Guide entry section:
Guide Entry Text:
At heart, an animated GIF is a visual experience. Where will you find visuals?
Sure, you could create an ExplainerGIF with nothing but text and may it be awesome. But probably not. To make GIFs interesting and compelling, you'll need visuals. Thankfully, there are a number of options for finding drawing or adding visuals to your GIFs.
We Can Help
Common Craft offers an online library of over 2000 high resolution visuals in "Common Craft Style" just like the ones you see in this guide. We call them Cut-outs and they are PNG files with transparent backgrounds.
Want to try them out? Click here to download 10 free Cut-outs (.zip)
Common Craft Membership is the best way to access 1000s of Cut-outs. It's annual and starts at $49 a year. That's about $4 a month. FOUR DOLLARS.
Want an additional 15% discount? Use this link to sign up
Paid Options for Downloadable Visuals
- Check out the Noun Project. They have an impressive library of icons that form a kind of visual language.
- You can find huge selections of images on stock photo websites like iStockPhoto and Shutterstock and Getty Images.
Free Options for Downloadable Visuals
If you're not able to purchase the images you want, we recommend using images that are in the public domain, or are licensed for sharing.
- Wikipedia has a big list of sites that offer public domain photos and illustrations.
- Pixabay offers a huge library of photos and illustrations that are free to use.
- WPClipArt is designed for students and offers copyright-free drawings and images.
- Open Clip Art All public domain clip art.
Drawing with Presentation Software
I think people would be surprised at how often I use PowerPoint to create new drawings for our videos. Once you get a few skills down, you can draw a huge number of things with your mouse.