121–130 of 200 posts
SVGs in general seem to have had quite a poor adoption rate. Editors for them are fewer, paint can't open or edit them, and support for them is iffy with even google docs not supporting the format for importing an image.
One big problem with SVG is that the specification is so large that everyone implements a subset, so interoperability suffers. Lots of XML-based standards of a similar age seem to have suffered from this. There was an idea that there'd be a standard for everything, and each XML-based standard would refer to others when it made sense rather than re-inventing the wheel. But too often the result was that in order to imp…
It's like using a compiler that supports one version of an architecture and you need to learn what you can/can't do in the source code that will result in illegal instructions anywhere else.
While Sketch is (imo) the best editor I've ever used for SVG it's also the worst about using weird SVG features that are poorly supported outside like, Safari and Chrome (I think they use the former).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please keep the animated SVG's away! Yes. Now, from the people who brought you the tag, continuous junky animations. You can also do spinning logos in WebGL, but you shouldn't. The only legit use for this is when you want clicking on a button to indicate that something happened. If you click on a "send" button, and an envelope zips across the screen and disappears, it's OK. If you click on the "Buy" button, it would…
> Remember "material design?" Whatever happened to that? You're going to love this. https://material.io/design/iconography/animated-icons.html
Please keep the animated SVG's away! Motion is extremely effective at drawing the eye's attention, and so should never be used unless that's the goal. In fact I can't think of a single good design reason to ever animate an icon except for loading/progress icons, which already are ubiquitous and generally don't need any dedicated animation tools since they're so simple and reusable. You don't ever want normal interfac…
I agree that I can't see a really compelling functional usecase here, but aesthetics is a worthy goal in its own right. I'm cautious, and animation will almost certainly make icons worse before it makes them better, but I can see potential improvement, and I'll always err on the side of expanding toolsets.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (Remember "material design?" Whatever happened to that?) The new hotness is "neumorphism": https://uxdesign.cc/neumorphism-in-user-interfaces-b47cef3bf...
Damn, I like the way that looks. I get why it's catching on! I think this could quickly go from "really awesome" to "super awful" pretty quickly if you didn't have a professional designer working on it, though. Overcrowding seems like it would be worse in this style than in others we've seen get popular over the years.
I recall a comment in some other HN thread the other day about how win 95 was the pinnacle of ux progression and how nothing seems to have really progressed since.
I totally agree that it looks good, & could go crazy wrong, very easily.
I've wanted to use the web as a replacement for PyQt (and tkinter, going all the way back to ~1995). It's really been amazing how badly the web tracks what is possible (and easy!) in a good GUI toolkit. Every 3-5 years I go back and try to find out what is the minimal way to get HTML + JS + CSS to produce something that would be easy in PyQt, while also being fairly principled, standardized, and maintainable. For exa…
No need to wonder: http//doc.qt.io/qt-5/wasm.html
Please keep the animated SVG's away! Motion is extremely effective at drawing the eye's attention, and so should never be used unless that's the goal. In fact I can't think of a single good design reason to ever animate an icon except for loading/progress icons, which already are ubiquitous and generally don't need any dedicated animation tools since they're so simple and reusable. You don't ever want normal interfac…
My most hated example of gratuitously distracting page decoration is the wriggling jizz scribbles on https://theoutline.com The worst part is that you can’t get rid the incontinent piss dribbles by whacking the reader mode icon, because the shithead web developers load the whole magazine into one page so reader mode only shows the first article. The developers of that site deserve to have their faces rubbed in my ana…
(Yeah, I know, HN doesn't like screaming. Bite.)
https://outline.com ... handles "theoutline.com" pretty well.
Please keep the animated SVG's away! Motion is extremely effective at drawing the eye's attention, and so should never be used unless that's the goal. In fact I can't think of a single good design reason to ever animate an icon except for loading/progress icons, which already are ubiquitous and generally don't need any dedicated animation tools since they're so simple and reusable. You don't ever want normal interfac…
Among the exceptions:
- Sensory feedback. A hue/shade change on hover, and on click, can be useful. For action commands (as @Animats describes) some indication of the action performed can be useful.
- Pending / in-process actions. If you've kicked off something that takes more than a second or so to complete, then a subtle animation indicating activity can be useful. "Loading" animations fall under this. Though a first consideration should be to not require pending actions.
- Highlighting associated context, especially in help / support scenarios. If you're describing an icon, then, yes, go ahead and have it animate then and only then as a finding aid.
- Data visualisations. No, not icons, but presentations showing some level of change that can be represented as in time. Here, SVGs can be useful (though also abused). Interactive charts, animations, etc., when directly engaged with (animate-on-hover is a CSS hack I've long applied to GIFs, though that's achieved by rendering all GIFs tansparent unless hovered).
But the whole notion that icons should sit spinning on your page when you're doing nothing with them? Nope nope nope nope NOPE!!!
If sites start doing that routinely, I'll simply block SVGs on them. Breakage be damned.
(TFA itself was virtually unreadable for me for just this reason.)
I, for one, don't want this. At all. Taking a look at my screen right now, there are probably close to a hundred or so icons in various applications visible on my desktop. If all these icons were wiggling and dancing, distracting me in my peripheral vision, it would be infuriating. I already had to disable animation in Slack due to the constant barrage of animated emojis. Let's not just do this because we can.
Even within the article there's already one that's questionable from an accessibility standpoint - the speeding train makes me a bit nauseous to look at and might present difficulties to users with balance or ocular disorders. Also, I can't agree with "Let's not just do this because we can." enough.
There isn't even an argument that doodads like these can placed on websites in an attempt to monetize users, like ads, where all the debate about sustainable sources of revenue and the ethics of adblocking come into play. They serve no material purpose at all except to be distracting.
Animations of any kind, even the ones that are finite in lifespan or simple page transitions, already annoy me greatly. If we lose this front, where random businesses start adding things like this only because the web platform has sufficiently advanced technologically to allow it, and a majority of users become desensitized into believing it is "cool" and shifting the the baseline of the web such that this majority now expects and might even want this kind of behavior, it would surely become another unnecessary annoyance. I feel like this has already happened with Metro/Flat design and the death of skeuomorphism (more or less), and also the overuse of animated GIFs in blogs.
But there's nothing making it outright illegal, so I'm not sure what would stop them from doing so at this point. We can't exactly go back to Web 1.0 (nor should we) - that kind of design is opt-in now.