Animated web content is essential for web designers to capture and hold onto our attention span; and in that way, they can advertise to us and give us an extra sense of joy or delight. Using animated web content is also ideal in visualizing a complex process or concept of a product, company, or service to demonstrate a message with the purpose of selling an item or service to their users. The ultimate goal of animated pieces is to draw the user’s attention to what is being conveyed or advertised.

The beginning of animated web content in web design started with GIF animations, but they were not the all-around-good animation format. This was particularly true in the past when internet speeds were extremely slow while GIF animations took a lot of bandwidth to run and function. Low internet speeds with GIFs that required high volume bandwidth led to low-resolution and heavily pixelated animations. To combat this, web designers had to compress GIFs to the smallest size possible which had a limited 8-bit color palette, which saved a ton of memory space but caused plenty of dithering. Web animation met its evolution when high-speed internet came into the scene and became the default; this brought an extensive amount of colors, with exceptionally smoother as well as higher frame rates.

Then came flash animations from the Adobe Flash software that were very lightweight and also relatively easy to create animations in; it included layers and had a timeline-based interface. The timeline-based interface with the layers is what made the animations so much easier to create with better functionality. While the keyframes also play a part — the number of keyframes determines the number of times the animation is going to move and morph and is essentially how many steps are going to be in the animation. These animations were distributed in SWF file formats, a file that used sound with amazing vector graphics included, which was only a couple of kilobytes in size. That was the special turning point in animations being used in web design as now it was much easier to make the animations and know that they were going to work without slowing your website down; relieving designers from slower webpage load times. The biggest drawback to using Adobe Flash to make animations was that a plug-in was required to run the software and create animated web content.

The best formats to use to create animated web content are HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and SVG. They are the most modern web design software, technologies, and languages that will help tackle plenty of problems accompanied by low webpage load speeds and quality of animation. 

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