Videos, stories, gifs outperform ordinary photos and texts in terms of reach. We tell you how to make animation for presentations, social networks, blogs and how it is useful.
The caveman reacted to anything that moved because it was either dangerous or could be dinner. Hundreds and thousands of years have passed since then, and we still, at the level of a reflex, notice moving objects. Only now they are used on advertising banners and flickering store signs, in presentations and on websites.
Animation draws attention and holds the eye. Hence the crazy popularity of GIFs in social networks. Another reason to understand how to create animations is that they allow you to tell a story, which is another trend in marketing and social media.
Today, making animation is much easier than it seems. We collected cool examples of presentations, gifs, and even mini movies and tried to create similar ones in Canva. Learn how to make animation and grab the audience’s attention.
How to make an animation for a presentation
Animation in a presentation can perform several functions at once. Animated objects draw attention to the most important facts and figures, transitions between slides help to mark a change of topic and “return” those who are bored or distracted to the presentation.
The main rule in choosing animation is that content is more important than beauty. If animation interferes with perceiving the meaning of the presentation, then it is superfluous. Long “spectacular” flights of each letter will not help the audience to remember the idea. Another thing is when the most important elements attract attention, especially if the presentation itself is logical and well structured.
How to make animation in a presentation useful? Use each effect meaningfully: the points fly out one after another – the audience sees the sequence, the logical chain, the stages of the process; objects “fade” and disappear – the viewer understands that we are talking about losses, losses. Make each slide speak.
See how animation drives attention in Sberbank’s presentation for the Central Russian Economic Forum. Here, animation has two tasks: it helps the viewer understand where to look, and it creates a mood. Pictures slide smoothly – and it seems that we are talking about something simple, light.
Sberbank presentation for the Central Russian Economic Forum You can achieve a similar feeling with the help of Canva. It provides a special mode for creating and showing presentations. To create an animation in a Canva presentation, you need to use the desktop version of the service. Select the “Presentation” template from the list, or enter this word into the search.
- Choose your favorite design or create your own from scratch: add text, pictures and decorative elements to each presentation slide.
- Then, from the Presentation menu, choose the effects for your presentation. Slides can flow smoothly into each other or change dynamically on the screen.
- To see what happened, start the show in Standard mode. For a presentation, the “Autoplay” mode is suitable: it will change slides after a specified time.
- If you want to switch slides yourself during a presentation, select Presenter View. Canva will create a second screen that can be shown to viewers on a projector. And the first one, only for the speaker, will also display a timer, the speaker’s notes and the order of the slides – this will help to talk about the case and meet the allotted time.
- Use this template
You can show your presentation with animated effects from any computer with Internet access – all you need to do is sign in to your Canva account. So you won’t forget a flash drive with a presentation at home, or run into an old version of PowerPoint that doesn’t display your fonts or animations correctly. The performance will be a hit!
How to make a gif animation for an article, website or social networks
GIFs are quickly loaded, easily integrated into any environment – both in the Vkontakte feed and in a scientific article. With the help of animated pictures, it is convenient to explain complex concepts, tell funny stories, or simply evoke emotions in the reader.
GIFs are often used in advertising banners. Banners are usually placed in the sidebars of a site, and marketers need to make them stand out in order to grab attention. GIF just solves this problem: the movement attracts the user’s eye.
Banners are usually small, you can’t write a lot of text on them in small size – as a result, all the benefits of the product simply do not fit in one picture. A GIF allows you to talk about a product in pictures: on each frame, talk about a separate property of the product or show an item from the catalog.
See how to make a gif animation for a salesperson. In contextual advertising, the MYTH GIF tells about discounts on the catalog of books that I was interested in:
Animated teaser on Afisha Daily website
You can also use a moving image for posts on social networks. This will help you stand out in the feed. If the first frame is interesting or intriguing to the user, they will pause to see what happens next.
See how the Sekta Body School declares one of the principles of their training. The light bulb idea is not only fun, it’s simple: all you need to do is take two shots.
GIFs have another cool property – they help convey complex emotions, explain non-standard phenomena. Such gifs are suitable for presentations, websites and media. Thanks to them, there is a whole genre of “Explaining with GIFs” in online media, when scientific, technical topics are revealed using GIFs. At the same time, the gif does not necessarily illustrate the topic, sometimes it just gives a rest in the middle of complex text. For example, in Meduza’s article “9 situations when you need high-speed Internet”, the gifs in each of the cards convey emotions and are well remembered.
In Canva, you can assemble a GIF from photos and pictures with animation elements. Let’s look at this method using the example of advertising a furniture store.
Choose a template with the desired dimensions. We will be posting on Instagram. Place the desired objects and text on it. In the “Download” tab, select the “Animation” file type.
Then choose how to animate the text and pictures (we chose smooth), and save the composition as a gif animation.We got such a square gif, which is convenient to use for advertising on Instagram, on the website or in social networks: