So you want your webpage to move? What do you do? First of all you put on your webdesigner hat and stop and recognize that caution is key in animation! Some of your users will find animation annoying and distracting. Some of your users will be accessing your pages on home modems and do not want to wait forever to see a bug bouncing a basketball for a webpage about classic literature. The first thing you want to do is determine how animation helps your design. Is there a way you can use animation to make your content better? If not, you are better off not using it.
For the average web user, you can get away with including one "gratuitous animation". They will accept an opening logo or symbol that morphs or moves to introduce your pages. From there on, they want the animations to serve a purpose. When animation first was introduced to webpages, there was the "cool" effect. Designers put them on their pages to be cool. Now animations can be done by anyone and are not by themselves "cool". They now need to serve a purpose in our more sophisticated webworld.
The first animations were animated GIFs. They were a series of individual GIF images played one after another in rapid succession to achieve animation. Most animations still use the GIF format but now you can animate other image formats also. Animated images are also now being combined with scripting languages(mostly Javascript) to create more complex animations.
Currently the leading application to create animation on is Macromedia's Flash 4.0. It is powerful and costs $299. In May, 2000 Adobe introduced Live Motion 1.0. It also costs $299 and is very competitive with Flash. These are currently the choice tools of professional webdesigners looking to add animation to their pages. You can download trial versions of both applications if you want to experiment with them. In this class, we will use Adobe's Image Ready program to create simple animated GIF's. We do not have the money or the time to teach Flash or Live Motion in this class. But the basic techniques of how to create animation will be taught and can later be applied to more complex tools if you so choose.
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