However you pronounce it (the raging battle between Jif and Gif), GIFs have become an integral part of internet culture and are playing a major role in how we traverse the vast chaos emitted down the fiber-optic cables and through our computer screens. In fact, it’s one of the biggest challenges that design can solve in today’s world. As such, the internet is teeming with a plethora of new GIF artists every day, and thanks to the popularity of GIPhy, Tumblr and blogging in general, these artists have evolved the GIF game in the last few years. Here are 30 awesome GIF Artists you should know, who continue to defy the limits of technology and art to rock our perception of reality.
Anthony Antonellis’s work engages playfully with the network culture and explores its relationship to IRL phenomenon such as physical objects, bodies, and institutions. What Anthony loves best about GIFs is their nearly universal compatibility and a unique set of restrictions. These self-contained little packages have an incredible reach. He doesn’t exactly perceive the process of creating GIFs as a distinct practice. Sometimes he creates a GIF, sometimes a painting, and at other times it ends up as both.
He draws his imagination from all over the place, such as screenshots, image searches, video sites, and more. Since the element of familiarity is crucial to him, he loves to collect and obsessively archive assets. He grabs at every chance to swap out a stock photo for something personal, as incorporating items he has owned into his GIFs is important to him. View more of Anthony’s breathtaking GIF art and explore unique Amazing PFPs here.
We are absolutely riveted by these wonderfully weird GIFs from London-based animator and illustrator Edward Carvalho-Monaghan, which channel the best of comic art.
Featuring an array of shapes, monsters and bizarre creatures, each GIF leverages a thick black outline and brash, bold hues that demand the viewer’s attention and make an instant impact. Check out more of his awesome works here.
This highly proficient artist combines solid colors and simple shapes, and brings them to life in truly expressive ways. She splits her time between Georgia, USA and Hong Kong. She designed her first GIF in 2012 as a logo for her website. She aspired to create a lasting mark that highlights her as specializing in graphics, illustrations, as well as motion design. Naturally, making a GIF was the most viable option.
Cindy is enamored with creating GIFs as they are more capable of capturing her attention than static images. She has a propensity to overthink almost everything which is pretty helpful in generating ideas. Another reason she likes GIFs is that they make everyday notions and things loop and move forever within a couple frames. Check out Cindy Suen’s mesmerizing artist page here.
Charlie Deck, also known as BigBlueBoo, is a New York-based creative technologist who is apt at creating games, apps, and data visualization, while focusing on “the fun, serendipitous, weird, and impractical.” This leads to stupendous illusions that incorporate seamless loops; it’s a simultaneously meditative and mesmerizing experience to watch rippling straight lines transform like a rock hitting the surface of a pond.
Check out more of his stunning works here.
Toyota Li created her first GIF in 2011, and couldn’t stem her fascination for this art form afterwards. She aspires to create pixel animation as pixilation is her favorite form of creation. She tries to glean inspiration from animation films and old TV games, and expresses her ideas with a retro pixel style. She loves GIFs since loop animation gives people a feeling of magic and her GIFs can be compounded with a short animation to give birth to interesting stories.
Click here to see more of Toyoya Li’s awe-inspiring pixel GIF art!
Sachin Teng’s GIFs are idiosyncratic in the best possible ways, with extraordinarily intricate designs that perfectly blend the glitched-out, cartoon-like with the realistic. Sachin believes that Art is less a craft than it is a language, and since often times things get lost in translation, he splurges most of his time unearthing the artifacts that have been left behind. His list of clients span big names like Adidas, The New Yorker, and Wired amongst others.
Check out more of this New York-based artist’s quirky GIFs at sachinteng.com
Jeremy Sengly attended the University of Minnesota with a focus on Graphic Design, and with his love for animation, GIFs seemed like a fun place to kick start his career. While working at a small shop called PUNY, he picked up on the ins and outs of animation on his own. Currently, he works in the GIF department at ADHD.
