SVG Made Graphic Web Design A Whole Lot Easier For Everybody

Scalable Vector Graphics became the accepted standard for contemporary web design because of the numerous advantages it offers as a format for expressing graphical effects. Unlike what the past necessitated, particularly elaborate effects can be rendered by the client's browser without the need for strong bandwidth. On top of the ability to express visual detail as lines of code, SVG demonstrates its versatility by allowing web designers to produce complex animated effects that would have previously required loading clunky, self-contained media files. Visual detail can be expressed in HTML files as coordinate data, and stylistic elements and animation sequences can be expressed in linked CSS files. Even JavaScript can easily be plugged into an SVG effect to incorporate interactive elements that react to user input.

None of this is to say that static image files uploaded separately and transferred over a connection to the client side have no place in modern SVG effects. An especially impressive SVG exhibition uploaded to CodePen by Amit Sheen showcases a persistently rotating effect resembling countless playing cards stacked together as a circular house of cards. Mere lines of code, mainly distributed between the HTML and CSS files in roughly equal proportions, are all that is needed to achieve the illusion that many flat, rectangular shapes are physically stacked atop one another.

While it is possible to have SVG convincingly recreate the face of a playing card through code, this project is actually remotely calling separately uploaded image files and projecting them onto each of the two flat sides of a given "card" shape. These calls are made within the CSS file, and a close examination reveals that all of the cards' white faces are being derived from a single image file resembling an arranged sheet of all 52 cards in a standard playing card deck. The CSS syntax is essentially dictating where among this sheet a small, rectangular area should be applied for the sake of "cropping out" that part of the image's contents. This extracted part of the image is then projected onto at least several of the standing card-like shapes' "forward faces." For more information click here https://v.redd.it/m4utn65wnag61.