How to make an animated club banner or logo

It all started several years ago when Goldtoken first introduced banners. I had recently joined The Xiphias Invasion Club and was also a member of the dominoes only club and
FixitDave made a great animated top banner for the dominoes only club (as seen in his profile page), and I asked him to design one for The Xiphias Invasion Club, shown below.

(unknown photo)

Inspired by this I decided to create my own.

Here's how

I designed several aliens, based an the Xiphias playing pieces, that showed an alien growing from a drone to a soldier and onto a captain. 10 different images in all. These were then pasted onto the same background space scene and saved as different images.
the images were combined in a single animated GIF using and online GIF animator.
The one at http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/animatedgif/ very good and easy to use.
The resulting image is shown below

Want something more complicated?

Recently I decided a new club logo would be a good idea, this time with fading text for the club name.
A similar process was used, although this was a little harder as you can't set the percentage transparency in MS paint.


the starscape was an image from the web, cropped to 600x200
the aliens were edited by me in MS paint, from the site Goldies
The text was created using wordart, the transparency was then adjusted via wordart tools in 10% increments (the font is called we are alien!! and is available on the web)
The starscape and text were pasted into visio and save as 11 individual GIFs
the images were combined in a single animated GIF using the online tool at http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/animatedgif/

Remember: The image cannot be larger than the max permitted size, or the site will will resize it and the animation will be lost