Please keep the animated SVG's
away!Motion is extremely effective at drawing the eye's attention, and so should never be used unless that's the goal.
In fact I can't think of a single good design reason to ever animate an icon except for loading/progress icons, which already are ubiquitous and generally don't need any dedicated animation tools since they're so simple and reusable.
You don't ever want normal interface/page icons to be animated constantly, because it's always distracting and never good.
What about intermittently, like hover states? Still no, because a hover state exists to give confirmation that you've mousedowned on a clickable area -- so the hover needs to be an area-wide confirmation (like changing the button color). Animating an icon instead is too confusing, and animating it on top of a color change is too redundant and noisy.
So I just don't see any use case at all.
(Extra note #1: motion itself can be helpful in UX -- e.g. an icon expanding in size to a card, a card sliding off, etc. -- but none of that involves animated icons.)
(Extra note #2: except for gaming interfaces which are all about sensory excess -- shadows! sounds! animated icons! pop-out effects! -- but those tend to be based on other technology workflows anyways.)
Motion is extremely effective at drawing the eye's attention, and so should never be used unless that's the goal.
In fact I can't think of a single good design reason to ever animate an icon except for loading/progress icons, which already are ubiquitous and generally don't need any dedicated animation tools since they're so simple and reusable.
You don't ever want normal interface/page icons to be animated constantly, because it's always distracting and never good.
What about intermittently, like hover states? Still no, because a hover state exists to give confirmation that you've mousedowned on a clickable area -- so the hover needs to be an area-wide confirmation (like changing the button color). Animating an icon instead is too confusing, and animating it on top of a color change is too redundant and noisy.
So I just don't see any use case at all.
(Extra note #1: motion itself can be helpful in UX -- e.g. an icon expanding in size to a card, a card sliding off, etc. -- but none of that involves animated icons.)
(Extra note #2: except for gaming interfaces which are all about sensory excess -- shadows! sounds! animated icons! pop-out effects! -- but those tend to be based on other technology workflows anyways.)