Making a SVG HTML Burger Button By Kyle Henwood | | 3 min. ( 475 words)

Note: works in safari, chrome, firefox (mask opacity is iffy)

See the Pen Alayb by Kyle Henwood (@kyleHenwood) on CodePen.

Hamburger buttons are used to symbolify hidden menus all across the world, but when I came across this pretty awesome transition of a hamburger button by CreativeDash, I challenged myself with recreating it HTML.

First thoughts.

Having never worked with animating SVG before I had a couple of ideas of how I wanted to approach the animated path.

Original Idea: One path.

My first thought was to create a simple path and animate a line along it, seemed simple enough right?

Of course not!

SVG paths CAN have an animated stroke that runs along the path, however this is created using two properties. ‘stroke-dasharray’ which makes a dashed line even spaces, and ‘stroke-dashoffset’ which moves the dashes. Most tutorials show this in use to animate a path in one direction, using a super long stroke length which in turn creates a super wide stroke gap when using a dashed line.

My problem:

I needed the stroke to change widths AND end, and having a small initial starting width was impossible.

Introducing: SVG Masks.

Not very well supported cross browser (had to use two different methods to get working in chrome / firefox) I hatched the idea to create two paths.

one small inital path which draws to the outside circle, which I would use as a mask and animate an html element behind to give the impression that the line is moving. (red stroke)

and the outer ring which uses the widly used super massive ‘stroke-dasharray’ and ‘stroke-dashoffset’ to animate it. (black stroke)

Without the mask here is what is happening:

See the Pen grsex by Kyle Henwood ( @kyleHenwood ) on CodePen

Many hours of frame by frame animations hand coded in css to get all the timing right and… tada!

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