Stop – Go

This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Arpingstone (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Arpingstone)

In a staff workroom the other day, a colleague turned and asked how she could make a traffic light image image on a PowerPoint slide animate between the different colours. Nothing fancy; just to enhance the message she was trying to convey.

Creating a traffic light graphic in PowerPoint took a few moments; the different colours of the individual lights could easily be swapped using different fill colours of course. I then tried to wrangle the animation feature in PowerPoint to produce some sort semblance of the lighting sequence. Oh dear! I spent far longer than I should have … all to no avail. Confident I would have the wherewithall to bend PowerPoint to my will, I’d neglected an alternative and (if I hadn’t been fixated on PowerPoint) blindingly obvious solution – the animated GIF.

Using the graphic I’d already produced, I exported a sequence of four images, each having a different lighting mode, as GIFs. Then a quick search found Picasion, an online GIF maker. The four images were uploaded, a couple of settings were adjusted and voila – an animated GIF available to download, link to or as an embed code, all in a mere few minutes.

I guess there’s a lesson to learn there. Since the original request came from the context of PowerPoint, an application I’m  intimate with , I failed to step back and consider other possibilities. I guess there’s a lot to be said for standing back and taking the helicopter view?