GIFFFFR: Building a dynamic web app and creative playground for animated GIFs.

Platform Web
Role Brand / Design / Code
Year 2014

All identity work was designed with Illustrator. The fully responsive static site was designed and built using HTML5, PHP, JavaScript, Gulp, Sass, and Compass.

GIFFFFR is a dynamic web application that simplifies GIF creation, enabling users to generate high-quality GIFs from YouTube and other video platforms with an easy-to-use interface. After gaining popularity and forming a partnership with Giphy, it was acquired to become part of Giphy’s in-house GIF creation tools.

TLDR
Starting the GIF creation process using GIFFFFR is as simple as entering a YouTube URL.
A browser mockup showing the GIFFFFR landing screen, with a simply URL entry field to begin.

Introduction

Animating the internet.

Animated GIFs have become the social language of the internet, used across Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, emails, and even text messages. While everyone uses them, it's hard for people to make their own — the current tools and applications out there are complicated, slow, and make small, low-quality GIFs. GIFFFFR is a web application that was built to solve that very problem: enter a YouTube video, select your size and time, add a caption, and you have a high quality GIF that can be directly uploaded to various platforms for social sharing.

Using modern HTML5 and JavaScript, all of the rendering of the video to GIF is client-side with low server overhead and no back-end processing of the image. GIFFFFR was covered by multiple blogs and online magazines, including The Atlantic, FastCo.Labs, Yahoo! Tech, and Wired, as well as making the front page of Product Hunt.

Visitors are able to select time stamps to crop the video, set the output size, adjust the speed of the GIF, and even add their own captions to display at the top or bottom. Once created, visitors can download or share directly to Imgur and Giphy.
Two browser mockups showing the GIF creation process in GIFFFFR, selecting time, size, speed, and adding captions.
Peter Venkman's “World of the Psychic” reaction face (from Ghostbusters II) made using GIFFFFR.
A GIF of Peter Venkman from Ghostbusters II, created using GIFFFFR

Partnership & Acquisition

Making friends with (and being bought by) the best.

After launch, GIFFFFR partnered with Giphy, the leading (and most fun) GIF sharing platform on the web to become their primary tool for creating GIFs from videos and uploading directly to Giphy. This partnership also led to an increase in capabilities — users were now able to use not only YouTube videos, but also Vevo, Vimeo, Vine, and a whole list of other sites (some of which even start with letters other than V) as their GIF creation source, as well as see these animated GIFs in action when sharing to Twitter and Facebook.

Once the partnership was concluded, GIFFFFR was acquired by Giphy to become part of their in-house public facing GIF creation toolkit.

Since its launch, GIFFFFR users have created and uploaded over 2,700 GIFs to the platform, leading to over 969 million total views and the top GIF getting over 95 million views on its own.

Results

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