One of the projects I was working on last year was in need of some more refined interaction & UI polish - so I thought I’d try to animate some of the icons I’d been using. I often use Google’s Material Design icons, which are published under the Apache 2.0 license. However, these are only static images by default - in Android development, it’s easy to use a tool like alexjlockwood/ShapeShifter to design an animation and import it into Android Studio as an AnimatedVectorDrawable, but the web doesn’t have this sort of tooling… or does it?
The thing about SVG images on the web is that they’re actually parsed with support for the same browser APIs that are used to process a webpage - so, for example, mixing an SVG with CSS properties is totally valid. The only drawback is that this won’t work if it’s included in an <img> tag, as many browsers will only render it as a static image.
As a result, there are two approaches to including these icons in your website. You can either directly include the SVG tag inside the element you want it to appear in…
<button>
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="24" height="24" viewBox="0 0 24 24" version="1.1">
<path d="M0 0h24v24H0z" fill="none"/>
<path d="M19 19H5V5h7V3H5c-1.11 0-2 .9-2 2v14c0 1.1.89 2 2 2h14c1.1 0 2-.9 2-2v-7h-2v7zM14 3v2h3.59l-9.83 9.83 1.41 1.41L19 6.41V10h2V3h-7z"/>
</svg>
</button>
…or you can use the <object> tag to include it as an external resouce - allowing you to keep the scripts & styles separate from the rest of the page.
For simplicity (and a bit of organization), I’m going to use the latter - but if you’re using some type of static site generator or web framework, it’s entirely feasible to forego the <object> element and define these inline with your page for a bit of a performance benefit (although, I haven’t actually measured how this affects its performance). This would also make it work without JavaScript, using a :hover selector instead of listening to the mouseover events. Either way, both accomplish the same goal - it’s just down to a subtle performance/compatibility impact versus how you organize your code.
Reorganizing the Path Data
Let’s take a look at the icon I used in the code snippet above - this is the “launch” icon from Google’s material icons repo. The SVG contains two path elements: one rectangle with fill="none" that defines the boundaries of the svg (probably for browser compatibility), and one with a much longer path string that defines the actual shape of the icon.
Looking at the shape of the icon, it actually contains two distinct components - an arrow, and a surrounding box/border. With some understanding of SVG paths, we can actually split this icon into two separate path elements. The “path” is really just a list of actions and coordinates - the first letter, M, is an action that “moves” to a set of coordinates to start a path, and the z action “closes” the path (or draws a line back to the first set of coordinates). Since our path contains two of these segments, it won’t have any effect on the rendered icon to split them into individual tags.
While we’re at it, I’m going to define a “group” tag to contain them, and add id attributes so we can reference them with CSS selectors later on.
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="24" height="24" viewBox="0 0 24 24" version="1.1">
<path d="M0 0h24v24H0z" fill="none"/>
<g id="launch-icon">
<path id="box" d="M19 19H5V5h7V3H5c-1.11 0-2 .9-2 2v14c0 1.1.89 2 2 2h14c1.1 0 2-.9 2-2v-7h-2v7z"/>
<path id="arrow" d="M14 3v2h3.59l-9.83 9.83 1.41 1.41L19 6.41V10h2V3h-7z"/>
</g>
</svg>
Defining CSS States
According to w3c, SVG 2 supports an inline <style> tag that can contain our CSS. However, to ensure backwards compatibility with prior versions, it’s best to surround the CSS styles in a <![CDATA[]]> tag (this way, any older browsers won’t try to parse its content).
To create our “animation”, I’m going to use the transition property - which simply animates the value of whatever it specifies. The animated state will be dependent on a “selected” property on the <g> element (for now, I’ll just add this property to the tag so we can see what it looks like).
