Freebie quality GIF animations

[Carol Haynes]

Animation Factory make really great animations (I have about 20 CDs of them).

To promote themselves they have teamed up with ULEAD to offer a free download of 300 animations.

See http://www.ulead.com/partner/app/anifactory/anifactory.htm to download them.

The main website is worth a visit too www.animationfactory.com

If you buy their CDs or register for their webservice their animations are Royalty free and you can use them on websites (so long as you don't host download pages of them).

Have fun ...

[f0dder]

Humm, not my kind of thing; I've always found most of those 3D gifs to look a bit cheap, and the low amount of frames in them makes the animation jerky.

I'm more into handcrafted pixel stuff anyway

[mouser]

well i can always use some free clipart, you never know when it will come in handy.

fodder, what is "handcrafted pixel stuff" ?  you paint each pixel on your screen with a paintbrush?

[f0dder]

"Handcrafted" meaning that the image/animation has been painstakingly drawn rather than rendered in a 3D app. Not necessarily pixel-by-pixel as in the really old days, but that the artist has given thought to the pixel level of things.

The smilies on most forums and instant messaging programs, for instance, have had this "attention to detail" in their design. Same thing with most icons for toolbars etc. The various "emoticon packs" for MSN by Blue Mountain and other people is an exception though - many of them have pretty tacky graphics.

I'm probably a bit conservative, though - for this kind of thing I prefer simplicity and clean graphics; something like http://www.sherv.net/images/sc8.gif is too "messy", although they're not the worst I've seen.

(gosh, I feel like a grumpy old man now )

[Carol Haynes]

Actually I think Animation factory have shot themselves in the foot a bit with this sample collection as they really aren't their best.

The website is great (if you are a member) as all the animations are rendered at different sizes, with white, black or transparent backgrounds. They even have an online tool to customize the graphic to your likeing before you download it.

Whilst they aren't pixel perfect (slightly 'cheap' point noted) they do what they aim to do well and have a HUGE library.

From my point of view one of the best things is the file size - it's all very well having beautiful pixel perfect animations but if they take 5 minutes to load on dial up ...

Here is an example of the range from their site to give an idea. The first picture is part of the download page for one graphic, the second is a sample from the online editing/customisation utility, and then the last two are the extremes of the downloads available (both on transparent backgrounds):