Transcripts
1. Getting Giphy With It: Hi. I'm illustrator and designer Ilana Griffo. This class is all about making illustrated and a hand lettered GIFs for Instagram stories. It's a great way to get creative and make something fun for your friends or followers, or to enhance your brand experience on the platform. First things first, some people say JIF, like the peanut butter, but I prefer to say GIF, either one works for me. GIFs are simple, small, and animated. It's really fun to create seasonal items or GIFs to celebrate milestones or important events. GIFs are really fun way to create a cohesive brand experience through Instagram stories. There are so many options for adding animation, and we'll only cover a few of them in the class. You can use scale, color, flickering, rotations and so much more. You don't need to be a Photoshop wit to take this class, but there are a ton of classes on Skillshare about Photoshop, if you want to start there. Let's get started.
2. Creating Gifs with Photoshop: The first thing I did was make a list of what gifts I wanted and thought about how I'd want them to look. That way I can create all the illustrations and lettering at one time. I made these on my iPad Pro using my lettering brush pack, I'll link to that below. Start with a Photoshop file that's at least 800 pixels wide. Make sure its RGB color mode and then place your artwork onto organized layers, so that you can edit each one separately. Now let's make sure our background is transparent. We're going to unlock this layer and delete it. The checkerboard in the background means there's no color. The other thing I want to do here is remove any of the extra white. I'm going to click on the layer, grab my magic wand by pressing W, select the white and delete it. If you hold down shift, you can grab more than one area. My second layer, I'll do the same thing. What I did here is I drew the same word twice on top of each other on separate layers so they would be similar but a little different, creating a little motion between them. That way when it flips back and forth really quickly, it'll just shake a little bit. I think I want to keep them as the same color as each other so I'm going to go ahead and do a color overlay. Just click on fx, color overlay, double-click on the color and you can type in any color number or pick one. Press Okay and we're going to do that same thing to the second layer. The next thing I'm going to do is animate. This one's really simple, so it's a great place to start. We're going to move to our timeline so to get this timeline to appear, you go to Window timeline. You want to click frame animation. I have one layer on. I'm going to turn this to 0.2 seconds. That frame is going to stay there for 0.2 seconds before moving to the next. I'll click here to create a new frame, and I'll turn off that layer and turn on the next. If I go back to the beginning and press play, this fun little dancing tap, tap. Perfect for adding to your Instagram story to encourage someone to tap on the photo to learn more. Great, that one was super simple, let's move on to the next one. For this one, I want to have the wine disappear from the glass. So I have each different level of wine on a separate layer. That way I can turn one off and the wine will get lower and lower until the glass is empty. I'm going to pick a nice rose color. First I filled the layer by using the fill tool and then I went over it with the brush just to get any extra edges it might have missed. You can see when I deselect, there were still some black, so I'm going to select again and use my brush tool. I want my first frame of my animation to be the full glass. I'm going to create a frame animation with all four layers turned on. My first frame is full, and then on the second frame I'm going to switch the layers so that there's less in the glass. Another frame, and the last frame will be the empty glass. Press play to see how it looks. Obviously it's way too fast, so we're going to turn each one to 0.2 seconds. But at least we know it's working. Speed again, perfect. Exactly what I was looking for. This last one has a couple extra elements, so the heart is one layer, and then each line are on the edge, is its own layer, so I can turn each one on individually. I want the heart to be that same pink color. I'm going to click on that layer. I'm going to do that again because I think it missed a couple of spots. Then I want the lines on the outside to be different colors. I'm going to go to the first one. I want the first line to be this nice coral colors. I'm going to pick one of my favorite corals, click on the layer, you can see it's selected from the dancing ants and fill it in. I'm going to speed this part up, but I'm going to go ahead and add color to the rest of them. I decided I also want my heart to get bigger and smaller as the lines get added. I'm going to make a second layer can play with the size of my heart and also naming them so I know which one's which. I've made sure every layer that I want to have on the first frame is on and I'm going to create my frame animation. For my next frame, I'm going to turn off all of the lines except one. Now, I'm going to continue that and add each one as a new frame. This is where ordering them and naming them has been really helpful. It's also important that you don't make changes to your layer, and once you've frame animation. Once you change a layer, it's going to affect that item on every frame. If you have changes to make, duplicate the layer so you're not working destructively. I'm going to go through and make those all 0.2 seconds. There we go. Now I want to play with the size of the heart. I'm going to go back, now instead of scaling that one layer, I'm going to go back and add the second layer. Now it'll get bigger and smaller by turning on our off the layer. Let's see how it looks. I think that's super cute, so now I'm going to export it.
3. Saving Your Gifs: I have a couple of tips for exporting your gifts. By going to File, Export, and Save for Web, you want to click on GIF 128 Dithered, it'll automatically pop up to 128 colors. Even though I only have one, a lot of colors are coming into play because it's pixels. You can bump it up to 256 but you may not need to. As you can see when I zoom in, there's a white border around and that's the Matte. If you click on Matte and click "None", you should see that disappear. You'll also notice even they have 256 colors, it's realized that I only used one color. The more colors you use, the more colors will show here, especially if you're using a gradient, or a foil, or even an image. The next thing you want to do is make sure you're at 800 pixels. There's really no need to make it bigger as it's going to be a really small file. The other option that we want to make sure we have is that our looping option is set to forever, that way the animation continues to play anytime someone's looking at it. Then click "Save", and you're done.
4. Uploading To Giphy: Now I want to show you guys how you can get these accessible for other people to use on Instagram stories and other platforms. The first thing you want to do is sign up on giphy.com, G-I-P-H-Y, as a brand channel. You want to make sure that you sign up as a brand and not an artist. That way your page gets verified and your gifs will be searchable. You can see right here the URL, so you can do this. It should take just a few days to get verified. Sometimes, it takes a bit longer, so reach out to them if you have any issues. It's really easy to upload your gifs to your Giphy page. All you need to do is go to giphy.com, and once you're signed in and just click on Upload, browse your files. For your source URL, you'll want to use your website or wherever you're directing people to, and for tags you want to enter things that people will search. So tap here or CAM lettering, maybe the color, if it's seasonal, you can have a lot of fun. The other tag you want to make sure you include is your brand name. That way people can search your brand page and you can create awareness around your brand. Click Upload, and you should see your gif shortly. It may take a couple days, but you should be able to search it on Instagram or another platform pretty quickly.
5. Finding & Using Your Gifs On Instagram: In this video, I'm going to show you guys how to access your GIFs and how to use them on Instagram. Open Instagram and I'm going to go to My photo gallery. Click on the little smiley face, and click on GIF. Now, when I'm in there I can search my name and the GIFs that I have available at the moment, show right up. Yeah, planners. I want to show you so of my favorites. Kristen is a friend of mine and I love her GIFs. They are so fun. Little avocado toast and I love these, they are so cute. I love the little seasonal ones. There you go, easy as [inaudible].
6. Thanks! : Thanks so much for taking this class, I hope you enjoyed it. Be sure to upload your creations to the class project. If you share them on Instagram, you can tag me @ILANAGRIFFO. You can also follow me on Skillshare to stay tuned for updates and new classes. See you next time.
Ilana Griffo, Artist & Author
