What is it about small, repetitive moving images that everyone is so crazy about on Tumblr? Animated GIFs have been circling the web since 1987, yet in the past few years, they seem to have increased in popularity.
Because Tumblr acts as a digital incubator for all things visually stunning, it has helped rejuvenate the outdated artform — along with other content-curating sites like Reddit. The GIF tag on Tumblr is thriving with animated images of anything from cats eating pizza, to more captive, cinematic city shots.
"Tumblr is a huge part of creative sharing online and is already a giant in mainstream Internet culture," says GIF tag editor Lacey Michallef, who is also a freelance designer and animator. "If GIFs are thriving in an extremely popular online community, it's only natural that it would extend to other parts of the Internet."
Digital artist and writer Colin Raff, who is also a GIF tag editor, says Tumblr provides an "effortless way you can just post what you make or like and it promotes itself, sometimes virally — a brief moving image is probably ideal for this format."
When selecting GIFs to be featured on the Tumblr tag — which each editor is allotted 10 per day — Raff prefers original artwork and Michalleff looks for well-crafted GIFs that loop seamlessly.
Tumblr's recent upgrade to a full 1MB for all photo posts allows artists more leeway for creativity. GIFs can now be longer and more elaborate — no longer are we seeing just basic, choppy one-second clips from a television show. This is helping artists who handcraft their own GIFs from scratch get more recognition.
Although Tumblr seems to house an endless number of clips of music videos and other moments in pop culture, both tag editors say they tend to avoid them.
"I don't care much for GIFs like that, but i acknowledge that a humongous chunk of Tumblr (namely a younger audience) loves those types of GIFs," says Michallef.
Raff, who attributes their popularity to an easily recognizable image, says "current pop culture GIFs on Tumblr are usually clipped references that are liked due to the recognition factor rather than their formal qualities as GIFs."
We asked Raff to pick out five GIFs from the tag on Tumblr and explain why he chose them. Here are his top selections.
Raff says this is "a characteristic Op Art GIF."
"This type of rapid montage is conducive to the medium, in my opinion."
"[This GIF] takes robust advantage of the recent Tumblr increase in GIF file size limit.
Max Capacity's GIF art captures the bygone days of analog video.
Thumbnail courtesy of ozneo.
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