• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, December 27, 2017

Some people think that nothing makes a message more fun than a GIF. At least the folks at Barbarian believe that. So the agency is giving people a fun way to share their 2017 that evades what they amusingly call the "Earnest Facebook Post.” 

With GIF My Year, people can answer five madlibs-style questions with emoji, and get a playlist of GIFs (powered by Giphy’s API) that tell the story of their year. 

It also gives people a way to share their most intimate moments with close friends in the know, while safely letting those same moments fly over the heads of aunts and uncles that might raise an eyebrow. 

Produced as a mobile-friendly single-serving site, “GIF My Year” was created in partnership with TRASH, the first artists/technologists to participate in Barbarian’s new “Stranger in Residence” program.

It is an initiative to invite experimental thinkers and makers into Barbarian to riff on the work they do and collaborate with the Barbarian team. 

“Internet culture has transformed GIFs from a simple file type into a new form of visual language,” notes Chuck Fletcher, CTO of Barbarian. “There are millions of GIFs on the Internet, enough to express nearly any emotion or idea. We partnered with TRASH to create a video-based GIF playlist out of the most fluid, fun, expressive content all from a single static emoji."

It's interesting that a 30-year-old technology (it stands for Graphic Interchange Format) can still be shaping internet culture today. 

And if you want to give it a whirl yourself, GIF My Year is now live here.