Show HN: Make SVGs interactive in React with 1 line
53 points - last Tuesday at 6:28 PM
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 ā 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 ā not just functional, but fun. I also know creativity thrives in community, so it's open source and Iād 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 ā ideas, feedback, and contributions are all welcome
paulirish
last Wednesday at 12:44 AM
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
From what I read of the docs, it's a pretty lightweight "library" that's actually mainly just a collection of css classes you can attach to an svg
yomielu
last Tuesday at 9:31 PM
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.
tracker1
last Wednesday at 7:51 PM
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.
I've used it for very complex visualizations and, as long as things are properly memoized, it has also turned out very well.
SVG a11y standards are pretty undeveloped however which is disappointing
khaki54
last Tuesday at 10:29 PM
Did you consider using lottie and its interactivity? What were the tradeoffs?
hersko
last Tuesday at 8:36 PM
Your landing page made my 9 year old laugh. Good work!
abdulyki
last Tuesday at 10:34 PM
Looks cool but isn't this just using gsap and having a wrapper around it?
ckemere
last Tuesday at 8:22 PM
Doesn't seem to do anything in firefox either.
jazzcomputer
last Tuesday at 9:55 PM
Try hovering over the symbols on the card - though I couldn't get the morph one to work on Firefox
1ilit
last Tuesday at 9:46 PM
looks cool, you should probably gitignore some of the dirs there though
ge96
last Tuesday at 9:53 PM
Reminds me when I was new to dev, I committed and pushed node_modules up ahh good times
1ilit
last Tuesday at 9:55 PM
been there, done that
recursive
last Tuesday at 9:38 PM
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.
cAtte_
last Tuesday at 9:57 PM
yeah, not sure why anyone would copy-paste SVG as JSX when SVGR exists: https://react-svgr.com/