Design + Code + Identity

GIFFFFR.

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.

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 as their GIF creation source, as well as see these animated GIFs in action when sharing to Twitter and Facebook. During this time, GIFFFFR users uploaded over 2,700 GIFs to the platform, leading to over 228 million views and the top GIF getting almost 24 million views on its own. Once the partnership was concluded, GIFFFFR was acquired by Giphy to become part of their in-house public facing GIF creation toolkit.

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

The GIFFFFR site displayed on a computer
GIF creation process for GIFFFFR
A screen showing a completed GIF made using GIFFFFR

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
Animated logo for GIFFFFR

A look at the Giphy dashboard while partnered with GIFFFFR, showing 2,700 uploads, over 288 million views, and the top GIF having almost 24 million views.

GIPHY Dashboard screenshot showing GIFFFFR stats - 2.7 thousand GIF uploads and 228.1 million GIF views, with the top GIF having over 23 million views
About

I fell in love with design and code in 7th grade when I built a webpage in Microsoft Word.

Hosted on GeoCities, it was a middle schooler’s dream of Star Wars: lightsabers, starfields, hyperspace, character profiles, and, of course, the Mos Eisley cantina band song playing in a MIDI loop in the background. Since then, I’ve grown up alongside the web — the introduction of CSS, the explosion of JavaScript, the death of animated GIFs, the birth of Flash, the death of Flash, the rebirth of animated GIFs, Web 2.0, and too many search engines to mention (along the way, I taught myself how to make websites a little bit better than that first one). Now I'm a designer for Taco Bell — your favorite place to grab a delicious taco at 3AM on the way home from an unforgettable night out with friends.

I live in Richmond, Virginia. I have a border collie named Logan (yes, after the X-Man). I’m a sneakerhead and font nerd. I organize my closet by color. I was born on a Friday. I’ve been to the emergency room in every place I’ve ever lived.

Do you have an awesome project that needs design, code, or identity? I’m available for very limited freelance work, so reach out.

Additional Clients: African Wildlife Foundation, AOL, Audi Financial Services, Clyde's Restaurant Group, Comcast, Custom Ink, Doubletree by Hilton, EVERFI, Habitat for Humanity, jQuery Foundation, Neustar, RAINN, Renaissance Hotels by Marriott, Sweetgreen, Volkswagen Financial Services.