Adopting and customizing SVG is undoubtedly one of my favorite things that have happened in the design and development community in recent years. As a designer, they were aspirin for many headaches that always occur during development. Today I’m going to look at what SVG is and why you should start using them, and how to get started even if you’re not a designer. And if you want to get directly to the good stuff, the main reasons you should use it are if you haven’t used SVG yet.
Reasons Why You Should Be Using Scalable Vector Graphics
SVGs like the blunt SVG free are scalable and make pixels perfect at any number of pixels, while JPEG, PNG, and GIF files don’t. SVGs are vector images and therefore typically have a much smaller file size than bitmap-based images.
Embedded SVGs Can Be Styled Using CSS
They are SEO-friendly, which allows you to add keywords, descriptions, and links directly to the definition. SVGs can be embedded in HTML, meaning they can be cached, edited directly with CSS, and indexed for more use. They are proof of the future. SVGs can be measured indefinitely, which means they always provide pixel perfection in new display technologies like 8K and others.
How are SVGs different?
Traditional image types such as JPEG, PNG, and GIF are based on bitmaps, meaning they consist of a fixed number of pixels. Usually, this means that once you start enlarging or zooming in on such an image, you will get edge lines, blurry artifacts, and pixel irregularities.
Smaller File Sizes
This is another important advantage. By the nature of vector images, the data that determines file size are layers, effects, masks, colors, and gradients. For comparison, bitmap-based images record each pixel in an image, as well as the number of colors used. Admittedly, this is a bit more complicated, but the bottom line is that often a bitmap-based image file is more expensive than its SVG counterpart.
Style an SVG Using CSS
That's it. And that means you don’t have to know any design software to make small changes like changing the color. In fact, if you’ve done any web design or interface development, it won’t be difficult to add a gradient to the shape or increase the stroke thickness.
SVGs are Future Proof
I think that’s something that’s very overlooked, especially when it comes to scalability. I remember the time before SVG when pixel density was a hot topic in the design community when new mobile phones and tablets with incredibly rich displays appeared. All of this was amazing. But that means that most of the JPEG or PNG images used on websites have now lost a high enough resolution and looked like trash on handheld devices.