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Show HN: Make SVGs interactive in React with 1 line

40 points • by shantingHou • last Tuesday at 6:28 PM • 16 comments • view on HN

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

Comments

paulirish • yesterday 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

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.

simlevesque • last Tuesday at 8:02 PM

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...

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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!

ckemere • last Tuesday at 8:22 PM

Doesn't seem to do anything in firefox either.

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abdulyki • last Tuesday at 10:34 PM

Looks cool but isn't this just using gsap and having a wrapper around it?

1ilit • last Tuesday at 9:46 PM

looks cool, you should probably gitignore some of the dirs there though

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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.

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