes sting with each blink. The idea for the GIF was initially an idea for a short comic I was going to draw but never got around to it. With that being said, I thought it would be fun to animate and it was really easy to do so with Adobe After Effects.

Check them all out at idearefinery.net.