My favorite tool for helping with animated gifs is the Gimp. All you need to do is make a multi-layer image, and export it as a gif file. It will ask you if you want to flatten the image or eexport it into an animation. You'll want an animation, of course.
Another great tool is Gif Construction Set by Alchemy Mindworks.
To create the "Spinning
Matt", I sat down in an office chair while a friend captured a clip of me
spinning around a few times. Once I was satisfied I got a good shot, I exported
one complete rotation as a set of still images.
Then I loaded all the images into the Gimp as separate frames and went through each frame, cropping out the background. After that I converted all the layers to indexed color, optimized the animation, and exported the file as an animated gif.
I got the idea for this spinning
letter cube from the artwork on the cover of the book
Gödel,Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R.
Hofstadter. I had to make it my own, of course, so I used my initials.
I created the 3D rendering using Caligari TruSpace. I haven't used it for a long time, but back in the mid 90's it was my favorite because of it's intuitiveness and power. I recently found out you can download a free copy of TruSpace 3.2! I was able to create some really neat stuff without ever opening the manual (try that with Blender!).
Once I created the animation, I used the Gimp to turn the video into an animated gif.
I also made the compass with
Caligari TruSpace. The combination of a
translucent and shiny surface made this a touch more challenging, but TruSpace
still made it relatively easy for an amateur such as myself.
I used Gif Construction Set to generate the animated gif.
It makes a nice icon for a hiking or outdoors page.
I created this scrolling text
animation with the Gimp.
I started with a short, wide image containing only the text. Then I added a shadow for flair, and flattened the image.
Next I duplicated the layer many times, and for each layer I cropped a square window, each time moving the window over 10 pixels. Then I piled each cropped layer on the left-hand edge. Once I was done with the layer cropping I cropped the whole image to 100x100.To make it web-ready, I set the color mode to indexed, with a 16 color optimized palette. Then I optimized it for an animated gif, and exported it the final product as an animated gif.