I know it’s a rooster, but the original animated GIF was titled ‘chickenexplode.’ I love the old school animated GIFs which packed a lot of action in very, very little data – often just a few Kilobytes. That was necessary back when the web was delivered to you at 56 kbps.

I thought it would be interesting to play with these older GIFs and give them a Web 2.0 makeover. First you can make them a lot larger now. The rooster above was originally 89 x 79 pixels, and had the the letters ‘TNT.’ With the help of Photoshop, it’s pretty easy to enlarge existing GIFs (now it’s 600 pixels wide) and also make some basic edits. Changing the text was pretty straight forward, but I think it would be fun to enlarge and combine a few of this old GIFs to create a story. Which leads to making this a ds106 visual assignment – Exploding Classic Animated GIFs.

I made this tutorial to show how I made it and shared a few favorite classic GIFs as well.