Christopher Price, a.k.a. topherchris, is the editorial director at Tumblr. The following article is not an endorsement for Tumblr nor does it represent the opinions of Mashable as a company.
This was was a big year for a certain file format. We witnessed the 25th anniversary of the GIF, the first ever live-GIFing of presidential debates, a large-scale GIF festival and the selection of “GIF” (as a verb, as in to create a GIF file) as U.S. Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionaries.
All that, and we still can’t seem to decide how to pronounce it. (I’m a militant proponent of the soft g version — as in, Jiff — simply because that’s how the programmers who developed it pronounced it and it seems right to respect their thinking on the matter.)
This attention on a relatively ancient technology (think about it, what else do you encounter on a regular basis that was invented 25 years ago with no enhancements?) has done something else: It’s turned our understanding of the GIF from a basic file format into a medium unto itself.
To celebrate the evolution of the GIF from utilitarian image file format into artistic medium, I’d like to present my personal Top 10 Original GIFs of 2012.