

Here’s how to create a cinemagraph in the DrawMotion app - within the app, you can choose to either take a photo or upload one from your device. To make your own cinemagraph, there are plenty of high-end tools available - Flixel and Graphitii are good premium options.įor those on a budget, there are various “freemium” options which enable you to cinemagraphs for free, and pay for added extras (such as removal of the app logo, or higher quality animations). And while they can be saved as GIF files, this isn’t usually recommended, or necessary, because they're also their own file type.Ĭinemagraphs are becoming a popular choice for advertisers and marketers because of their novelty value, and because of the element of surprise they bring to viewers who think they’re looking at a static image, but then realize that part of it is moving. They’re similar to GIFs, but are generally much higher grade, and are therefore a popular choice for brands wanting to raise the standard above the basic GIF. Let’s take Giphy as a starting point - to create your own GIF, head to the Giphy the homepage and click on the 'Create' button.


and are two dedicated GIF-making sites, but other image optimization tools like Canva also enable you to make GIFs. They’re essentially short animated images - accompanied by text captions and sometimes sound - that move in loops.Ĭreating GIFs is relatively easy, thanks to the huge range of tools available. More recently, they’ve become synonymous with social media, and tend to get shared widely around the web. Swipe up on the photo to bring up the moving picture menu (Live, Loop, Bounce, Long Exposure). When they first popped up online 30 years ago, GIFs were used to display images on rudimentary computers whilst saving memory. Open the Photos app on your iPhone and tap on the Live Photo you want to turn into a GIF. According to Brightcove, social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined. Motion graphics are proven to be engaging - in fact, Twitter has said that tweets with a GIF see 55% more engagement than those without. Using motion graphics in your social media marketing can also help to drive more traffic to your site - another bonus for your SEO. Think of it this way - if you were given two identical pieces of long-form content, one with moving elements, supporting graphics and slick transitions, and the other without, which would hold more appeal?Īnd that's not all - according to Wistia, people spend 2.6x longer on webpages that have videos than those that don’t. It’s not as if they’re the opposite of long-form.Īccording to Merle Driver, the head of animation at Social Chain, a piece of long-form content will likely perform better if it includes motion graphics. Brands are now realizing that in order to maximize discovery, they need to produce high-quality, long-form content, rather than the kind of clickbait marketers once churned out.īut this doesn’t mean that motion graphics are inherently useless. In recent years, various studies have shown that long-form content performs better in SEO terms. Why motion graphics are worth using They add to long-form content
