Beer Labels in Motion

Prepare yourself for the coolest beer labels you’ve ever seen…

These Animated GIFs were created by Trevor Carmick, a Boston-based video editor/graphic artist/beer lover.  Even though they’re unofficial, you can’t deny that they’re pretty fantastic! Carmick says he became inspired to create them after reading a New York Times article about Dogfish Head Beer and their Cinemagraph-style GIFs.

“I loved how a still image came to life and was forever alive and moving… yet still completely frozen in time. It was always in the back of my mind so one day when I saw a bottle label I thought, that would be a really cool to try that technique on the picture,” he told FoxNews.com.

Trevor creates these ingenious animated labels from his favorite regional and local craft beer labels which in turn has helped highlight some lesser known brews.  He began creating them for fun and showing them to his friends until one of them suggested he post them on Tumblr. Now he has marketers, beer companies, and fellow craft beer fans looking at his work and has even been received the attention of national news!

It’s easy why! GIFs are an ideal medium for digital marketing and we love his clever use of the format.  It only further illustrates how versatile and just plain awesome GIFS are. Congratulations to Trevor Carmick on his much deserved attention and for creating such innovative and fun Animated GIFs!

Be sure to check out Trevor Carmick’s Tumblr Page Beer Labels in Motion (all images in this post were taken from there). Cheers!

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.