Google launched its Data Gif Maker a few months ago. As an infographic designer, this tool caught my attention very quickly of course. The Data Gif Maker compares numbers and displays them in relation to each other. The end result is a nice, animated gif file which you can easily use on your website, your blog, your social media timelines etc.
I tested the data gif maker with real data: Different mobile devices of one of my publisher client’s app magazine: 51% iPad, 26% iPhone, 18% Android phone and 5% Android tablet.
Unfortunately, I already stumbled over the first hurdle: The Data Gif Maker allows only two data inputs. Alright, so I had to break it down to 77% iOS and 23% Android. Selecting the % symbol, the graphic looks like this:
However, the Google Data Gif Maker can also be fed with ordinary numbers. So I used the iOS and Android user numbers again:
(This makes of course only sense when both numbers sum up to 100%. Comparing two numbers that are not part of one whole sum are not logical presenting with the Data Gif Maker.)
You can download low-res and high-res gif versions. However, even the low-res pictures took three minutes to download – for one single gif file! And I tested it several times in different browsers (!) on differet days in different months. In most cases, the tool crashed and did not make it to export the gif files. In only few cases the tool actually worked fine. Probably the worst performance ever for an online tool – and it comes from Google!
As regards the look: Google was clever to keep the tool in the colours of the Google Material Design only. If there will be further individualisation possibilities in future remains to be seen ... But first, Google should improve the technical performance of the tool!
Conclusion: It’s a nice tool to easily bring more oomph into your online presence. However, it takes incredibly long to download gif files. This is why I personally cannot recommend the Google Data Gif Maker.