FOOL! I warned you!

I'm going to tell you how I made the "enter" animation. From there, either you'll get it and will go off and ruin your life, or, if you're lucky, you'll not really get it and just have to steal the animations from GIF animation websites.

STEP ONE:

Figure out what you want to do. I just thought you'd get a kick out of making a simple little sign (e.g., you could do one of your name where the letters shift colors or flip through a bunch of different font-styles... whatever).

Draw the basic image. You can use the PaintShop program I've included on the CD for this (which is shareware, by the way, and you can get newer releases of that program, but I find this one to do most of what I need).

If you're not too good at drawing stuff (I'm pretty bad) AND if you really want to mess around with TEXT, you might want to use something like MS-Word. PaintShop does text stuff, but it's something like drawing in ink... not as forgiving as a text-editor.

I began with a simple WORD document (enter.doc) that contained the initial concept:



Then, I just copied that image and pasted it into the PaintShop program. Once there, I changed the colors of the arrow-segments (lightened parts a bit), then saved it as a GIF file, which I called "enter01.gif" (I'll show you each picture below).

Next, I colored the first segments of each arrow light yellow. Then I saved that as enter02.gif so that I'd remember that I wanted it to come next in sequence.

Just like making a cartoon, I made a little change, then saved each change as a new file (ending with a number so I'd know the correct sequence at a glance). Below are the five versions of the image:

enter01.gif
enter02.gif
enter03.gif
enter04.gif
enter05.gif

Fire up the program that puts these things together into a single .GIF file. This, of course, would be the GIF Construction Set program (also included on this CD as GCSPRO.EXE - and also shareware which means there's most likely a newer version of this software out by now).
When you start the program, you get a basic blank information-less screen. Your best bet here is to click on the "wizard" button:
You can probably just keep the defaults where they are until you get to this little window: For my GIF, I selected the DRAWN option. You should try the different options (regardless of the program's advice) because you might get something cooler than you expected just by accident.	.
The next window asks for a delay value. I went with the 50 hundredths. Two things, (1) this determines how much delay to allow before switching to the next "screen" of your animation. As you no-doubt know, the shorter the delay, the smoother the animation. (2) whatever you end up clicking on here will mean that the delay will be the same between ALL images. This is just a convenience, you can modify the delays between images once the basic thing has been put together. So, save time and choose the delay that will be used for MOST of your images.	.
The next window asks for you to select the files (IN PROPER SEQUENCE) that will be combined into your animation. Click on the SELECT button and hunt down the directory containing those files. Once there, either click once to select the first file, then click OPEN, then click the second file, then OPEN again, etc. until done, OR, you can double-click on each file and it will load automatically. When all files have been selected, click the CANCEL button to get back to the animation wizard. From here, click NEXT, then DONE. That's the quick-and-dirty of it.
The program will crunch for a moment or two (time depends on how many GIF files are being combined). Then you'll be back at the main screen with a window containing a list of the picture-files you loaded. At this point, you can right-away click on the VIEW button to see how the animation looks so far:
If the timing isn't quite to your liking for any particular image, double-click the image in the image window and a control screen will come up with a variety of options. Increase or decrease the delay as you like. (I increased the delays for the first and last image so that it would hang a bit longer on the green ENTER image.)
When you're happy with the way it looks, go up to FILE and SAVE that sucker! The single file it creates will be your animated GIF!