Free SVG icons are a powerful and smart means of communicating your ideas across audiences. Knowing that it would simply up the effect of your creation, these magic shapes are just so hard to overlook.
Graphic designers are often found to experiment with an array of methods for using icons on their websites, applications, and other digital content. Lately, the use of non-standard fonts has also gained tremendous popularity amongst designers. However, there has been a hullabaloo on the Internet over what’s better, icon fonts, or free SVG icons?
What’s Better- Icon Fonts Or Free Svg Icons?
Although icon fonts are highly customizable with its standard CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) styling rules over image icons, their designing is quite limited to monochromatic colors, size, standard transforms, and animations, They can also turn out to be glitchy, leading to the generation of multiple server requests. Additionally, your browser’s expected failure to identify the icon font can show up a blank space instead of fonts themselves.
On the other hand, SVG is a bundle of XML code rather than an image or a font. This makes them reasonably sized, highly performant, and scalable. Plus, they can undergo modifications without losing quality as opposed to icon fonts. You can also edit, color, or animate each individual bit of an SVG icon, unlike the conventional icon font.
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) refers to a vector image format that can be encoded with the help of Extensible Markup Language (XML) syntax. It is a scalable image that is created with a series of coordinates. It is directly linked within a browser, adding further to its scalability.
Guide on how to create SVG icons .
Let us understand how to create SVG icons. Here is much that you need to know for creating free SVG icons.
Drawing Icons
The first step to creating your own free SVG icon is to sketch them out. Draw each design on a distinct artboard and save each of them in a separate file. Now, open the vector design program of your choice. A vector image program entails drawing icons with the help of different colors, shapes, and path administration on a virtual drawing board. Following this, you export the .svg file, and the coding will take place behind the scene.
Affinity Designer, Inkscape, Sketch, DesignEvo., Vecteezy, CorelDRAW, and Vectr are some of the popularly used vector image programs. Alternatively, you can consider trying the readily available free SVG icons download on free vector icon websites out there.
Understand The Artboards
The artboard size won’t be a matter of concern if it’s a single icon. You will just need to ensure that it has a decent size, meaning neither too large nor too small. However, if you are seeking to create a uniform icon set, your artboards should be of the same size.
Draw Over A Grid
Consider drawing the icons over a grid so they turn out as symmetrical as possible. Also, use a square Artboard and customizable stroke size for maximum efficiency. If you are creating a mono-colored icon, it would be best to set your design tool to solid black. Do not worry, as it can be easily changed in the application or the stylesheet to your desired color.
Keep Shapes Simple
While creating free SVG icons, make sure that the vector shapes are simple. It will bring out a simpler SVG code that loads in the blink of an eye and is least susceptible to show-up errors. Cut out the unnecessary points. For instance, a circle must need not more than four-vector points. Anything more than that can easily invite technical fuss.
It is also essential to know that SVG images are based on universal shapes which can be created virtually by employing numbers and coordinates. The seven main shapes include line, path, circle, ellipse, polygon, and polyline. In terms, each shape is denoted as <circle>, <line>, and so on.
Layer Them Right
Consolidate shapes and layer them over one another to generate versatile imagery. Transform any grouped layers, circles, or ellipses to aggravate paths. This will assist you in creating free SVG icons with small file sizes and make sure that their quality remains intact across different channels.
You can reshuffle the artboards, retitle them, and export them as SVG files. Now, start creating a new Illustrator document with a resolution of 64x64px.
Add ID Tags
If your icons are ready, you are good to export and optimize them in SVG format. Once done, open the files in a code editor and assign a distinct ID tag to each SVG tag.
Using The ‘<img>’ Tag
One of the most common ways of using the SVG file icons in your design is by using the <img> tag. For example, <img src=”alert.SVG” alt=”Alert” width= “125”>. It allows you to customize the size of the image. However, one significant drawback is that you cannot do a thing about the color.
Enhancing The ‘<img>’ Tag
You can enhance the img tag with the help of fragment identifiers. These are embedded SVG properties. You can refer to an SVG component with the help of an SVG view specification. For example, <img src=”svg_file.svg#svgView(viewBox(a,b,w,h))”>
Here a and b, suggest fragment coordinates from original files, while w and h are indicative of width (w) and height (h).
How To Insert Free Svg Icon Files
SVG images are a piece of cake to integrate into your web design. You may choose to either upload icons, the SVG code, or the SVG editor can be used to create a new SVG icon. For encoding an SVG with the help of a <img> component, you simply need to link it in the src attribute. You will also require a height or a width attribute, or both in certain cases to achieve an effective integration.
Editing Free Svg Icons
A modifiable SVG refers to the use of SVGs in HTML documents with their code embedded directly in the document rather than importing them from a file. These are created by employing tags such as <svg> </svg>.
Editing free SVG icons can be off-putting for designers, especially those who work primarily with the front-end code. You can create SVG either by hand or with the help of a tool with minimal code. SVG files are nothing but a set of XML code. On viewing the icon in a text file, you will witness quite a technical description of shapes, colors, and numbers. The very nature of SVG icons make them remarkably flexible, high in quality, and lightweight
Wrapping Up
It is incredibly easy to create free SVG icons that do not have any resolution-related influence. Unlike other formats, they don’t pixelate or blur away when you zoom in. You can index them. Script them, and compress them, just as you’d like it. It is also essential to acknowledge that all the best things come with practice. Hopping over to this article is your first step towards an effective free SVG icon creation. It might seem a little overwhelming in the beginning. However, once you gain a grasp on the whole process, you would come up with your own and even more creatives.
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