How to Create SVG Animations?

Since web design is all about capturing the user’s attention, it becomes necessary to use animation to communicate the value of our business/our client’s business delightfully. This is why animations have become the go-to thing for designers to capture the visitor’s attention or bring the visitor’s attention to a particular component in the design. In this article, we will discuss what Scalable Vector Animations are which are one of the most optimized methods of animations. what are the fundamentals of Animation, what is the importance of Animation in the Web, and what best practices you must follow?

What is SVG Animation?

The creative movement of text or visuals in a web application to catch the user’s attention or bring the user’s attention to a particular component in the design is called animation. SVG Animations or Scalable Vector Graphics Animations are a format of animations more optimized for web design. Since web design is all about capturing the user’s attention, it becomes necessary to use animation to communicate the value of our business/our client’s business delightfully. Animations help our users to understand and properly digest what’s happening in the screen. Objects in real life don’t appear and disappear in an instant, so animations can help us bridge the gap between an active and inactive state.

Here’s an example of a heart SVG animation:

Fundamentals of SVG Animations

There are three main fundamentals of Animation in web design:

• Meaning: Meaning of animation means making sure that we are choosing the right animations based on the character of your the business. For example, If we are designing a kid’s toy website, we should have some fun quirky animations to go along with the the theme of the website rather than dark and sophisticated animations.
• Physics: Animation has its foundation in nature and real life. In order for our animations to feel natural they need to follow the physics of Real World objects. For example, if we are animating a slider, the best thing that we can do is to choose one direction for the movement and keep that direction for all of the elements.
• Choreography: Choreography is a coordinated sequence of motion in a particular animation that helps in maintaining user’s focus as the interface adapts. Choreography helps us establish hierarchy in our animations. These are the three rules of creating choreography:
  • Element that doesn’t move has the lowest hierarchy.
  • Element that animates first is secondary.
  • Element that animates last is tertiary.
  • Importance of Animation in Web design

How to Create SVG Animations?

Step 1. Start with an idea:

Designing an SVG Animation must start with discussing the idea with the client or coming up with an idea if you are working alone. This idea cloud simply be a rough sketch, a prototype, some form of visual or just an inspiration. In the coming steps we will see how to bring this idea into a visually appealing animation.

Step 2. Come up with visuals:

After deciding the idea, designers can come up with the visuals for the animations, these are mostly text and images for the animations. While coming up with visuals designers must make sure to follow the Meaning of the animation (we discussed this in earlier section).

Step 3. Decide the animation speed, transitions, and other effects:

The next step is to use transitions and other effects in these visuals to create an animation from these visuals. This is the most crucial step of the designing process where one must be careful of what speed and effects should be chosen. The golden rule here is to bring your animation environment as close as possible to real life (like we discussed in the Physics part of previous section). Your animation should follow the laws of physics to make it look natural.

Step 5. Refining those visuals using design thinking:

Design thinking is basically a creative way to solve problems. It is the sum of all the processes that results in designing of an animation, The most important skills for design thinking are having empathy for the users and prototyping. In this step we will refine the animations we had from previous step to come up with a final design. Our aim in this step is to use design thinking principles to get a final animations design that is presentable enough for the stakeholders or for testing.

Step 6. Test and iterate:

The final step of the process of creating SVG animations is to present the final animations to the stakeholders and get a review from them, as well as we need perform usability testing by a group of people. The feedback you receive after this must to taken into account and the design should be iterated accordingly until a final SVG animations are obtained that satisfies the stakeholders.

Best Practices

• Speed and Duration: The effectiveness of animations depends on this crucial aspect. Too fast animation might not be noticed properly by the viewer and too slow animation who not serve it’s purpose of drawing the viewer’s attention. Make sure that your animation has the right speed and duration. The duration of the animation should not be too less or too long.
• Consistency: The animations of the web application for Desktop must be consistent to the animations we have on other devices with smaller screens. This provides a better experience and a factor of relatability which user switches from one device to another.
• Natural Animations: By default anything that is unnatural to our eyes looks odd to us. Make sure that the animations that you are designing are natural and are in accordance with the laws of physics.
• User feedback and iterating: Taking feedback from the users can provide valuable insights about how the animation is and what things should be improved. In order to continuously improve the animation and the overall design we have to that user feedback and iterate our design.

Conclusion

SVG Animations or Scalable Vector Graphics Animations are a format of animations more optimized for web design. Since web design is all about capturing the user’s attention, Animations become a important weapon in a designer’s arsenal. Animations can help you create hierarchy, draw user’s attention to a component, make the design understandable and a lot more. Make sure to remember the points we discussed in this article when designing animations for your next application or website.