SVG Drawing Animation

SVG is finally becoming a more utilized and fun website component. It’s really powerful and there are many creative possibilities for fun effects on a website using SVG. Today we’d like to share two experimental concepts with you that make use of stroke animations, made popular by the animations on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One review sites. This technique was introduced and explained by Jake Archibald in his article Animated line drawing in SVG and also explored by Brian Suda in his article Animating Vectors with SVG for 24Ways. For our experiments we are using his code to animate the strokes of the paths.

So, what concepts did we explore? The first one is a line drawing animation that fades into a “real” image or illustration once the respective figure is in the viewport. This can be a fun effect for any kind of illustration on a website. The second concept explores using SVG line drawing animations for simulating the loading of a website: website parts are represented by flat drawings with a stroke that gets animated and once finished, the “real” elements are shown. The technique itself is implemented in a static way where we use an SVG for every bunch of elements that fade in. The idea for the schematic representation of the website come from this awesome Dribbble shot by Chris Bannister.

The beautiful illustrations of the devices are by Pixeden and you can find the PSD files here:

• iPad Air Perspective Mockup
• 3D View iPhone 5s Vector Mockup
• iMac Mockup Template

The traced SVG line drawings of these illustrations were carefully crafted by talented Emanuel Serbanoiu. Check out his Dribbble profile or visit his website.

The first demo is the line drawing animation with the illustration fade-in:

The second demo is the line drawing animation with the website fade in:

And the third demo is similar to demo 2, just that the animation and the fading in of the elements happens sequentially but with a random timing:

We hope you like the effects and find them inspiring!