a friend asked how i make blinkies and i have changed what site i use for gifs since the last explanation i attempted to write out, so here goes hoping this one maybe makes more sense. or maybe that combined these two explain everything well for once you can really make blinkies any size as i've seen plenty of irregular bigger ones, but the most common dimensions ive seen is 150 x 20 the hardest part making them is deciding how to split up text between frames of animation (if you make one like, say, my My Trains one where there is both an animated dashed border plus multiple lines of text);
if you put one line of text per 2 or 3 frames of the border animating, for example, you can make the border move faster while still preserving your ability to read the text in the end. just make sure you try to divide everything up so that the border loops properly (i.e. 2 different frames of border animation like on My Trains means your end result should be a frame count multipliable by 2) gonna be honest, ive taken border animations off old geocities blinkies ive found, but of course if you want you could easily freehand some too also it helps if you have some basic grasp of pixel art if you want something a little more on your blinkie than text, a border, and a background color/gradient/image, because i feel like its a little less civil to use uncredited pixel animals/food/plants/etc on a blinkie than to just copy a border as most blinkies have a similar pool of border animations on them use an art program with an antialiasing on/off option (antialiasing makes fonts and your digital art brushes look smooth and non-pixelated on the edges), and a pretty plain/average-looking font (verdana, arial, comic sans, ms sans serif, palatino linotype, etc. anything thats easy to read at a very small size. you can mix these for accent text to emphasize words to add more interest to the appearance of your blinkie, if the fonts are noticably different)
take this border for example- dotted, 3 frames of animation; it happens to have the illusion of the dots moving forward around the blinkie when it’s put together rather than flickering alternate colors (as most dashed ones do) for this frame to work best, your text should either: - be only one line that stays consistent the whole animation - be able to be worked into a multiple of three, either by literally being a multiple of 3, or by being able to be made into one by making multiple border animation frames with the same text; i.e. line 1 of text repeated over 3 frames, completing a border animation loop, and line 2 also repeated over 3 frames, bringing your total frames to 6 and making the border animation loop perfectly
for an example blinkie i just grabbed two lines of the chorus of a song (Go-Getter Greg by Ludo to be exact) i used a combination of palatino linotype and segoe print here in 10px with a few accent colors to give this a little bit of extra interest. ideally i'd have pixelled a little gun for the second line frames but i was just trying to get this tutorial done, sometime i'll make a version of this that looks nicer w another 2 lines of the chorus actually
i put the frames together in https://ezgif.com/maker (choose all your frames, click upload) and then messed with the delay time to get a speed that made it readable but still kept the border appearing to move fairly fast (to be exact, this blinkie’s delay time ended up being 23). you have to click “make a gif!” after every edit of the delay time in order to see the change, by the way for your first few tries, you may have to tweak things more, such as spreading your lines of text out over frames of border animation for better comparative speeds. i.e. 6 copies of “i’ a go-getter guy”, with the lighter middle frame being 2 frames then sandwiched each between 2 frames of the darker font color, would have allowed me to make the border move at about this same speed while making the wording less fast/more legible. (yes i do mean to say the text changes faster on this example blinkie than i ideally would have liked) also, personally i don’t usually do any optimizing steps like the bottom of that ezgif page suggests as blinkies are pretty small file size anyway so i feel they dont really need it (you are however free to try and mess with them if you think your blinkie requires that). just right click your assembled blinkie and ‘save image as’ once you get the frames animated properly to your liking and there you go! blinkie done