Jeremy Sengly relishes in working with the innate restrictions of the GIF format. In order to upload onto Tumblr, the GIFs cannot be greater than 1 MB. This makes him regularly decide tradeoffs between splurging a lot of time illustrating Gifs or super intensely animating them. He thrills at the chance to work in those restrictions and leverage places like looping, which make his GIFs unique.
Check out more incredible GIFs by Jeremy Sengly here!
Rebecca Mock is a Brooklyn-based MICA graduate, illustrator, GIF artist, and comic cartoonist, who is a pro at creating paintings like images that tend to have subtle movements. The result is an atmospheric, cinematic effect which is pretty unique in the world of GIFs. Her GIFs have appeared in The New York Times, as well as the Adventure Time comics.
Check out more of her remarkable works here.
Like many upcoming artists out there, The GIF Connoisseur leverages Tumblr as a platform to display his animated images. All the GIFs on his page feature a man clad in a blue suit, standing motionless with his back facing viewers, against varying backdrops of video games, skyscrapers, and darker images.
Check out more of his amazing works here.
London-based designer and illustrator Laurène Boglio has created mesmerizing works for Converse and Little White lies, but it is these simple GIFs on her blog that tugged at our heart strings. They make us reminisce the works of Nimura Daisuke, as they echo the same thick line work and cheeky spirit. However, while the works of Nimura highlighted whole characters, Laurène is rather predisposed towards the gestures of people, through the movement of their limbs and their hands.
Most of her GIFs are imbued with obscure undertones, with repeated paper-cutting of fanned fingers in a famous animation or multiple thumbs appearing on one hand in another. She alters her style from time to time, drawing the negative by subverting her monochrome or adding in more details in places, thus further expounding the experimental nature of her works.
Check out more of her astounding GIFs here.
Falcão Lucas is the illustrative team consisting of the married couple Avelar Lucas and Tânia Falcão. When it comes to their creative process, it usually kicks off when one of them does an illustration that would look nice animated, and the other creates an animation for it. Other times, one of them starts experimenting with images, shapes, or whatever they get their hands on, and creates a new animation from scratch.
As you may have noticed with their illustrations and GIFs, they are a bit hectic when it comes to style and subject. The notion of the perfect loop seems to be an integral part of their GIFs, since the creation of a sense of “eternity” formed by the illusion of a few frames, is very appealing to them.
Check out more of their amazing works here.
The GIFs of the Sydney-based illustrator and animator Chris Phillip are so consistently quirky, fun, and brilliant, that you would have a hard time picking your favorite. Chris Phillips is a master of vector-illustrated, character-driven, animation—specially “odd little GIF loops,” as he calls them. His work stands out from competitors, mainly because of the ideas at the center; they are usually slightly dark, humorous or eccentric. Chris couldn’t be happier about the resurgence of GIF as a format, as he finds it easier to create something small and get it in front of people.
Check out more of his wonderful works here.
Accessibility and immediacy is what got Miranda Pfeiffer hooked to the GIF format. This Los Angeles-based artist and animator loves quiet art with a big presence. Unlike movies which blast you with an avalanche of sound and need extensive periods of physical immobility, you can scroll quietly by a GIF, barely even noticing it.
Pfeiffer has a knack for turning mundane, everyday objects into surreal, strange scenes of complex beauty and movement. Inspired by the average things she gets to grip with in daily life, the artist uses tracing paper and mechanical pencils to illustrate each frame meticulously, and later sequences them in Photoshop to give birth to seamless animations that loop incessantly. Check out more amazing hand drawn GIF art from Miranda Pfeiffer here.
Each of Min Liu’s surrealist GIFs, stylized in black and red with a hand-drawn quality, manage to convey a definitive emotion or feeling in the space of a few seconds. The sheer volume of her GIFs is one of the most redeeming qualities of her animations, as this allows viewers a generous dip into her world of body language, shark-infested blood baths, and cats galore.
Check out more of her works here.
