What's in the animal icon set
Ready today: cat, dog, fish, bird, butterfly, rabbit and 3 more (free) and bee, turtle, penguin, owl, panda, ladybug and 19 more (Pro).
Pets: a cat, a dog, a rabbit and a rat, plus a paw print for anything pet-related. Birds: a little songbird, an owl, a dove, a penguin and a pair of lovebirds. Bugs and garden creatures: a bee, a butterfly, a ladybug, a snail, a worm, a spider and a bug. In and by the water: a fish, a turtle, a starfish, a shrimp and a seashell. A little wilder: a panda, a squirrel, a bat and a reindeer. And a few toys shaped like animals, for parties and nurseries: a teddy bear, a balloon dog, a rocking horse and a piggy bank.
Every animal is drawn the same way as the rest of Doodle Icons: stroke-only, on a 48 × 48 grid, with a chunky 3.4 stroke and round ends. Faces are kept to a few dots and a curve, so a hand drawn cat still reads at small sizes, and a page that puts a dog next to a calendar, a phone or an arrow from the main library still looks like one person drew it.
Where cute animal icons work
Kids' worksheets and classroom materials
Counting sheets, phonics cards ("b is for bee"), reading charts and reward stickers. Print the still SVG or the PNG. The icons are outlines with no fill, so they double as tiny coloring pages: kids can color the fish in themselves.
Pet blogs, vets and pet shops
A paw print next to "book a visit", a cat and a dog to split a menu into cat food and dog food, a fish for the aquarium aisle. Because the animals share a grid and a stroke with the full library, they sit beside your mail, phone and calendar icons without looking pasted in.
Zoo, nature and science content
Field-trip handouts, a nature club newsletter, an ocean unit with a fish, a starfish, a shrimp and a turtle, or a "minibeasts" lesson with a bee, a ladybug, a snail and a worm. One drawing that inks itself on at the start of a slide gets attention; keep the rest of the slide still.
Apps, websites and empty states
An owl on a reading app, a turtle for "this may take a moment", a bug on your bug-report button, a bird beside a newsletter sign-up. The animated SVG draws itself in as the page loads, which suits a welcome screen, an empty inbox or a 404 page.
Party invites and nursery prints
A balloon dog and a teddy bear on a kids' birthday invite, a rabbit and a pair of lovebirds on a baby shower card, a row of animals along the bottom of a nursery print. For print, use the still files and set the ink to match the paper.
Formats, downloads and the draw-on
Pick a free animal above to open its page. It downloads as a still SVG, a transparent 512px PNG or an animated SVG, with no sign-up. When the animated file loads, the strokes draw in order, each starting just before the last one ends, so the animal appears line by line, the way you would sketch it. Then the boil takes over: an SVG filter nudges the line through six slightly different frames on a loop, like a hand-inked cartoon that never redraws a line in quite the same place.
The file is self-contained, with the draw-on in CSS and the boil as a standard SVG filter, so it plays in modern browsers inline or as an <img>. Many slide apps and design tools import an SVG as a still drawing, or not at all. Because the animated file keeps its strokes hidden until its animation runs, it can come out blank there, so use the still SVG or the PNG in those apps.
In React, npm i @oreo-design/doodle-icons gives you the free icons as components; mount <BoilFilter> once and pass draw for the entrance. The free set is 203 icons under the MIT license. Pro adds 1,708 icons in the same hand, the bee, owl, penguin and the rest of the animals included, and every batch on the way to 2,000, for a one-time $39 for the first 100 orders, $69 after that. No subscription, and a 14-day full refund if it's not what you hoped.
Tips for using hand drawn animals
- Color them in. The animals are outlines, so in a design tool you can tuck a soft blob of color behind one, a pink one behind the piggy bank, a yellow one behind the bee, and keep the ink line on top.
- Change the ink. SVG files from this site use a near-black ink (
#2b2a33): change thestrokevalue for a brown dog or an orange fish. The React icons usecurrentColorand follow the text color around them. - Build a little scene. A big turtle with a few small fish, or a line of animals walking along a footer. They are vectors, so a mix of sizes stays sharp.
- One moving animal per screen. A whole zoo boiling at once gets noisy, so let one animal draw itself in and use still versions for the rest.
Hand-drawn animals FAQ
Some are. Cat, dog, fish, bird, butterfly, rabbit and 3 more are free; bee, turtle, penguin, owl, panda, ladybug and 19 more come with Doodle Icons Pro, a one-time purchase. Free icons are MIT-licensed for personal and commercial use.
Yes, for the free ones: each free icon's page has a transparent 512px PNG next to the still and animated SVGs. Pro icons come as animated and static SVG files plus React components.
Yes. Free icons are MIT-licensed. Pro icons can go on physical and digital products you sell, such as T-shirts, mugs, cards, stickers and printables, as long as they're part of your own design. What the Pro license rules out is selling or sharing the icon files themselves, or putting them in a product whose main purpose is offering icons, like an icon library, font or template marketplace. The terms have the details.
That's the boil. Old hand-drawn cartoons redrew every frame, so lines never landed in quite the same place. Each icon cycles through six of those frames for as long as it's on screen; on this site, reduced-motion settings show them still.