Articulate Storyline doesn’t always lend itself well to GIF animations, image artifacts and blurriness are a constant nag, but through experimentation, I have found a good solution that possibly will help many of you.

The first thing to remember is that scaling GIFS within Articulate Storyline contributes to blurriness. To avoid this, design your GIF’s as close as possible to the final output size for your course, don’t resize within Storyline.

Secondly, make sure you avoid linear GIF’s with an alpha channel, they tend to somewhat pixel corrode when imported into Storyline. If you are going to use such animations, buffer them with a solid background color that matches the exact color hex# of your course canvas.

Thirdly, I have delineated the settings that will give you a good quality GIF while saving on file size, the smaller, the better, to avoid slow launching animations.

I will not be going through the process of how to animate a GIF, maybe in some future post. I want to show you the five settings that can yield the best results.

Good quality GIF: (smaller file size)

• Set your color range to 64 (renders color images less faithfully, smaller file size)
• Dither amount 75% (reduces the color range)
• Image size is arbitrary depending on your project needs, eliminate all unnecessary space not used by the gif (reduces file size)
• Select looping forever option, unless you want it to animate once
• 6 Kbps (loads faster, smaller file size)

Best quality GIF: (larger file size)

• Set your color range to 256
• Dither amount 100%
• Image size is arbitrary depending on your project needs, eliminate all unnecessary space not used by the gif (reduces file size)
• Select looping forever option, unless you want it to animate once
• 96,000 bps Modem

Use animations where necessary within your eLearning courses to support: instructional, graphics, and interface design aspects that will result in a user-friendly experience for the learner. Learn more about the three types of animation design in eLearning from my blog post.

Are you having problems with your GIF animations?
Contact me for support!