New visual trends in social and online media – usage of short animation
Assist. Prof. Kalina Hristova, PhD
Abstract: Animation is perfectly suited to impart information in a clear and simple manner. It uses simple lines, bright colors, and constant movement to keep viewers’ attention on the screen. This technique attracts attention just like children’s attention is attracted by cartoons. One may not understand the appeal of animation, however, it has proven to make a complex or difficult topic more accessible, interesting and less intimidating.
Резюме: Анимацията е перфектен начин за предаване на информация по изключително ясен и достъпен начин. Тя използва прости линии, ярки цветове и постоянно движение, за да запази вниманието на зрителите на екрана. Тази техника привлича вниманието точно както вниманието на децата лесно е привлечено от анимационни филми. Дори и не всеки да може да разбере апела на дадена анимация, все пак е доказано, че този похват помага информация, която е много сложна или трудна за приемане, да бъде представена по един по-интересен и не така смущаващ начин.
Keywords: Gif animation, media, social media, short animation, marketing;
Over the past few years, the visual environment in social networks and online media has changed drastically. Most of the information nowadays is based on quick visual publications.
Graphics Interchange Format (GIFs) are image files that are compressed to reduce transfer time, that’s why they are the key to visual climate change in social communication. Facebook for instance has developed a huge library of GIFs as a replacement of the static images, to be able to respond to users’ demands. Static images have lost popularity and have become inadequate for social networks. Users need more dynamic visual means of communication in social networks and this trend affects also businesses and services. Regardless of the nature of the business, making a video could be one of the smartest investments one could ever make. Animated videos can be used for any product, service, or topic, in a variety of venues. A video can be used to promote business on a website and throughout social media like Facebook and YouTube. It can also be used for many other purposes like tradeshows, meetings, and presentations.
One may not understand the appeal of animation, however, it has proven to make a complex or difficult topic more accessible, interesting and less intimidating. GIFs allow for a picture file to loop through series of still images shown in sequence. While GIFs have been the staple of the Internet for many years, it seems that companies have finally started to really embrace GIFs as their go-to medium for social media advertising. Using animated videos is a professional approach in marketing. As online videos become more popular, the Internet is overwhelmed with low-quality, homemade movies by amateurs.
What actually necessitates means of expression to be extended and visual environment to be animated in social networks?
Animation is perfectly suited to impart information in a clear and simple manner. The animated video can include charts and graphs that can be easily comprehended because they move and flow along with a verbal explanation. This is the reason why animated videos are easier to understand than static information. One of the most important advantages of short animations is that they save time, as time is the most valuable bargaining chip nowadays.
The gravitation towards visual posts is based on human preferences. The average person’s attention span in 2015 was 8.25 seconds. Thus, most social media users are not going to read an entire article; they simply want to get the basic message as quickly as possible.
As many social media marketers and avid users have acknowledged, animated GIFs and short videos have become pervasive over the course of 2015. If you take Twitter, for example, the majority of its best-performing content involves some kind of visual elements.
GIFs, or bite-sized animations, are ideal for telling stories in a short timeframe. The motion in these images also gives them the advantage of attracting the attention in crowded news feeds.
From a graphic designer's point of view, it is interesting to analyze the relationship between trends in graphic design and ever-spreading short animations as the key to visual communication. Most elements used by designers become flatter: flat, but bright colours, simpler fonts, characters and etc. The flat design trend is characterised by a clean, colourful look, big typography, white space, and subtle gradients. It’s influenced by minimalism, Bauhaus, and the Swiss Style. The flat trend has the staying power of a visual language that creates high usability and fast loading times. It’s also easy to combine flat design with more intricate or hand drawn artwork and photography, which makes the trend versatile and flexible. It started as a completely flat style and has been updated adding depth, light, and shadow, as well as motion.
Trends and the preferred methods of expression in graphic design from 2015 and early 2016 clearly show what lies ahead in the next few years. The past few years were reinforced by the use of certain expressions that were ignored by designers in the previous period. The main objective in all aspects of graphic design is the immediate information and connection with the observer. The flat and bright colours come as simple, bold and firm. This is what characterises the 21st century and shifts the 80s impact.
Some called that trend the “new retro” style which is inspired to great extent by the Memphis Group and Arcade video games that brought to graphic design some bold colours, pixel art, and playful geometric patterns. The Memphis Group is a design movement founded in December 1980 from the Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass. They opposed to the conventional approach of products following conventional shapes, colours and patterns. In contrast, they drew inspiration from other already existing movements: striking geometric figures from Art Deco, bold color palettes from Pop Art and the minimalist design of the 70s from 1950’s Kitsch movement.
“Unlike previous design movements, Memphis embraced a somewhat chaotic, free-spirited approach to backgrounds. It isn't uncommon to spot thin, straight lines in stark contrast with organic, free-flowing dots and structured 3D shapes.”
However, we cannot say that there was boredom of the excessive digitization, but definitely, the creative industries and consumers seemed willing to return to something familiar, accessible, not so pretentious, something created by a human hand. Some time ago it was enough that everything was digital – the forms and colors of composition, then in the last few years, the trends is digital images to be turned into analog again as they are clearly more visible.
A painted by hand image is always able to evoke more and stronger emotions due to its natural connection with its creator. Perhaps the drawing as a graphic design and animation tool carries much more powerful emotional message. The drawing or a painting is a symbol of something created by human hand, something warm and personal, not digitally sterile.
