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As a frontend dev who also works in UX and graphics from time to time, I find it helpful to be able to do both, looking at SVGs as both a vector graphics format and a human-readable XML. IME the workflow depends more on whether any SVG is meant to be illustrative (like art) or quantitative (like charts) or interactive and animated/mutable (like a game).
For something like this bell example (https://svg-tutorial.com/svg/bell), you can certainly hand-code it if you're really math-inclined and can estimate the formulas of curves just by looking at them, but for us mere mortals, it's easier to just draw out the curves in a graphics app then export as an SVG. And for things like the ringer (is that what you call it? the orange ball thing at the bottom of the bell that strikes the bell to make the sound), being able to visually draw it on a canvas, change its size, drag it around and play with its colors and dimensions, etc. is really helpful. Figma is fine for simpler graphics, but it's really more of a UX tool than a graphic design tool, and Illustrator is a lot more powerful. Inkscape is a FOSS option.
In other circumstances, though, manipulating the SVG XML directly is also very helpful. Let's say you want to programatically generate a bar chart. If you have a big dataset, it's going to take a designer forever to manually plot them and change them every time the data changes. But it's easy for a dev to use Javascript (or any language) to draw each rectangle, programmatically adjust their heights and colors based on the data, add tooltips, etc. And that way you can dynamically update them in real-time whenever the data changes (like if the user selects a different date range, or new events come in). A lot of this is made easier by libs like https://frappe.io/charts or https://apexcharts.com. But before you take that approach, you should know that for complex charts, sometimes Canvas rendering (or just generating graphics in the backend) can be more performant than SVG.
SVGs can also be animated and interactive, not just with CSS transitions but by directly manipulating the XML geometries, like http://snapsvg.io/demos/ or https://www.svgator.com/ or https://codepen.io/collection/XpwMLO/. This is fine for product pages and such, but for really graphics-intensive apps (full games) it's probably slower than other rendering pipelines. (Not my specialty, won't speculate too much.)
TLDR Drawing them in a graphics app is usually easier for the designers, but the XML can be programmatically manipulated afterward to great effect.
As a frontend dev who also works in UX and graphics from time to time, I find it helpful to be able to do both, looking at SVGs as both a vector graphics format and a human-readable XML. IME the workflow depends more on whether any SVG is meant to be illustrative (like art) or quantitative (like charts) or interactive and animated/mutable (like a game).
For something like this bell example (https://svg-tutorial.com/svg/bell), you can certainly hand-code it if you're really math-inclined and can estimate the formulas of curves just by looking at them, but for us mere mortals, it's easier to just draw out the curves in a graphics app then export as an SVG. And for things like the ringer (is that what you call it? the orange ball thing at the bottom of the bell that strikes the bell to make the sound), being able to visually draw it on a canvas, change its size, drag it around and play with its colors and dimensions, etc. is really helpful. Figma is fine for simpler graphics, but it's really more of a UX tool than a graphic design tool, and Illustrator is a lot more powerful. Inkscape is a FOSS option.
In other circumstances, though, manipulating the SVG XML directly is also very helpful. Let's say you want to programatically generate a bar chart. If you have a big dataset, it's going to take a designer forever to manually plot them and change them every time the data changes. But it's easy for a dev to use Javascript (or any language) to draw each rectangle, programmatically adjust their heights and colors based on the data, add tooltips, etc. And that way you can dynamically update them in real-time whenever the data changes (like if the user selects a different date range, or new events come in). A lot of this is made easier by libs like https://frappe.io/charts or https://apexcharts.com. But before you take that approach, you should know that for complex charts, sometimes Canvas rendering (or just generating graphics in the backend) can be more performant than SVG.
SVGs can also be animated and interactive, not just with CSS transitions but by directly manipulating the XML geometries, like http://snapsvg.io/demos/ or https://www.svgator.com/ or https://codepen.io/collection/XpwMLO/. This is fine for product pages and such, but for really graphics-intensive apps (full games) it's probably slower than other rendering pipelines. (Not my specialty, won't speculate too much.)
TLDR Drawing them in a graphics app is usually easier for the designers, but the XML can be programmatically manipulated afterward to great effect.
Another way is to write HTML/CSS and use satori [0] to convert that to SVG. It's meant for Open Graph images (the images that show up when you link a site in Discord, Slack, Twitter, etc.), but it works quite well for anything.
This is obviously not as flexible as true SVG, but it is familiar to author for anyone who's written a React application. I've used it on the backend to generate match reports for League of Legends [1]
[0]: https://github.com/vercel/satori
[1]: https://github.com/shepherdjerred/glitter-boys
Another way is to write HTML/CSS and use satori [0] to convert that to SVG. It's meant for Open Graph images (the images that show up when you link a site in Discord, Slack, Twitter, etc.), but it works quite well for anything.
This is obviously not as flexible as true SVG, but it is familiar to author for anyone who's written a React application. I've used it on the backend to generate match reports for League of Legends [1]
[0]: https://github.com/vercel/satori
[1]: https://github.com/shepherdjerred/glitter-boys
This is really cool! SVG is such a neat and flexible format, I'll definitely be taking some time to work through these tutorials, as it's directly related to some side projects I have going.
Like some of the other commenters here, I've found a lot of fun in building React components that are backed by SVG. React and JSX make it easy to add the interaction, and SVG lets you do some pretty cool UIs that wouldn't be easily possible with just HTML.
I actually have published a React component that renders an interactive "Circle of Fifths," which I built for a music theory side project I was working on (although this project is currently languishing among many other half-baked repos). There's still a lot to do with the component, but it's in a usable state: https://github.com/epiccoleman/react-circle-of-fifths
I wrote what I think is probably my best blog post about the process of figuring out how to build the Circle of Fifths with SVG, if that sounds interesting: https://epiccoleman.com/posts/2023-04-05-svg-circle-of-fifth...
I'm currently building out a fretboard diagram generator using a very similar approach, and having that post on hand for reference has been pretty useful. This is maybe my favorite thing about writing up the stuff I work on, it's nice to be able to "replay" how I thought through a problem.