Chapter 22: Designing Animations

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Overview

Animations are often used to communicate an idea; unfortunately they are sometimes used for no practical purpose and end up only annoying users. The challenge you face producing animations is to get the illusion of motion in as few frames as possible to keep the file size to a minimum. If an animation takes too long to download it can take away from its intended purpose.

You probably remember using a flipbook as a child, a book containing many images, which appeared to move as you flipped the pages with your thumb. That's the basic foundation of GIF animations, many images shown in sequence to give the illusion of motion - minus the thumb.

The decision to use a GIF animation or another technology, such as Flash, is a decision you have to make. Some of the determining factors will be your audience and the intended purpose of the animation, along with your budget and the frequency in which you produce animations. One of the major benefits of using Fireworks to produce GIF animations is the cost factor - no additional purchase is required for specialized software. If you produce only a limited number of animations or only short or small ones, Fireworks MX is more than suitable for the job. Another benefit to using GIF animations is the fact that no additional plug-in is required to view the animations, and the learning curve for creating them is extremely short. Incorporating a GIF animation into an HTML Web page doesn't require any special coding. You insert them just as you would any other image. Some of the drawbacks include a limited color palette of 256 colors, making GIF animations unsuitable for gradients, 3-D, or photographic animations, larger file size, and no streaming capabilities. Because all the frames of the animation need to be downloaded in the browser before it plays properly, the first time it runs, it may look jerky.

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