I’m sure most people have used an SVG at some point. Some may even have peeked inside the file, only to scream from the overwhelming jumble of numbers and letters.

But SVGs aren’t as complicated as they might first appear. Underneath all those seemingly mysterious numbers and tags is a simple description of shapes, paths, colors, and other graphical elements. Once you understand a few of the basic building blocks, creating and tweaking an SVG becomes much less intimidating.