Context

Remember 2010? Before auto play videos decorated every social media feed, before Vine, before Giphy put a gif search engine in all your messaging apps, Instagram was on v1, Tumblr was so hot within creative communities that they couldn't keep their servers up and Apple was still in love with skeuomorphism.

Introduction

Hungry for a new challenge, Dan and I decided to build an iOS app. This was the year photo apps took off so the idea of a stop motion .gif camera came by naturally to two animation nerds. We named it GIF SHOP.

The screencaps below are from v2 which we launched a year later after the iPhone 5 introduced the taller screen.

A toy is a tool

The very first prototype felt so playful it took me by surprise. There was something special about touching the screen and seeing the ghost of the moment frozen in the onion skin. The gratification of the instant playback. The original instinct was to design a stark utilitarian UI in spirit of the familiar design tooling - however after some time with the prototype the direction turned a lot more playful. A toy is a tool of learning.

Creative expression

Not the first nor the last .gif maker on iOS. I would argue what made it special from the start is the simple fact that the app encouraged creative exploration. We made the decision to optimize for play and creative expression over making it as fast as possible to capture and share a moment or to achieve a specific formulaic result. This in some ways sealed its faith as a utility. Having seen the alternative played out in other products over the years I am still personally happy with this decision.

Manage expectations

In v2 we introduced 'Staff picks' which was a curated list of our favorite animations. The intention was to highlight all the creative work and the people behind them in order to build a community around the app. The feedback was immediate and negative from one large segment: parents. The app was initially purposefully designed to be respectful of privacy and we kept parental concerns in mind. The change was not in line with the expectations we had set and parents were understandably not happy. We promptly removed the feature until we could build in parental controls that would communicate the change appropriately.

500 KB

500 KB was the .gif file size limit Tumblr would host and trying to upload a larger file would convert the animation to a static .jpg with no warning. This was the best case scenario as all other social platforms were outright hostile toward animated .gifs at the time. In this context it became necessary to offer a file hosting service and integrate with every social platform to make sharing as seamless as possible.

Looking ahead

GIF SHOP was featured numerous times on the App Store, voted Wired Magazine Editor’s Pick, FWA Mobile app of the day, Gizmodo app of the day and more.

I learned a lot about what I find meaningful in a project. I learned code rot is a real thing on platforms we have no control over that change every year with disregard for backward compatibility. Above all I learned running a service is a big responsibility.

What strikes me as most valuable about the project are the creative artifacts left behind. Out of respect for those, shared animation links remained operational until June 1st, 2023, and all account holders received a link to download a complete archive of their data. In July 2025 I announced a faithful re-creation of GIF SHOP as a cross platform web-app.

Thanks for all the .gifs!



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