EDLUNDART has been working with Stack Overflow, a 10 million member strong question and answer site for programmers, for a good while — creating animated videos in the 1-3 minute range about various aspects of their offerings. But as a separate effort, an ongoing series called Stack Overflow Knows has provided an opportunity to animate short social media loops illustrating questions from the site's amazing knowledge base. Why are some airplane windows round and others more elongated? Why aren't the keypads on phones and keyboards laid out in the same way? What's the best way to completely and definitively destroy all data on a laptop? These are just some of the quandaries tackled in the Instagram loops collected below.
A couple of the final loops in this collection aren't really loops per se, they're more like "short short films" — but most of these are made to seamlessly and endlessly loop, which is quite a fun thing to devise. Every loop was also designed to work as widescreen animations for other platforms. The process for this was to design full 16:9 frames to begin with, but ensuring that the core of each composition worked great within a square. Some full width stills are shown below.
Earlier in my career, I did a lot of longer (3-5 minutes) animations for clients. In recent years, the runtimes have come down, which has allowed the quality to go up — I like being able to put in more work per second, to put it that way. So, 60-90 seconds is a sweet spot for longer pieces, and doing short loops or "moving illustrations" like these is really fun for me.
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Have a look at other great projects on the animation page, including a collection of longer Stack Overflow animations.