Design Tip: How to Use Cinemagraphs on Your Website

Have you heard of cinemagraphs? If the answer is no, you are missing a huge opportunity to make your website look way better!

Cinemagraphs are just animated GIFs with repeated movement in them. Defined also as still photographs, they are something between videos and images. Cinemagraphs are a rather new trend and we expect its popularity to grow even further in the next years. The first ones to coin the term were the photographers Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck.

Cinemagraphs vs normal GIFs

Although cinemagraphs usually come in GIF format, they are a little different from the normal GIFs we are accustomed to see around the web. The normal GIFs are compressed image files where the same motion loops over and over again. In the same time, in the cinemagraphs we have just a small portion of the image repeating itself while all other parts remain stationary.

Why you should use cinemagraphs on your website

OK, cinemagraphs are pretty cool! But why should you use them on your website. In our opinion, the main reason to do it is that cinemagraphs could really make your website look more modern and could help you communicate in a better and more effective way with your visitors. Perhaps you know that people totally love visuals and many experts are suggesting that you should include more and more images on your website.

In the same time, cinemagraphs have a greater ability to catch visitors’ attention than regular photographs, which makes them an effective marketing element. In our experience, cinemagraphs are good not only for drawing attention of people, but also for creating a more fancy, smooth or even emotional experience.

Cinemagraphs could be used both as a background or as another element surrounding your texts.

How to use cinemagraphs in Oxxy

Implementing cinemagraphics on your Oxxy website is pretty easy. You just need to upload the GIF file through the media library and after that you will be able to use it on your website.

The more challenging thing is to find a suitable cinemagraph. Creating one by yourself could be time consuming as you will need a good camera and some Photoshop skill. If you think you can do it on your own, there are plenty of on online tutorials for the purpose.

Furthermore, there are some really nice cinemagraph galleries out there. Probably, the most popular one is Flixel.

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