C’mon Yahoo! – You Can Do Better Than That!

Really Yahoo…was that the best you could do?  Is it just me or was the first GIF Yahoo posted when announcing their acquisition of Tumblr rather disappointing?  This faux pas shows what little Yahoo knows about the animated GIF and its immense influence on Tumblr.

My mom always told me that you never get a second chance to make a first impression and well…not so much Yahoo.  The Tumblr community is home to some of the greatest GIF creatives on the planet.  Yahoo could have easily reached out to one of them to blow us away with a GIF that rocked our world.

True artists and innovators like Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg, INSA, Reed+Rader, Mr. GIF, and many others have worked hard for many of us and more importantly for consumers to move beyond the GIF of the past.  They have transformed it into a highly evolved, mesmerizing, and sophisticated medium.  Big brands like Neiman Marcus, Disney, GE, American Apparel, Amazon, Burberry, and MTV have assisted in the re-education process by sharing powerful and beautiful GIFs in email campaigns, web designs, ecommerce displays, and social media.  It’s a shame that all of this hard work, creativity, and thinking outside of the box was brushed aside by one of the most influential technology companies of the past 15 years.  It doesn’t exactly give you a warm fuzzy feeling.

The GIF is not the old low quality format that it once was.  It has matured and evolved into a professional, high quality image format that is as engaging as a video but as simple to use as a still image.  This is only the beginning of the ‘new and improved’ GIF.  At Cinegif, we are even taking it one step further by revolutionizing the GIF into the next rich media format.  For more information, please visit our website.

“GIF-ITI” – Ketel One & INSA

Ketel One Vodka announce the first installment of the DO ONE THING WELL craft collaboration, CC#1, with experiential street artist INSA displaying his craft at Roest, Amsterdam until May 2013. Launched in 2012, the DO ONE THING WELL campaign celebrates the passion and skill required to achieve success in a discipline. Ketel One is on a quest to celebrate these craftsmen who exemplify knowing how to DO ONE THING WELL.

We at Cinegif love INSA’s work because he brings together the physical and the digital to create art that lives forever.

INSA began his career as a graffiti writer, painting streets and buildings as he traveled.  He soon became known for his trademark ‘graffiti fetish’ pattern, which can be seen on the walls of cities around the world.

INSA has a bold vision and reputation for not doing things by the book.  Always keen to push boundaries and innovate further, INSA has gained a huge following globally through his recent experiments with social and digital media. Using ‘GIF-ITI’, a term INSA coined when he began to create the first ever GIF animations of graffiti work; INSA brings the outdoor spectacular to life in an exciting and creative way, using a meticulous and labour-intensive process’ often requiring him to repaint an entire wall by hand several times.  INSA’s unique GIF-ITI invention has captured audiences by creating street art that paradoxically only exists online.

See more INSA and learn more about the Ketel One Modern Craft project