Let’s hop in the DeLorean and take a trip back to 1996. Bill Clinton is President, I am in high school and the world wide web is chock full of…animated gifs.

Sparkling stars, glowing gravestones, dancing paperclips.

Smiling cats, glittery messages, shaking booties.

Infuriating emoticons, illuminating lanterns, spinning skulls.

The web was full of them. I believe this was in the days before the functionality to easily create these was added to Adobe Photoshop’s arsenal. I can remember using ULead GIF Animator and other shareware applications to facilitate this process. If I recall, one of my early animated gifs was either a pooping moose or a inappropriately gesticulating grizzly bear.

Animated gifs were all the rage in the days of the early web. Back before (Macromedia) Flash hit the stage, stepping up animations to a new level, web designers had to grace the screen with their artistry frame by frame. Gifs weren’t new the scene, but they were certainly exotic. You could do something unheard of with web images- you could leave the background transparent. Now of course this was not a clean and easy operation. Gifs with transparent backings would have a sort of a thin, pixelated halo around them. The only real solution was to have this halo somehow match the background of your website, or the container that it would be held in.

So what happened to this lost art? Who knows. Perhaps we can theorize that the sparkling wizards and their rotating wands leaped out of the screen and banished all classic animations from the internet. Could this be possible? Who knows, but I say let’s bring them back.

Here are some great resources to find animated gifs from this ancient era:

Animated GIF’s(I left in that apostrophe atrocity)
Mikey’s Collection of Animated GIFs(same name, same interests)
Random Gallery O’ Animated GIFs(for the Irish, apparently)

The intent of the design and delivery is to have the actual bone-shaped biscuits tied with twine around the business card, essentially delivering the recipient a piece of the actual product to try out on their pet or the dog of a friend.