The Giphy Gallery - Gif art and commission websites - ☆ ∙ Web Projects

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Hi all, I wanna share a web project I was commissioned to make by Giphy earlier this year which launched recently. This is a somewhat wild story and I think its useful to share both the site itself and my experience of doing a commission project for a company as an indie web artist - it had ups and downs but was overall a good experience!

View the site live here: https://giphy.neocities.org
You can also read a nice article about it here in The Art Newspaper

୧‿︵‿︵ Back story:
At the start of this year I was e-mailed by a member of the Giphy marketing team because they liked MoMG and were interested in doing some sort of colab, we had a good call and I proposed making a small spin-off of MoMG featuring gifs picked from Giphy - they went with this plan, we did some brainstorming etc. They wanted a dark-themed site with a sort of 80s vibe; and I eventually came up with a plan for a kind of after-dark museum inhabited by you and a mysterious fish. They wanted the gifs to be in a consistent order, and they wanted the next-room mechanic to be extremely simple and mobile friendly - so I came up with a sort of non-infinite scroll mechanic where the page loads like a typewriter carriage return.

You can see the original mood board on my site here! - it also includes the design mockups!

Overall this was an unusual process for me; I've never had someone attempting to direct or comment on one of my sites before the finished site is available. There were definitely times where it was frustrating, but it also pushed me to explain myself more and dig into trying things I would otherwise not have tried. At certain points I ended up just saying "Im doing this!", while there were other times where I let things go.

In the end we ended up with a sort of hybrid; they made requests that I then incorporated into the design; they selected the gif artists the gallery would house, then I selected the majority of the gifs from those artists that would be included; I wrote most of the texts, and reworked them based on feedback etc. All the logos, graphics and features were made me by, then discussed by everyone, then either kept or modified.

Here are two early variants and tests that ended up not being used:

For the gifs themselves, I really tried to pick ones that were the best representation of what a gif "is" e.g. its a moving image, its a contrast between stillness and motion - so I wanted gifs that expressed that rather than ones that were funny or react-y - often this lead me to picking more unusual ones than what the artists typically uploaded! Most of the artists were fine with this, though one or two did request my selection not be included.

Both the Giphy team and myself needed some time to figure out the line between "this is a web dev project" and "this is an artistic commission" - it took trial and error to figure out, and it took time for us to trust each others choices. We spent two months (on and off) trying to figure out what kind of contract would be appropriate - in short, the website is classified the same way a commissioned sculpture for a corporate office would be. I'd suggest this is how all web craft commissions should be handled - there's lots of good advice for artists about how copyright works on commissions. (if your struggling with a commission contract like this, contact me and I can share some tips!) - in general though I found the Giphy team to be really understanding and accommodating of my worries about copyrights and working with a company as an indie artist!

I received an artists fee the project - its really hard for me to judge the true value of this as a commission because I don't know what other projects might grow out of this one yet. In terms of raw hours involved, it ended up being a little low, but as a first attempt at something like this; I'm ok with it.

All in all, it took around 6 months to get from the start to the finished project. There was a launch party in New York last week arranged by Giphy! They paid for me to fly over and attend the event which was very cool and a lot of fun!

(a sneaky ozwomp took over the screens at the end for an unofficial super-flight)

All n all, this was a good experience! It's a really big deal that a company of this size was willing to reach out and get involved in a web revival project; and I take it as an honour to have been asked to create this site and to represent the many gif creators involved, as well as indie web crafters as a whole. The site is not exactly what I might have produced purely myself, but thats also kinda the point!

I think it accomplishes the core goal of presenting gifs in a fun way, one that also gives gifs some weight and meaning, and shows people their value as an art form - and it does that in a context that showcases their relationship to web craft as an art form too. As a web crafter, it was super interesting to work on a project like this; and for the web revival as a whole I think it marks a big step into the wider world!

I hope I did it justice, I think I did, I don't know that I could have done better ~ but I'd love to hear your thoughts!