I noticed the problem before I had a name for it. Every screen I was building for Sarv needed some way to say a model is thinking, or a tool just ran, or an agent handed off to another agent — and every time, I'd end up hand-rolling a one-off Lottie file or a CSS keyframe hack just to get one icon to breathe. It worked, technically. It also meant I was solving the same tiny problem from scratch every single week.

Motion Icons started as a folder of these one-offs I kept copy-pasting between projects. At some point I stopped pretending it was a personal habit and just built the thing properly — over 1,700 icons now, each with a resting state and a motion state, shipped as plain SVG and CSS so nobody has to drag in an animation library just to make an icon blink.

The part I was strictest about was restraint. It's easy to make motion that looks impressive in a demo and unbearable in a real interface — a spinner that never resolves, a bounce that plays on loop until you want to close the tab. Every animation in the set was tuned to say its one thing clearly and then stop. Motion should tell you something is happening, not perform for you.

It's out now, free for personal and open-source use, with plans for teams who want more. But I'll be honest — I built it selfishly first. I wanted the icon set I wished existed the first ten times I needed it, and I'm still adding to it based on what I keep needing next.