Alec Mackenzie tries to entertain himself with what he creates, and most of his ideas come when he is listening to music, sitting at his laptop, or about to doze off. That is when he languidly taps them into his phone so that he would remember what he was supposed to be doing with random words and phrases. He finds GIFs an intuitive way of working, discovers something gratifying in their looping repetitive nature, just like clockwork toys and old zoetropes continue to fascinate us even today.
Before finding bliss in the world of GIFs, Alec was disgruntled with producing large-scale geometric wall drawings in his art studio, which entailed investing a plethora of planning and measuring efforts, not leaving much room for fun. He saw in GIFs a chance to go back to the basics and creating work purely for enjoyment again.
Check out more splendid GIFs by Alec here.
NYC native Claire Marie Christerson is currently pursuing a degree at the School of Visual Arts. Even as a student, her portfolio is a repertoire of clothing, video, collages, as well as hypnotic GIFs. Inspired by “bling” and “mystical creatures”, her eclectic GIFs are a chock full of Hello Kitty, Lisa Frank, Unicorns, and all things cute, touched up with an undercurrent of weird!
Check out more of her works here.
Fabricated by French student Guillaume Kurkdjian, who specializes in video direction, 2D and 3D animation, and photography, these GIFs are subtle and simple, forming irresistible looking, clean animations that always tell a clever or funny, yet a simple, story. Not to mention, his tiny characters are bursting with life. His latest collection of animated GIFs, entitled ‘Bisous Les Copains’, combines all his efforts and is a gorgeous source of inspiration.
Check out more of his works here.
Growing up, David Michael Chandler aspired to be a movie director, which is why most of his design ideas revolve around editing and movement, and transforming his illustrations into short animations helped satiate that childhood desire. He believes that his illustrations lack meaning or purpose until they are imbued with movement, which is when they take on a life of their own.
David Michael Chandler’s GIFs are colored and drawn by hand, and the combination of illustrations and movements completed with colored pencils, is fun for him. The succinct nature of GIFs suits his style as he finds it less daunting than attempting an actual animated short film. Check out more amazing GIF art from David Michael Chandler here.
The 22-year-old designer Paolo, AKA Patakk, is currently based in Zagreb, Croatia. He has recently come up with a series of animated GIFs that has left us riveted to our screens. With fonts, faces, triangles, and typography to peruse through, his GIFs are replete with opportunities for inspiration. Part pop-culture commentary, part Escher and all cool, the collection is one you cannot miss out. He draws inspiration from literally everywhere, without proactively seeking it. Also, he leverages internet to explore works of other artists whose ideas resonate with his, to learn from their experiences.
Check out more of his awesome works here.
Jeremy McKeehen’s “Kiss from the Soul” delves in to one moment of bliss repeating forever, stretched out into a thousand moments. The strange liminal space reminds one of the mind’s eye, which replays all kinds of memories over and over again. The concept of everyday infinity is widely depicted and discussed in his work. McKeehen states that “after all the questions are asked, and all are answered, we revert to what is right in front of us.” This is something all of us need to contemplate seriously. He instructs us all to explore deeper into the moment to find out what is real and what is true.
Check out more of his earth-shattering GIFs here.
We have finally got on our hands a modern day Michelangelo. Portland-based Digital Artist Zack Dougherty, more commonly called by his Tumblr username Hateplow, creates GIFs which put the Greek sculptures in a whole new light. Zack has shown a predilection for juxtaposition of art, classical sculptures, GIFs, and the everyday backdrops. Dougherty captures images of figurative sculptures before pixelating them and imbuing them with geometric edges. He brings life to lifeless paintings, buildings, sculptures, and more.
Check out more of his mind-bending work here.
NYC-based creative Carl Burton makes monochromatic, surreal, and atmospheric GIFs that are oddly calming, yet totally bizarre. Working as an illustrator, 3D artist, and animator, Burton has amassed all his expertise to produce a collection of rather beautiful offerings. Inspired by everything from his surroundings to news stories, intricate animations and colors make these GIFs stand out from the crowd. In addition to his personal experiments, he also offers his illustrative style to images for web-wide long-form publications.
