Liberate GIFs From the Web With an Old, Weird Technology

We live in an age of great GIF ubiquity. The animated images — receptacles of small, silent feeling, news or art — are everywhere and here to stay. GIFs are malleable yet sharable, concise yet context-free.

They’re also trapped online: Introduced in 1987, the Graphic Interchange Format is a product and prisoner of the digital world.

Or are they? A new project is trying to liberate GIFs from the digital world with the help of one old, weird, 20th-century technology.

Two programmer-designers, Sha Hwang and Rachel Binx, debuted a Kickstarter campaign Wednesday — and saw it funded, in the same day — to print animated GIFs onto lenticular-printed cards. Now that it’s funded, their project, Gifpop, could turn your favorite GIF into a little card you can hold in your hand. Read more...