Artists like Guillaume Kurkdjian are using animated GIFs to a somewhat unique end: creating tasteful (and sometimes commissioned) illustrations. Image: Guillaume Kurkdjian Rebecca Mock, a Brooklyn-based illustrator, is one of a handful of artists who have done GIF work for the New York Times. Laurene Boglio, a French graphic designer and illustrator based in London, started exploring GIFs two years ago as a way to add “a new dimension” to her drawings. Image: Laurene Boglio “Producing a GIF is essentially a matter of patience,” she says. “I find making them very relaxing.” Image: Laurene Boglio Illustrator Robin Davey has been contributing masterful GIFs to WIRED Italia. Image: Robin Davey Kurkdjian posts his GIFs weekly on a Tumblr, which has new garnered some 17,000 followers. Image: Guillaume Kurkdjian Boglio says she's had a few commissioned, but often times they fall through. Image: Laurene Boglio Erich Nadler, an art director for the Times, explains how they can be more work: "The trick with animated GIFs is that the final image needs to work as both a still image in print that can stand on its own, and also as an animation online that adds to the meaning or emotional resonance of the image and the story." Image: Laurene Boglio When done right, though, they can add a subtle bit of action to a layout. Image: Guillaume Kurkdjian Image: Laurene Boglio

While animated GIFs have trampled over still images, Flash animations, and even in some cases video clips as a way to inject multimedia pizazz into text-based content, animated illustrations remain a rarity. It's a bit odd. Flip through an issue of The New Yorker or open up the Sunday Review section of The New York Times and you'll find heaps of illustrations, begging to be animated. Look at the web versions of those visuals, though, and they're almost always lifeless. Almost always.

Flip through The New Yorker and you'll find heaps of illustrations, begging to be animated.If you happened to read the web version of "Main Street's Landlord," a Times op-ed piece from last Fall, you'd see one example of how animated illustrations have started to creep into some big-name publications. The GIF, a play on Edward Hopper's Early Sunday Morning by Brooklyn-based artist Rebecca Mock, doesn't hit you over the head with activity. It shows a sleepy storefront, with a sign blowing gently in the wind and a blinking red hand warning pedestrians to hurry up. It's subtle and restrained. What it is, really, is something that's practically an antonym for "animated GIF": It's tasteful.

It's also not the only one of its kind. Mock has contributed a handful of these animated images to the Times–all collaborations with Erich Nagler, an art director for the paper. "I first noticed some stunning personal work in animated GIFs on her website and wanted to use her in the paper," Nagler says. "But I needed to wait for the right story–and later, stories–to cross my desk that her style would be appropriate for." Mock's GIFs capture the subtle movement that makes up everyday life, not the guy cannon-balling into the pool but the trees swaying gently behind it. "I am inspired by quiet moments in film and photography, and I see people often making these moments into GIFs," she says. "It is a passion of people like us to find these moments and capture them in writing, photography and painting."

But hers aren't the only GIFs that have appeared on the Times' site. Illustrator Oliver Munday introduced a subtle bit of motion to his graphic for a Thomas Friedman column last December; Javier Jaen Benavides made the iPhone in his illustration for surveillance-related news story last summer come to life. In one particularly effective example, Brian Stauffer used the looping nature of the GIF to drive home the monotony of life in prison in a visual for a letter to the editor. (Of course, in an article about GIFs, it would be wrong not to include one.)

Making GIFs from video clips–be it a YouTube folly or one of Don Draper's smirks–requires nothing more than some software, some Googled instructions, and some patience. With animated illustrations, you still have to know how to draw. That's one obvious reason this variety of GIF hasn't been as common as some others. But for artists, making the transition isn't as hard as you might think. Mock started toying with animated versions of her illustrations around a year ago, just as a personal experiment. "I knew the basic technique from playing around in Photoshop," she explains.

>Creating the things, she found, was sometimes even therapeutic.

For someone who's spent plenty of time rendering static scenes, she says, the software's animation tool was "simple to master." Laurene Boglio, a French graphic designer and illustrator based in London, started exploring GIFs two years ago as a way to add "a new dimension" to her drawings. Creating the things, she found, was surprisingly simple–and sometimes even therapeutic. "Producing a GIF is essentially a matter of patience," she says. "I find making them very relaxing."

After initially making GIFs for her personal blog, Boglio started getting some commissions for online magazines. "I felt lucky because it was a new way of using my illustrations and a chance to work with a deadline in mind," she says. But getting the GIFs to work within the constraints of particular websites' publishing systems can be a challenge. Mock has been commissioned to do GIFs for other publications besides the Times, but more than once, the animated versions ended up getting scrapped. "I think the style I work in, which is more painterly and realistic, doesn't always compress to a 256-color GIF well," she says.

The GIFs can mean extra work for editors, too. In the case of the Times, it requires zeroing in on a visual idea that can do double duty. "The trick with animated GIFs is that the final image needs to work as both a still image in print that can stand on its own, and also as an animation online that adds to the meaning or emotional resonance of the image and the story," Nagler says.

And that's just the beginning of the process. "It can be tough to commission GIFs, because our turnaround times and general workload are already super-tight. Plus it requires a second approval process of showing the editors both versions—animated and still–and sometimes making a case for why the animation adds significant value to the image. Then coordinating with our Web producers to get the animation at all the correct sizes for all the ways and places it appears on our site and in our apps."

Usually, though, editors are willing to entertain new ideas for adding some extra visual oomph to the pieces they publish, and Nagler continues to go through the extra legwork involved when the occasion calls. In fact, at this point, he's used to illustrators approaching him specifically with animated contributions in mind. And there will probably be more where those came from; at Mock's alma mater, some illustration classes are already incorporating GIF-making assignments into the curriculum. "When I was in school we just used Tumblr to distract ourselves from school," she says. "Now an aspect of Tumblr culture is a part of school."

In a highly hyperactive medium at a highly hyperactive historical moment, you wouldn't be wrong to question the need for introducing more activity to our screens and, by extension, our eyeballs. Thankfully, whether or not we've already reached peak GIF elsewhere, you can count on the Times to be judicious about their use. "I think that after the initial fascination with the form, we are somewhat more selective now about when and why we publish them," Nagler says. They have to serve the story, he says, "rather than just bring more bells and whistles and visual noise, which the Internet certainly does not need."