Notes on the first release of svgia

Today we are excited to announce the first release of our online vector image editor svgia.com!

Backgrounds and design philosophy

SVG(Scalable Vector Graphics) is a great format for the web, the vector image can be scaled to any size without losing accuracy. The small size makes it perfect for the web. It is also very useful in other scenarios.

As a group of designers and programmers, we have been using the SVG format for a long time, but the lack of convenient editing tools always causes headaches. There is professional softwares like Adobe illustrator, but it is expensive and not easy to use.

Year after year, it becomes clear that we need a simple svg file editing tool that is designed for the web, solving the exact requirement we need, easy to use, only including core functionalities of the toolset but sufficient for most cases.

So we decided to make our own. The main design philosophy of this tool is simplicity, yet it still covers all the aspects we have been concerned about for years. This is a tradeoff between features and useability.

Another main concept is it must be web based, which means you can use it anywhere with a web browser. This makes the app lightweight and no need for any download/installment. All the documents are saved on the server and can be accessed anywhere.

The web based design also reduced the development costs, we only need to implement it once, it can be used across platforms like macOS and windows. It also gives more flexibility to the user.

But relaying the web browser still has some problems, the performance may be a little slow compared to the native desktop app. However, we have been testing for many times that this is acceptable for most cases, it is very rare to edit an extra large size svg file.

Planned features in the future

The first release is only a minimum viable product(MVP), it has a barely useful toolset that we think can be called a product. It still lacks a lot of features we want to add, but it’ll be no end if we are always adding new features. That’s why we release it first.

There will be more features in the next few releases, this is a continuous process and we will make it better and better with iteration after iteration.

Most notably, for the long term view we have planned the following features.

Teamwork / collaboration

This is what we need for our own team, files can be edited from different users or even together for the same file. Like other online documents systems, there will be access controls, comments and requests, and the whole collaboration process.

Online market for artists to share their work

We will add a lot of free artwork libraries, and also make it easy for the artist to upload their work to the market, they can share it free or charge a little bit to make money.
For the first step, we’ll add more free artworks online, especially the base elements for many categories, this can hugely speed up your design process.

Character and avatar tools/generator

This feature has a low priority,furthermore, the character should come with a pre-designed animating library and ready for many common actions. we will add it with the animation feature together in the future.

Animation editing

This is a very long feature and we even consider making separate products. Many things are still undetermined in the brain storm stages, and we also want to listen to your opinions.

Final words

Thanks for reading, we hope this tool solves your problem. Welcome joining us together! You can send us the feedback through the contact page, we are happy to hear your suggestions.

With the first release, we have already made the most important step, there is still a long journey ahead, let’s start the trip together!