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This 4k animated gif was created in Xara X. It has 28 frames and was remarkably easy to create. Text-based animations like the one above are particularly easy. When you download the free trial version of Xara X, I'd suggest your first animation be something like it. It provides a good introduction to how you create animated gifs with Xara X's help. To make an animation like the one above: First, you have to let Xara X know you want to create an animation - under the file menu you just select new > animation. Xara X then enables its "frame gallery" that allows you to quickly and easily build your animation. For my first frame I simply used the text tool and typed the first letter. One click on a button in the frame gallery informed Xara X that I wanted the second frame to be a copy of the currently selected ( in this case - the first ) frame. On this copy I simply added an additional letter. This was repeated until the entire sentence was spelled out. I then added a blank frame so that when the animation loops, it doesn't immediately jump from the complete sentence back to the first letter. The blank frame provides a necessary transition. Xara X allows you to preview your animation so you can decide if it needs some tweaking prior to exporting your finished animated gif. For the animation above, I decided it did indeed need some tweaking. The default timing was way too fast! It was easy to fix. In the frame gallery I selected "properties > animation loop & speed" where I was able to set the length of time each frame would be successively displayed. I chose 22/100 of a second. After previewing the result, I went back and changed the time for the frame that is the complete sentence. I made it display longer. I then did the same for the blank frame giving a longer pause before the animation repeated from the beginning. To optimize the size of the animation I had Xara X reduce its pallet of colors for it down to just six colors. ( I knew six colors would still enable Xara X to effectively anti-alias the text making it less "jaggy" than would be the case if it only had black and white to work with ). Optimizing the color pallet is easy. All you do is in the frame gallery select "properties > animation colors". Xara X gives you a number of options to play with. Playing with them is the best way to learn to harness their power. Using Xara X's option to preview in your web browser enables you to see exactly what your animation will look like. The browser preview also can provide you with info about the animation. Significantly it will tell you how big the file size of the exported animated gif will be. It even tells you how long it will take to download at common modem speeds. If the file size is too big, you can go back and further reduce the number of colors in the animation's color pallet or reduce the size of your animation. Like I noted above, just play with it - you'll quickly learn to optimize your animated gifs. Exporting your finished gif is simple. All you have to do is select "export animated gif ..." under the file menu. You can also save your file as a Xara X document. Doing so allows you to come back at a later time and revise the animation without reconstructing it. That's exactly what I did below - I simply revised the font and reduced the color pallet to four colors. The resulting animated gif is just 3k in size!
Try creating your own animation using Xara X. I know you'll have fun. This page has explained the basics that can be used to create even highly detailed animations. On the next page I'll show you some of the kinds of fun animations you can create using this remarkably inexpensive yet powerful graphics program. I love it!
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