Check out more of his GIFs here.
The 21st century update of the sixteenth century masterpiece, “The Garden of Earthly Delight”, is one of the most prized GIFs created by the Brooklyn artist Carla Gannis, formed by replacing religious vocabulary with contemporary and secular digital symbols. Her work balances cutting-edge insights, politics, and humor into GIFS that are infinitely watchable.
According to Carla, “My work examines the narrativity of 21st century representational technologies and questions the hybrid nature of identity, where virtual and real embodiments of self, diverge and intersect.” Check out more of her works here.
Elle Muliarchyk’s GIFs are imbued with a sense of joy and fun, something fashion photography isn’t exactly known for. First and foremost, she’s an artist, but she’s also a storyteller and a model. As you may have noticed, most GIFs on the internet are derived from pre-existing video content, but not Elle’s. She strives to show beauty and fashion in innovative ways. She believes that a peek-behind-the-curtains, sense of humor, and a narrative are key factors behind her works. The light tone gives her series of transformational GIFs an almost improvisational feel, but they’re also very tightly constructed. She sees GIFs as the future of fashion photography and hopes to be the pioneer of that change.
Check out more of her gorgeous work here.
Inspired by the pop art evolution of recent decades as well as the digitized look of early video games, the GIF art of Lacey Micallef hits you in the face and doesn’t apologize. She has also famously collaborated with Meredith Gran of Octopus Pie fame.
Check out more of her works here.
The style of Japan-based illustrator Ryan Andrews is somewhat rudimentary, but it definitely sticks with you. His well-known comics include Eisner Award-nominated Sarah and the Seed, and Our Bloodstained Roof, in addition to many others.
Check out more of his GIFs here.
Animator and illustrator Ori Toor found out his innate talent for timing and old-fashioned frame-by-frame animation when he took a handful of animation classes in college. Based in Tel-Aviv, Ori Toor makes a living making animated art and music videos. Famous for his distinct style when animating, Ori is a pro at improvising frame-by-frame loops, separating them, and editing them back together like Lego blocks. The ability to create gesture and movement excites Ori, and is something that always precedes the illustration itself.
According to Ori,
“I start by animating a shape, then I add another shape and yet another until a character is born. I enjoy the feeling of crafting weight and inertia one frame at a time – it feels like magic. The freedom of it is somewhere between modern puppetry and dance.”
Check out more of his mesmerizing works here.
When it comes to the selfie game, John Cate’s is on point, elevating Photobooth pics to a whole other level. A graduate of Danube University in Austria and of Illinois State University, Cates is currently teaching at the animation, new media, video, and film department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It hardly comes as a surprise, given that all his selfies are GIFs of him being a badass and throwing up the sign of the horns. Check out more of his whacky GIFs here.
Sometimes one aspires to induce a brain aneurism, while at others one may want to look at provocative political art. There’s hardly a need to limit ourselves. Creative German artist Peekaso’s GIFs are eye-grabbing and vibrant, and he has a penchant for sad Pepe and Donald Trump, so he’s your man for tropical, topical doses of LOLs.
Check out more of his works here.
Hold your horses! While you may want to steer way clear of crappy fan Art, you won’t be able to resist Eran Mendel’s Creative, fresh, and charming, GIFs of Game of Thrones season 6. Not to mention, the rest of his works are equally brilliant, as you can peruse here. Graduated from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in 2004, Eran is an animator and illustrator, specializing in character design and illustrations for mobile, web, print, TV, and advertising.
Do you know of more amazing GIF artists who are rocking the design world? Do let us know in the comments below!
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Not a new kid on the block but a crazy old bloke called Dave Sutton who is past his sell by date but he does make some good animated gifs
7000 followers on G+ but about to lose them all.