Straight after the tragic event in Paris in November 2015, a handmade symbol, created as a natural, prime reaction to the happening, has captured the online space faster than any social or advertising campaign. According to the artist Jean Jullien, a Frenchman who lives in London, it was his initial reaction – to look for a piece of paper and a pencil. Combining the Eiffel Tower and the symbol of peace, painted with uneven graphics line has become a symbol of empathy not only for its social message, but also because of its spontaneity and simplicity of graphic expression.
The use of drawings has widened its boundaries and now illustrations are more often used in social advertising campaigns. Dropbox, for example, used a graphical style child’s drawing as a starting page on its website, not to show its imperfection but to reach the viewers and obey the tendency in the graphic design mentioned above.
Animation often uses simple lines, bright colors, and constant movement to keep viewer’s attention attracted to the screen. This technique attracts attention just like children’s attention is attracted by cartoons. Animated videos are eye-catching and attention-grabbing.
Nowadays photos and illustrations come to life with 2D animation and cinemagraphs. The basic concept of cinemagraphs is taking a still image, and then inserting a moving image either into part of the picture or into the picture itself. It is actually very similar to an animated GIF, but with a still component.
Video has been popular for a while now, but social media helped making it even more popular. Most of the big social networks now incorporate video elements. It seems that short animations and videos are the best way to: show personality; show off a product; explain a process; create a tiny presentation; tell a story; play an ad; animate data; highlight your company culture.
Another advantage of the GIF animation is that its appeals to many. Animation has no real age, race, or nationality. As the Internet increasingly becomes a global marketplace, companies want their videos to appeal to all types of people all around the world. Brands are beginning to tap into this medium, finding new ways to engage with their audiences.
Short form and instant video is, without a doubt, the ideal format for many. Adam Leibsohn, chief operating officer of Giphy, believes that the rise of GIFs and other similar formats is because people are “using content and culture to communicate- they are not using words anymore.” He goes on saying “When they are doing this, there is an opportunity for that culture to come from a brand.”
Animated videos are excellent for brand development. Animation allows us to seamlessly incorporate logos, color schemes, and brand images into а video. With animation, settings and actors can evolve without fundamentally changing – this allows us to build recurrent themes and brand icons over a series of videos.
So, the connection between graphic design and online visual environment becomes apparent. Visual environments are becoming more dynamic. Our consumption of visual culture has irreversibly changed. The interactive visual storytelling is becoming a highly pursued strategy for big brands in 2016. Journalist Nayomi Chibana calls this a hybrid form of interactive content, in the sense that it contains multiple unique elements of visual storytelling in a single, consolidated medium.
„A seamless integration of a variety of mediums–from the written word and still images to interactive graphs, maps, and animations–the interactive story is paving the way for new forms of transmedia storytelling in our convergence culture,” she writes. “These highly versatile formats are singular in their ability to give the user the freedom to navigate information, choose possible narrative paths and delve as deep as they desire into a certain topic.”
Availability of surreal visual environment shows how millions of viewpoints, ideas and perspectives are available through multiple channels and platforms. “Surreality” is an aesthetic that refers to how we visually make sense of the new ways in which we consume culture and share information. It is vital to recognise the unconscious as the foundation of human behavior and as an influence on our judgments and feelings in order to appreciate and be fully aware of what is going on in the conscious mind.
2015 was a shifting year for visual marketing. If we look back to the industry in five or ten years from now, it’s likely to recognize this year as the one in which things really began to take off on the visual front. It seems that most of the online content experiences some dynamic movement.
However, 2016 has the potential to be even more revolutionary. By 2019, it has been predicted that 80 percent of all Internet traffic will be generated by videos. That figure would be 64 percent higher than in 2014 and significant growth will probably occur in 2016.
GIF animations are part of a coming visual revolution, the transformation of the form of visual communication in social networks. And that’s just the beginning.
Russell Armand, the co-founder of the animated image platform Phhhoto, sees a coming revolution in the way images will be used and experienced in the near future. “The definition of a picture and the definition of photography is evolving in this truly digital space,” says Armand. “Pictures can do things that pictures were never supposed to do, and at some point soon, messaging will just happen inside the pictures themselves.” That interactive future for photography is not yet here, but GIFs are perhaps the harbingers of what’s to come.
It is clear that video is the most powerful form of visual storytelling. However, it is also the most difficult medium to master, from a marketing point of view. In 2015 and the beginning of 2016, many small and medium-sized businesses adopted video for the first time and this is just the beginning of the forthcoming global visual and online marketing change.
The 2016 was the year of social media. Social networks saw an incredible expansion in use throughout the year, and it is not expected to diminish anytime soon. Social media has given businesses the opportunity to connect with customers in ways never seen before, and in the coming year the innovation from these networks will allow companies to interact even more with their communities. So we can expect to see increased use of animated GIFs in the next 2017 for sure.
Literature:
· Busche, L., 2016/05, Trend Alert: 1980s Memphis Design, Design Trends (https://creativemarket.com/blog/trend-alert-1980s-memphis-design)
· Siebert, V., 2015/11, 'When I put my brush on paper, it was the first thing that came': Artist behind the Eiffel Tower peace symbol reveals its reactionary origins - and how he doesn't want fame for it, Daily Mail
· Slattery, G., 2015,“The Rise of GIFS - Why Brands are Jumping On”, New / Slang, (http://www.newslang.ie/blog/the-rise-of-gifs-why-brands-are-jumping-on)
· Alton., L., 2016/02, Digital Marketing will increasingly become about visual storytelling, DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY,
· Laurent, O., 2016, How the GIF Is Taking Over the World, LightBox – TIME
(http://time.com/4275521/gif-photography/)