The GIF Animator's Guide [Paperback]

Sandra E. Eddy (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 155828561X | ISBN-13: 978-1558285613 | Publication Date: September 30, 1997

The GIF Animator's Guide At last —a book on GIF animation for all of us. The GIF Animator's Guide is the most comprehensive book on animating GIFs for World Wide Web pages. With easy step-by-step instructions for desktop applications including Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop, you learn how to create and edit GIF89a animations to enhance your website. Whether you are a beginner or experienced Web developer, this book will answer all your questions about creating and animating GIFs—from beginning to end. The GIF Animator's Guide is designed both to be easy to use and to provide all the important information about creating good-looking graphics and animations using a variety of popular programs—freeware, shareware, and commercial—for both Windows and Mac computers. The book includes valuable information about animation, computer graphics, and GIF standards so that you can easily create animations for your Web page. CD-ROM Included The CD bundled with The GIF Animator's Guide includes Microsoft GIF Animator, Paint Shop Pro, GIF Construction Set, GIFBuilder, Ulead GIF Animator, and save-disabled versions of Photoshop 4 and Illustrator 7. It also includes a large gallery of unique and copyright-free GIF animations that you can plug into your own Web pages.

• Learn how to create GIF animations easily with Microsoft Image Composer, Microsoft GIF Animator, Photoshop 4, Illustrator 7, Paint Shop Pro, GIF Construction Set, CorelDRAW, and GIFBuilder
• CD includes Microsoft GIF Animator, save-disabled versions of Photoshop and Illustrator, a gallery of GIF animations, and freeware and shareware including Paint Shop Pro, GIF Construction Set, GIFBuilder, and Ulead GIF Animator
• Ideal for all GIF animators—both amateur and professional
• Free animations are included on the CD to use for your Web site
• Learn how to optimize animations by using the 216-color palette, planning for transparency, offsetting images, and setting time delay

http://www.mispress.com

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Reading The GIF Animator's Guide can turn a Web and graphics novice to a GIF-animation expert in a surprisingly short amount of time. This full-color guide first teaches you the basics of creating and editing images, explaining file formats, transparencies, color selection, design principles, and other issues involved with creating an image that you want to animate. Then the author explains how to plan an animation (you focus, for example, on the first frame); choose the effects and techniques to produce the look you want; and insert your animation in an HTML document. Then she delves into using a variety of Windows and Macintosh programs for doing your work: Microsoft Image Composer, Microsoft GIF Animator, Paint Shop Pro, GIF Constriction Set, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, CorelDRAW, and GifBuilder. The author explains each product's interface, provides tips on achieving various effects, and offers shortcuts and potential pitfalls. Appendices on the history of animation, traditional animation techniques, and computer-based animation round out your knowledge of the field of animation. The hybrid CD that comes with the book includes demo or full versions of the discussed software programs, other GIF animation programs, and a gallery of GIF animations.

About the Author

SANDRA E. EDDY has written many computer and Internet reference and how-to books, and is the author of the "Computer Ease" column for Business Start-Ups magazine. She has more than 17 years of computer experience as a freelance writer, documentation manager, and technical writer. She is the author of HTML in Plain English, also published by MIS:Press.

Product Details

• Paperback: 322 pages
• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (September 30, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 155828561X
• ISBN-13: 978-1558285613
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 7.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,165,862 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Little useful content, January 21, 2002

By 

Jan K. Jachnik (Sticklepath, Devon, England) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The GIF Animator's Guide (Paperback)

Don't be seduced by the high quality of the printing of this book and its large glossy pages full of colour. It makes a great coffee table book but the content is typical of so many web oriented books - a great deal of padding and an approach which says, "Why use 1 word when I can use a dozen?" Chapter 2, pages 13 to 26, covers the useful content, which is a pretty poor percentage of the over 300 pages in the book.
Most of the book is devoted to explanations of how to use various drawing packages: Corel Draw, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop etc. If you have any of these packages the original manuals offer a much better source for how to use them. The text does not even orientate itself specifically to GIF creation when discussing the drawing packages. Indeed, these pages are purely descriptive rather than guiding you through how best to create an animation.
A web search on "How to create GIF animations" returns more useful information than you will find in this book. As an alternative, I would recommend "Effective Web Animation" by J. Scott Hamlin - covering Javascript and Flash in addition, Hamlin manages to devote over 140 pages to GIF Animation, providing much more in the way of technique and ideas.

5.0 out of 5 stars Couldn't be happier., December 14, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The GIF Animator's Guide (Paperback)

The book and the CD look brand new to me, and the shipping was maybe a couple days longer than I had expected; but, I have no complaints, everthing was like advertised.

1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Gif Animator's Guide, April 21, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The GIF Animator's Guide (Paperback)

It's a helpful tool for making gif animation files.