<p>In 2013, Jake Archibald introduced this cool trick of animating an SVG path to look like it’s drawing itself. It’s 2020 now, and the trick is still popular. I’ve seen it on a lot of websites I’ve visited recently. I, too, feature an animated SVG loader on my website using one of the libraries I’ll introduce below. </p> <p>In a previous article, Chris Coyier wrote about how SVG path animations work under the hood, using the CSS stroke-dasharray and stroke-dashoffset properties. In this article, I want to introduce you to four JavaScript libraries that can be used to create SVG path drawing animations with fewer lines of code, like this cool example. Why a library? Because they’re ideal for complex animations involving two or more SVGs with multiple paths. </p> <p>To get started, l’ll first secure an SVG to demo. Let’s use this castle from svgrepo. The castle SVG downloads as an SVG image. But, since we’re dealing with path animation, what we need is the code format of the SVG. To get this, I’ll import the file into Figma and use the “Copy as SVG” feature (Right Click → Copy/Paste → Copy as SVG) to grab the SVG code. </p> <p>To successfully animate an SVG path, the SVG shape should have a fill of none and each individual SVG path must have a stroke (we’ll set it to #B2441D) and a stroke-width (set to 2px). </p> <p>The animation effect we want to create is to first draw the outline (or stroke) of the SVG and then fill in the different colors. In total, there are six different fill colors used throughout the SVG, so we’ll remove the fill color from each path and give paths of the same color the same class name. </p> <p>#695A69: color-1#B2441D: color-2#DFDOC6: color-3#C8B2A8: color-4#DE582A: color-5#AO8A8A: color-6 </p> <p>After all the modifications, here’s what the SVG code looks like:</p>