Christian Heilmann

Presenter tip: animated GIFs are not as cool as we think

Monday, August 11th, 2014 at 2:42 pm

Disclaimer: I have no right to tell you what to do and how to present – how dare I? You can do whatever you want. I am not “hating” on anything – and I don’t like the term. I am also guilty and will be so in the future of the things I will talk about here. So, bear with me: as someone who spends most of his life currently presenting, being at conferences and coaching people to become presenters, I think it is time for an intervention.


The hardest part of putting together a talk for developers is finding the funny gifs that accurately represent your topic.

The Tweet that started this and its thread

If you are a technical presenter and you consider adding lots of animated GIFs to your slides, stop, and reconsider. Consider other ways to spend your time instead. For example:

  • Writing a really clean code example and keeping it in a documented code repository for people to use
  • Researching how very successful people use the thing you want the audience to care
  • Finding a real life example where a certain way of working made a real difference and how it could be applied to an abstract coding idea
  • Researching real numbers to back up your argument or disprove common “truths”

Don’t fall for the “oh, but it is cool and everybody else does it” trap. Why? because when everybody does it there is nothing cool or new about it.

Animated GIFs are ubiquitous on the web right now and we all love them. They are short videos that work in any environment, they are funny and – being very pixelated – have a “punk” feel to them.

This, to me, was the reason presenters used them in technical presentations in the first place. They were a disruption, they were fresh, they were different.

We all got bored to tears by corporate presentations that had more bullets than the showdown in a Western movie. We all got fed up with amazingly brushed up presentations by visual aficionados that had just one too many inspiring butterfly or beautiful sunset.

added text to sunrise

We wanted something gritty, something closer to the metal – just as we are. Let’s be different, let’s disrupt, let’s show a seemingly unconnected animation full of pixels.

This is great and still there are many good reasons to use an animated GIF in our presentations:

  • They are an eye catcher – animated things is what we look at as humans. The subconscious check if something that moves is a saber tooth tiger trying to eat me is deeply ingrained in us. This can make an animated GIF a good first slide in a new section of your talk: you seemingly do something unexpected but what you want to achieve is to get the audience to reset and focus on the next topic you’d like to cover.
  • They can be a good emphasis of what you are saying. When Soledad Penades shows a lady drinking under the table (6:05) when talking about her insecurities as someone people look up to it makes a point. soledad and drinking lady When Jake Archibald explains that navigator.onLine will be true even if the network cable is plugged into some soil (26:00) it is a funny, exciting and simple thing to do and adds to the point he makes. jake and the soil
  • It is an in-crowd ting to do – the irreverence of an animated, meme-ish GIF tells the audience that you are one of them, not a professional, slick and tamed corporate speaker.

But is it? Isn’t a trick that everybody uses way past being disruptive? Are we all unique and different when we all use the same content? How many more times do we have to endure the “this escalated quicklyGIF taken from a 10 year old movie? Let’s not even talk about the issue that we expect the audience to get the reference and why it would be funny.

We’re running the danger here of becoming predictable and boring. Especially when you see speakers who use an animated GIF and know it wasn’t needed and then try to shoe-horn it somehow into their narration. It is not a rite of passage. You should use the right presentation technique to achieve a certain response. A GIF that is in your slides just to be there is like an unused global variable in your code – distracting, bad practice and in general causing confusion.

The reasons why we use animated GIFs (or videos for that matter) in slides are also their main problem:

  • They do distract the audience – as a “whoa, something’s happening” reminder to the audience, that is good. When you have to compete with the blinking thing behind you it is bad. This is especially true when you chose a very “out there” GIF and you spend too much time talking over it. A fast animation or a very short loop can get annoying for the audience and instead of seeing you as a cool presenter they get headaches and think “please move on to the next slide” without listening to you. I made that mistake with my rainbow vomiting dwarf at HTML5Devconf in 2013 and was called out on Twitter.
  • They are too easy to add – many a times we are tempted just to go for the funny cat pounding a strawberry because it is cool and it means we are different as a presenter and surprising.

Well, it isn’t surprising any longer and it can be seen as a cheap way out for us as creators of a presentation. Filler material is filler material, no matter how quirky.

You don’t make a boring topic more interesting by adding animated images. You also don’t make a boring lecture more interesting by sitting on a fart cushion. Sure, it will wake people up and maybe get a giggle but it doesn’t give you a more focused audience. We stopped using 3D transforms in between slides and fiery text as they are seen as a sign of a bad presenter trying to make up for a lack of stage presence or lack of content with shiny things. Don’t be that person.

When it comes to technical presentations there is one important thing to remember: your slides do not matter and are not your presentation. You are.

Your slides are either:

  • wallpaper for your talking parts
  • emphasis of what you are currently covering or
  • a code example.

If a slide doesn’t cover any of these cases – remove it. Wallpaper doesn’t blink. It is there to be in the background and make the person in front of it stand out more. You already have to compete with a lot of of other speakers, audience fatigue, technical problems, sound issues, the state of your body and bad lighting. Don’t add to the distractions you have to overcome by adding shiny trinkets of your own making.

You don’t make boring content more interesting by wrapping it in a shiny box. Instead, don’t talk about the boring parts. Make them interesting by approaching them differently, show a URL and a screenshot of the boring resources and tell people what they mean in the context of the topic you talk about. If you’re bored about something you can bet the audience is, too. How you come across is how the audience will react. And insincerity is the worst thing you can project. Being afraid or being shy or just being informative is totally fine. Don’t try too hard to please a current fashion – be yourself and be excited about what you present and the rest falls into place.

So, by all means, use animated GIFs when they fit – give humorous and irreverent presentations. But only do it when this really is you and the rest of your stage persona fits. There are masterful people out there doing this right – Jenn Schiffer comes to mind. If you go for this – go all in. Don’t let the fun parts of your talk steal your thunder. As a presenter, you are entertainer, educator and explainer. It is a mix, and as all mixes go, they only work when they feel rounded and in the right rhythm.

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