GIFs are fun, creative, and engaging. You see them everywhere: family chats, online shops, sales collateral, to name a few. In marketing, we love to use GIFs as well because they are excellent for educating and informing the audience, showing off products, illustrating complex ideas, and telling enticing stories.
GIFs are becoming even more popular than images and videos, and we add them to enhance other pieces of content, like PDFs, flipbooks, ebooks, or digital catalogs. However, converting images and videos to GIFs isn’t an intuitive process. That’s why today we’ll talk about the best and easiest ways to make GIFs that will help you streamline your content creation process and save time and effort. Let’s get right to it!
How to Create GIFs in Canva
If you want to be creative and have fun, we recommend using Canva, an easy web design tool, to make GIFs online from images and videos. Simply follow these steps:
Creating GIFs from Images
1. Log in or sign up for a free Canva account using your email or Facebook credentials.
2. Choose a design project: narrow down your search by type, be it for a brochure, ebook, or social media graphic.
You can search for 'GIF' right away to make animated GIFs from the ready templates.
3. In the editor, select an image from Canva’s library or import it from your desktop. You can also import an image from your Instagram or Facebook accounts, or from external storage devices, like Google Drive or Dropbox.
4. Choose the number of slides you want to have in your GIF. If it’s your first design, start with a couple of slides, you can always add more later.
5. Customize your GIF design by adding stickers, graphics, and other elements from the library. Personalize further with different text styles, fonts, and color palettes. If it’s your very first GIF, go with an easy design before creating a more complex one.
6. Animate your design by clicking on a particular element you want to animate and selecting the ‘Animate’ option to pick a motion style. You can combine animations, too.
7. When your GIF is ready, you can check the preview by clicking the play button that sits next to the Share button in the top right corner, and choose the download or share option.
Here's a simple GIF example, consisting of two slides, that anyone could make in Canva, no matter the design skills.
Creating GIFs from Videos
1. Log in or sign up for a free Canva account using your email or Facebook credentials.
2. Choose a video project design from a wide selection of templates or work from scratch.
3. Upload your video files. Use a video from a personal collection, YouTube, Vimeo, or Canva’s stock video library. Add your video and position it on your layout.
4. Edit your video. You can choose a specific frame or scene from your clip, merge videos, trim a clip, or crop the footage in Canva’s video editor. Tweak the playback speed for a different effect.
5. Apply a frame, filters, and other design elements. Add text to the video for subtitles to make your new GIF more entertaining. You can use simple fonts in either black or white to keep the text readable.
6. Convert your edited video to GIF by downloading your finished clip in the GIF format.
Check out this GIF example that we made from two short videos in Canva just in a few simple steps.
So now that you have great-looking GIFs at hand, it’s high time to include them into your marketing collateral. For instance, if you create digital flipbooks, brochures, catalogs, or magazines, it will only be natural to make them more enticing with GIFs. Such digital publishing services as FlippingBook can help you add GIFs to your documents in a few clicks. Plus, thanks to smart integration with Canva and specially designed templates, you can create collateral faster and more efficiently.
See for yourself! Check out how you can make your flipbook eye-catching just by adding one simple GIF. Looks gorgeous!
We’ll talk about the ways to enhance your content with FlippingBook later in the article and now let’s look at the list of other GIF makers that you can also use.
Easy-to-Use GIF Makers
Apart from Canva, there’s a big variety of online GIF makers but not all of them focus on creating GIFs from both images and videos. Plus, if you are a beginner, you’ll need an animated GIF maker that is easy to use and has features that can help you make nice-looking GIFs even without being a professional designer. So we’ve gathered a list of the ones that allow you to do that—check them out and choose what suits you best.
Make A GIF
Make A GIF lets you make an animated GIF from multiple images, a YouTube or Facebook video, a video from your computer, or one taken directly from your webcam. It allows you to rearrange the image order using its simple drag-and-drop interface to create a GIF from images or photos. Plus, you can choose at what point in the video to start the GIF and then decide how many seconds of it should be used.
If you want to remove a watermark or make GIFs longer than 10 seconds, you need to create an account, otherwise, you can create GIFs without signing up. High-quality GIFs are available with a Premium plan.
Giphy
Giphy is a simple GIF maker that allows you to upload images, other GIFs, or videos to make a new GIF file. Import the video from Vimeo, YouTube, or your computer. Arranging the files in the order you want is very easy, and you can slide the image duration button back and forth to make the frames shorter or longer. You can also decorate your GIF with a caption, stickers, filters, and freehand drawing.
To make GIFs in Giphy, you have to create a user account.
ezgif.com
ezgif is a free gif maker for creating animated GIFs by combining separate image files as frames. You can make GIFs of high quality and free of watermarks or attribution. You can also upload your own videos from your computer or smartphone, or add a URL to make animated GIFs. Don’t forget to download the GIF when finished as there’s no online save option in ezgif.
How to Make Your Content Interactive with FlippingBook
If you want to add GIFs to many types of marketing collateral but you’re not sure how to create such collateral yet, don’t worry! We can recommend a way for you to make it simpler, especially if you use Canva. At FlippingBook, we’ve designed five amazing Canva templates for our clients and everyone who wants to create documents easily. You can make a catalog, magazine, brochure, newsletter, or digital flipbook and then add your GIFs right to them.
What's more, to improve your content creation process, we’ve launched an integration with Canva. It allows you to proceed seamlessly from creating a PDF in Canva to making and customizing your flipbook in FlippingBook. You can add GIFs in the FlippingBook Editor, thus empowering your interactive content even more.
In FlippingBook, you can also add other interactive elements for the ultimate reading experience. For instance, see how an embedded video enriches the flipbook and gives it more value:
Berkshire Real Estate Market Report
And if you add links that lead customers to your website, it will be a great way to help your audience learn more about the products and purchase them right away.
That’s it! We hope that our article will help you find the best way to create GIFs and take your marketing content to the next level, reach a wider audience, and get new loyal clients.