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="24" height="24" viewBox="0 0 24 24" version="1.1">
<style type="text/css"><![CDATA[
#box, #arrow {
transition: transform .25s, opacity .25s;
}
#launch-icon[selected] #box {
opacity: 0.5;
}
#launch-icon[selected] #arrow {
transform: translate(2px, -2px);
}
]]></style>
<path d="M0 0h24v24H0z" fill="none"/>
<g id="launch-icon" selected="true">
<path id="box" d="M19 19H5V5h7V3H5c-1.11 0-2 .9-2 2v14c0 1.1.89 2 2 2h14c1.1 0 2-.9 2-2v-7h-2v7z"/>
<path id="arrow" d="M14 3v2h3.59l-9.83 9.83 1.41 1.41L19 6.41V10h2V3h-7z"/>
</g>
</svg>
With this SVG, you should be able to see the arrow move up and to the right, with the surrounding box faded out a little. If this doesn’t work, check that the selected attribute is properly applied to the <g> tag in your developer tools menu - and make sure the id and attribute names match.
We should now have a working animation that will change based on our selected attribute - try running document.getElementById("launch-icon").setAttribute("selected", true); and document.getElementById("launch-icon").removeAttribute("selected"); in your console, and you’ll see it transition between the two states.
Detecting the Hover State
Now that we’ve finished animating the actual SVG, the hard part is over - we just need to define our HTML element and detect its hover state to switch between the two states.
I’ve saved my SVG at ic_launch.svg, so - in the same folder - I’m going to create an index.html with the following content…
<html>
<head>
<title>SVG Icon Fun</title>
</head>
<body>
<button id="launch-button">
<object id="launch-object" type="image/svg+xml" data="./ic_launch.svg"></object>
</button>
<script type="text/javascript">
// JavaScript here...
</script>
</body>
</html>
Having defined our elements, we’re going to listen to the mouseover and mouseout events of the #launch-button element to determine when to animate the icon.
let _buttonElement = document.getElementById("launch-button");
let _objectElement = document.getElementById("launch-object");
_buttonElement.addEventListener("mouseover", (event) => {
// TODO: add the "selected" attribute
});
_buttonElement.addEventListener("mouseout", (event) => {
// TODO: remove the "selected" attribute
});
Now that we’re listening to our mouse events on the button, we need a way to actually change the selected attribute inside the SVG. Because we’re using the <object> tag, that can’t be done directly, as the elements actually exist in a different “place” and can’t be referenced from our page. However, we can use the dispatchEvent function with a CustomEvent object to communicate with it instead.
let _buttonElement = document.getElementById("launch-button");
let _objectElement = document.getElementById("launch-object");
_buttonElement.addEventListener("mouseover", (event) => {
_objectElement.contentWindow.dispatchEvent(new CustomEvent("ic-launch-hover", { detail: true }));
});
_buttonElement.addEventListener("mouseout", (event) => {
_objectElement.contentWindow.dispatchEvent(new CustomEvent("ic-launch-hover", { detail: false }));
});
Inside our SVG, we need to add a script tag that will listen for this event and change the selected attribute for us - this works similarly to adding the <style> tag with the <![CDATA[]]> section (older browsers will just ignore its contents), except it needs to be commented out with JavaScript comments as well…
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="24" height="24" viewBox="0 0 24 24" version="1.1">
<style type="text/css"><![CDATA[
#box, #arrow {
transition: transform .25s, opacity .25s;
}
#launch-icon[selected] #box {
opacity: 0.5;
}
#launch-icon[selected] #arrow {
transform: translate(2px, -2px);
}
]]></style>
<path d="M0 0h24v24H0z" fill="none"/>
<g id="launch-icon" selected="true">
<path id="box" d="M19 19H5V5h7V3H5c-1.11 0-2 .9-2 2v14c0 1.1.89 2 2 2h14c1.1 0 2-.9 2-2v-7h-2v7z"/>
<path id="arrow" d="M14 3v2h3.59l-9.83 9.83 1.41 1.41L19 6.41V10h2V3h-7z"/>
</g>
<script>/* <![CDATA[ */
const _iconElement = document.getElementById('launch-icon');
window.addEventListener('ic-launch-hover', function(e) {
if (e.detail)
_iconElement.setAttribute("selected", true);
else _iconElement.removeAttribute("selected");
});
/* ]]> */</script>
</svg>
Finally, opening our page in the browser, we should now have a nice little animated SVG icon on our button. Ahh… very satisfying.
There are definitely limits to what can be done with CSS properties on details as fine as parts of an icon - but I’ve managed to pull off some fairly complicated animations with this already, so I encourage messing around with this to see what it can do.