The Daily Dot is proud to present a new way to spread holiday cheer: GIF cards. Each business day leading up to Christmas, we’ll be presenting two or more fun and easy-to-share GIFs to get you and your loved ones in the spirit of the season. To see our entire catalog, visit us on Tumblr.
If Instagram is the Polaroid camera reimagined, the GIF is the modern day flipbook.
This simple form of animation is what helped artist Hoppip pass the time in grade school, doodling imaginary scenes frame by frame at the bottom corner of his books.
Today Hoppip, who borrowed his Tumblr name from the cute grass Pokemon, is a GIF artist and tag editor who helps curate the network’s best content.
Hoppip started making GIFs in 2000, during an era of cheesy “under construction” animations on Geocities and tiny AOL buddy icons. He re-embraced the image format after Tumblr launched in 2007 and hasn’t looked back since.
Hoppip’s blog features thousands of original animations that range from glitch art and 3-D rendering to experiments with typography and beloved movie scenes. His work is often very clean and simple, perhaps best exemplified by this floating heart he posted two weeks ago. It has collected more than 860 notes.
But if he had to chose, it’s his handdrawn illustrations of cats and coffee that he’s most proud of.
“I like to see them as animated doodles,” Hoppip said of the format.
“I think doodles have powerful capabilities since they are the purest form of an idea in my opinion. This one-take policy, as I like to call it, succeeds most of the times on transmitting the warmth of an idea in its rawest form. That’s probably the main topic I had tried to explore and exploit in all those little animations I do.”
As much as Hoppip loves chopping movies like The Shining into forever-looping animations, he’s also a GIF teacher whose detailed Photoshop tutorial has helped hundreds learn how to animate.
In the spirit of giving, Hoppip created two exclusive holiday GIF cards for the Daily Dot.
“I think the holidays are a special time of the year because they bring people together, no matter their beliefs, and there is always this ‘good mood’ in the air,” he added. “My family and I aren’t very religious, but we like to keep the tradition so we always gather in some special locations and just celebrate, chat and have fun.”
