So I've gone ahead and made some dev.to loading gifs based on the logo. Which one's your favourite?
This large gif is a bit choppy - see the actual gifs further below ;)
Whenever I start a side product, one of the first things that pops into my mind is the loading animation. Lately, I've found a nice tool that I'd like to share called Anima. It's a sketch plugin that lets you animate things like this. It's quite powerful and I'm still discovering more about the tool every week.
If anyone's interested, I'll make a quick tutorial showing how to make the GIF everyone likes, and maybe then I'll jump in and try contribute to the project on Github - that'd be cool :)
My first thoughts were what if the "V" moved to the left, replicating a console, and then "loading" just scrolled across...
I quite like this, but it wasn't quite right. After chatting with my lady friend (who's also a dev, hey Catia 😘), she suggested doing something like "npm run DEV" - which I really like the idea of. So, we came up with:
And a slight variation on that
Some other options
It's always good to have options! While building the above, I thought what if I just faded the letters in and out sequentially. So:
And another version of the above
Which do you prefer?
I know which is my favourite, but let me know what you think is best, and obviously if you've any ideas for how to improve it, lemme know.
PS: you can check out some of my other animations over here, like:
Top comments (95)
Pulse 1 or 2 definitely.
The others are animated with sudden stops or are cramped with too much going on imho.
They all look nice tho. :)
Agreed 100%, with a preference for Pulse 1 because Pulse 2's animation seems too quick.
Yes!! I prefer the Pulse 1. It is better
Yep I agree actually. I thought I'd like the npm one more cos its clever. But as an actual loading icon the pulse is cleaner and simpler...
If there is one thing I've learned in my years of development work it's that clever is rarely a good thing.
The first one is the one that I like the most!
Great work with all of them, but this one attracted my attention the most 😊
I like the idea of creation such a loading animation, maybe you can propose this via a github pull request.
EDIT: I'd love to read an article about Anima!
I agree. Overall the V being used as a command prompt arrow is genius!
Maybe in place of the loading there could also be one with a blinking thick cursor like the command line?
This is why I stopped iterating and wanted to share. Didn't think of this. Lemme see what I can do 🙌🏼🙌🏼
I'm curious! 😎
Maybe the V can turn in a way that one side of the V becomes the cursor (it splits during the turning). Just an idea :)
Even better idea with the blinking cursor! This connects even more to the developmer-terminal-feeling.
Same wavelength here. I was going to comment "how about a blinking cursor instead of the text 'loading'" and I'm glad I read the comments first!
Such a fan of this one!!
I'm definitely drawn to the loading and pulse 1...I think the sweet spot might be somewhere between or combined.
🍻
I like Pulse 1, and I would love "Loading..." if it didn't have the word "loading" scrolling across. Let me crudely mock up the keyframes in ASCII here, that's what you wanted, right?
Interesting! Not very difficult to do given what I've got so far...
The NPM ones are making some assumptions that everyone here is a web dev. :P
yeah true - sorry it's just a command I'm most familiar with and wanted to try. is there a command that's more universal?
Just saying there are Python and Go developers, DevOps engineers, people who primarily do C++ API's or whatever.
NPM is specific to JavaScript. And usually web specific at that.
The other ones are cool, though!
I'd say, npm is specific to npm. There are web developers who use yarn or pnpm as well. :)
The Node Package Manager is, in fact, specific to JavaScript.
Maybe then git clone?
I guess
makeis more universallsrm -rf /gitNope I am not a web dev. I write AI, ML and all that stuff. 😁
Option 1. Nice and smooth, requires the lowest amount of eye strain to comprehend.
I like the animation of option 5 and 6 but using
npmexclusively is alienating. Maybe if we havenpm,gem,composer,helm, etc; sure.Your comment about eye strain makes sense actually, there's a lot of quick movement that makes your brain work hard.... interesting. Also yeah NPM could be a bit alienating now that you mention it...
If you want to use the clever link between the V and a command prompt, why not do a classic CLI loading animation? I'm thinking of the spiny bars (-\¦/-...) or the newer walking dots (github.com/sindresorhus/ora)
oooh this is nice - good idea!
The first one is very original, I like it. But honestly the Pulse 1 just looks better.
I don't really like the "npm run dev" idea because it gives the impression that this is a node.js community. Why not "go dev", "python dev", or "php artisan dev" ?
I like the idea of the command prompt. What if after rotating the V you zoom out (so it becomes tiny) and a command is executed which then makes output scroll to the bottom. So the black dev rectangle is like a tiny computer terminal. It could end with the big DEV text eventually appearing on the screen.
That's interesting - although the logo is small enough, I'm not sure I can make it work, but I might try that. What command would you recommend?
If it's tiny enough you can't make up the command which was entered. But maybe something like
Great work! I think the first one looks best!
Thanks! :)
npm run DEV v3