flash vs. animated gif - which should I use for this?

**FSUchucky3** · Jul 28, 2003 13:31

i have a client who is sold on the idea of his logo moving. its a marine construction company, so their logo has a tugboat pulling a barge w/ a large crane on it. he wants that to "float in the water" across the screen in the logo area.

my question is, what would be the "smartest" way to do this? animated gif or flash? which files are bigger/take longer to load? i know w/ flash, you need the browser to have flashplayer installed. im not sure about his potential users' browsers, so i would assume i would need a "non-animated" if i flash wasnt detected.

i never bothered to teach myself animated gifs and i havent learned flash either.

any ideas?

thanks
chuck

**theGuest** · Jul 28, 2003 14:23

Flash, definately. The file size would kill if you used Gif.

**macarthur** · Jul 28, 2003 14:31

If its just a simple animation use gifs

If its more than simple stuff go for flash

**hillsy** · Jul 28, 2003 14:55

Learning animated GIFs will be a lot easier than learning Flash too.

If it's a simple, fairly small animation, GIF is fine. And "fairly small" is relative - a lot of banner ads are animated GIFs and they're not all that small.

Flash is definitely better and you can make it a lot bigger, but there's the possibility that someone may not have the player, and the effort to create a good Flash animation is higher than to create a GIF animation in my experience.

**robotrebellion** · Jul 28, 2003 15:43

Basic Flash animations are not too had to figure out, honestly I dont think much harder than a GIF.

An animated GIF is fine for simple, short, and somewhat choppy motion of graphics that have few colors. A Flash animation would be smoother, and depending on the complexity of the animation, can actually have a much, much smaller file size.