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Show HN: Make SVGs interactive in React with 1 line

(svggles.vercel.app)
50 points shantingHou | 21 comments | 01 Apr 25 18:28 UTC | HN request time: 1.143s | source | bottom

Hey HN

I built svggles (npm: interactive-illustrations), a React utility that makes it easy to add playful, interactive SVGs to your frontend.

It supports mouse-tracking, scroll, hover, and other common interactions, and it's designed to be lightweight and intuitive for React devs.

The inspiration came from my time playing with p5.js — I loved how expressive and fun it was to create interactive visuals. But I also wanted to bring that kind of creative freedom to everyday frontend work, in a way that fits naturally into the React ecosystem.

My goal is to help frontend developers make their UIs feel more alive — not just functional, but fun. I also know creativity thrives in community, so it's open source and I’d love to see contributions from artists, developers, or anyone interested in visual interaction.

Links: Website + Docs: svggles.vercel.app

GitHub: github.com/shantinghou/interactive-illustrations

NPM: interactive-illustrations

Let me know what you think — ideas, feedback, and contributions are all welcome

1. simlevesque ◴[01 Apr 25 20:02 UTC] No.43550773[source]▶
This example doesn't seem to work, I hover it and nothing happens, in incognito, chrome latest: https://svggles.vercel.app/?tab=Documentation%2FHover%2FAnim...
replies(2): >>43551019 #>>43551226 #
2. ◴[01 Apr 25 20:12 UTC] No.43550858[source]▶
3. ckemere ◴[01 Apr 25 20:22 UTC] No.43550933[source]▶
Doesn't seem to do anything in firefox either.
replies(1): >>43551734 #
4. ◴[01 Apr 25 20:32 UTC] No.43551019[source]▶
5. hersko ◴[01 Apr 25 20:36 UTC] No.43551074[source]▶
Your landing page made my 9 year old laugh. Good work!
6. nartho ◴[01 Apr 25 20:54 UTC] No.43551226[source]▶
You need to hover the heart in the middle, not just the card.
7. westurner ◴[01 Apr 25 21:21 UTC] No.43551474[source]▶
Src: https://github.com/shantinghou/interactive-illustrations
8. westurner ◴[01 Apr 25 21:22 UTC] No.43551476[source]▶
MDN docs > SVG and CSS: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Tutorials/S...
9. yomielu ◴[01 Apr 25 21:31 UTC] No.43551554[source]▶
Awesome work! Not sure if this is intentional but it looks like the (lack of) contrast on the text vs background color is making it hard to read anything on the landing page.
10. recursive ◴[01 Apr 25 21:38 UTC] No.43551598[source]▶
It seems unusual to make the package name so different from the project name.

Also, the instructions for converting svg to react component work sometimes. It won't work if your svg has any style attributes for example. React also warns on some valid svg attributes, such as this one.

    <rect x="11" y="11" width="8" height="8" stroke="green" clip-path="circle() view-box" />
I've spent at least a day cleaning up after devs who just dropped inline SVG content into react components without checking whether it works. If you actually had a reliable way of embedding SVG in JSX in such a way that it worked with react, I might have use for it on occasion.

The given code example is missing a right angle brace on the `<svg` line.

replies(2): >>43551699 #>>43551754 #
11. 1ilit ◴[01 Apr 25 21:46 UTC] No.43551665[source]▶
looks cool, you should probably gitignore some of the dirs there though
replies(1): >>43551714 #
12. ◴[01 Apr 25 21:51 UTC] No.43551699[source]▶
13. ge96 ◴[01 Apr 25 21:53 UTC] No.43551714[source]▶
Reminds me when I was new to dev, I committed and pushed node_modules up ahh good times
replies(1): >>43551737 #
14. jazzcomputer ◴[01 Apr 25 21:55 UTC] No.43551734[source]▶
Try hovering over the symbols on the card - though I couldn't get the morph one to work on Firefox
15. 1ilit ◴[01 Apr 25 21:55 UTC] No.43551737{3}[source]▶
been there, done that
16. cAtte_ ◴[01 Apr 25 21:57 UTC] No.43551754[source]▶
yeah, not sure why anyone would copy-paste SVG as JSX when SVGR exists: https://react-svgr.com/
17. khaki54 ◴[01 Apr 25 22:29 UTC] No.43551976[source]▶
Did you consider using lottie and its interactivity? What were the tradeoffs?
18. abdulyki ◴[01 Apr 25 22:34 UTC] No.43552000[source]▶
Looks cool but isn't this just using gsap and having a wrapper around it?
19. paulirish ◴[02 Apr 25 00:44 UTC] No.43552714[source]▶
I love playful interaction too, but you can get all this for free: SVGs are natively interactive.

Here's your demo in 45 lines of SVG and CSS: https://codepen.io/paulirish/pen/gbOZXJp

20. tracker1 ◴[02 Apr 25 19:51 UTC] No.43560771[source]▶
Depending on what you're doing, I find SVG manipulation in React to come out pretty well. I've used it for overlays on scanned documents and basic charts without much issue at all.