How to Make Your Own Animated Icons for Free

Icons are used to express personal identity online on instant messengers, blogs and forums. Many people prefer to use animated icons to show many pictures in their icon at once. Animated icons can be created online for free using animated icon makers such as Make a Gif, Gickr and Picasion. By simply uploading the images you want to use in your icon and choosing the size and speed of your icon, these animated icon makers will put the images together into an animated GIF image.

Things You'll Need

• Images saved to your computer

Instructions

1. Go to one of the animated icon makers (see References) and select pictures from your computer to use in your icon by clicking "Browse." On Picasion and Gickr, up to 10 pictures are allowed per icon, and 12 are allowed on Make A Gif.

2. Customize your icon by choosing the size you want your icon to be and the speed you want the images in your icon to flash. You can choose from default sizes and speeds, or you can choose a custom size and speed.

3. Click "Continue," "Next" or "Create Animation" to finish creating your icon. You will be redirected to a page with your animated icon on it. Right-click the icon and select "Save Image As..." to save the image to your computer.

Tips & Warnings

• If you want to create an icon for an instant messenger, the size you will need for AIM will be 48-by-48 pixels, and 100-by-100 for Windows Live Messenger. Yahoo Messenger doesn't have a size limit for icons.

• Each animated icon maker will give you a URL of your image, so you can link back to it, and an HTML code for your image, so you can place it on another web page.

• On Make A Gif, you also can use its "Photobooth" option to take pictures with a webcam to use in your icon.

• Gickr and Picasion also allow you to import pictures from Flickr and Picasa and from YouTube videos.

References

• Make a Gif
• Gickr
• Picasion