This isn’t the first animated GIF that has appeared on NYTimes.com (an example of another) but it appears to be the first to grace the homepage front and center.
In the last few years, the GIF, which is often seen as a lo-fi online illustration, has been curated into art exhibits, the subject of documentaries and gained a newfound popularity with the emergence of smartphone apps and the ease with which they can generate the twitchy critters. The fact is that with social media sites, such as Tumblr and Google Plus, accepting the format (Facebook still doesn’t allow them) what is certain is that the GIF is now not the domain of net nerds and just another illustrative device for the online world.
