posted on Feb, 27 2013 @ 08:49 PM
So I have a new idea.
(That shouldn't be strange, coming from me.)
The whole lining up of avatars that are animated to match a background image was a neat exercise. But we solved it. It's doable, and now that we
now how, meh, kinda boring.
However, many people tote a profile background, and place a transparent .gif on top of it, as their avatar.
Okay. That's the standard. But why? People love the full image perspective. Avatars are too tiny, and all that space needs used. Right?
There are some people here who are animation deficient, (*ahem* bfft, who continuously states he sucks at animations) but I suck at graphic design.
I'm not an artist like you guys are.
An animation is nothing more than a series of pics that are encapsulated into a .gif file, and everyone's software should be able to export to .gif
format. It's just frames, a pic that is altered, and the end result is usually no more than 6 frames to achieve a suitable animation.
.gifs often have a transparent background. Most people have a transparent 170 x 240 avatar.
See where I'm going with this?
A sort of collaborative effort where we share techniques, and erase the mystery of animations once and for all. The canvas is the proverbial avatar
space, a transparent 170x240 block, that could bring effects to a person's background image. I'm emphasizing subtle here, nothing flashy. We
don't want the transparent avatars to induce epilepsy, but we do want to have effects that would be suitable across a wide variety of background
images.
The idea?
A butterfly that flits across the avatar space every 5 seconds or so.
An ATS logo that fades in and out, every 8 seconds or so.
A UFO that floats across the appropriate background.
A bird that flies in, and lands, and flies off.
The sun rising, and setting. The shadow effect, awesome on that one.
The point is that they need to be generalized, and match a variety of backgrounds. Easily switchable.
Keep in mind, the animated avatars should be able to be popped above any background image, without interfering with the overall effect.
The alignment factor is irrelevant. The file size is. All transparent animated avatars are limited to 75kb. They need to be kept sweet, short, and
simple.
I think the most popular would be the ATS logo as an animated avatar, with a 5-8 second delay. Anyone want to do that one?