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Google Font Effects

developers.google.com

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Great, now someone needs to write a "disable animated fonts" extension.

Extensions required to make the web usable:

AdBlock: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/

NoScript: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/

Toggle Animated GIFs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toggle-animat...

> Extensions required to make the web usable:

> NoScript: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/

Can you elaborate, how does noscript makes web more usable?

AFAIK most people use Noscript for privacy/security reasons, there's no way it makes the web more usable considering how prevalent javascript is these days.

It certainly becomes less and less annoying after you use it for a few months. That way you only get annoyed by new sites.

Used it for 6 months switched machines and didn't want to go through the learning curve again.

Can you copy over your settings file from old machine?

I don't know the parent's particular circumstances, but NoScript has a whitelist import/export feature.

OP forgot to do it since it was working well it was out of mind.

Sure. Lots of websites have really questionable javascript behavior, like replicating mobile behavior where dragging the mouse around makes you "swipe" between articles, or in-line image resizing (wikipedia), or auto-rotating image galleries, or shitty page-loading effects like fading text in, or breaking your scrollbar.

NoScript eliminates that kind of garbage.

In addition to this, there's the privacy benefits, lowering your page load time and CPU usage, and avoiding running arbitrary programs on your computer loaded off the internet, which is how GitHub was DDOSed last month.

For an average, non-technical user, I wouldn't recommend NoScript. But if you're willing to put up with a little annoyance of allowing two or three domains now and then, it really makes a lot of webpages behave better.

except the fact that many sites use js to render anything so it makes most of the web unusable unless you turn it off.

Yup, it's a trade-off. You have to view fading-in-text and put up with broken scrollbars; I have to click "Temporarily Allow" a couple times a day.

NoScript also has surrogate scripts that replace what was blocked with a minimal script to un-break sites. It's usually used to fool a site with first-party scripts enabled into thinking that the third-party scripts loaded, too, but there are also scripts that allow a site to work without any of its scripts being enabled. The changelog currently show that they recently added a surrogate to allow some troublesome wordpress themes to work without scripting, and to allow the Microsoft support site to show article content without scripting.

yeah but it is an unfortunate game of wackamole. I really wish I could turn off JS but when I did, I would always just end up with no other option.

I've yet to find a Chrome plugin that does what Toggle Animated GIFs does for Firefox.

Anybody know of one?

I'm 100% in favor of breaking up a wall of text with images, but too many bloggers favor distracting animated ones. In my perfect world, they'd be a still frame with a play button, like any other embedded video.

I'd skip NoScript, and replace it with...

Ghostery: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/ghostery/

and Cookie Block: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-block/

Good blocking of trackers and off-brand cookies, but without dealing with the whitelisting of new/broken sites all the time.

Use umatrix instead. It's much more powerful than adblock and noscript.

https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix

I'm missing a spinning skull GIF, a permanent under construction sign and blinking pink text that scrolls incessantly.

GooGleoCities, perhaps?

With animated horizontal rules and an animated background.

GeoCities was exactly what came to my mind when I saw the "fire" animation.

Lol, i also thought of Geocities and old Frontpage pages :p Missing fireworks anyone?

I taught myself coding HTML by hand using Hippie. I regressed and switched to Frontpage because it was so "easy". I then went over to the Dreamweaver and stayed there until I learned server-side programming, which put me back in the text editor, where I've happily been since.

Even with my stupid page of links nobody other than me cared about, it was still exciting learning HTML and being able to publish whatever dumb things I came up with online on Geocities.

Image counters, web rings, and that analytics company that gave you free analytics but you had to put there little square logo on the bottom of the page and anybody could click on it to see your stats. Those are some fun memories of my fledgling web years, circa the mid-90's.

And by that you mean Macromedia Fireworks? Oh, the clear blue water! The fonts really triggered some memories... .

Would have been an awesome April Fools' prank.

Exactly my thought when I saw the line "to produce beautiful display text" with an example that would have been atrocious on any GeoCities page.

OTOH, the time on the internet when GeoCities was hot was a wild time. I wouldn't mind if the web would get a bit less serious and more light-heartened again. :)

gifs are not web3.0!

☠☠☠ http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2620/index.htm ☠☠☠

Also, need a digital Earth spinning with "WWW" spinning around it.

This is a really clever move by Google. Put these out there, then lower the PageRank score of anyone foolish enough to use them!

"When making headers or display texts on your website, you'll often want to stylize your text in a decorative way."

Oh dear.

"..with minimal effort to produce beautiful display text"

The original fonts are tweaked painstakingly by a designer. The "effects" are like putting lipstick on Mona Lisa.

Web site design is now a branch of publishing and design and Google is one of the larger corps operating in the area. This is like... I don't know, offering a high end DSLR with a physical button to add instagram filters and lens flare to the original image. Well, for free, but the decision process to add these features gives the appearance of amateurism and lack of respect for good design.

Schoolkids will love these exciting tweaks, no doubt.

But hey, at least it's just text instead of an image. This is good for accessibility.

Ironically, more accessible for the blind.

> Schoolkids will love these exciting tweaks, no doubt.

Plenty of money in that demographic; when Google can track schoolkids habits they can predict their future habits as adults and be the first to sell the best ads. Google (and Target) knows about the first pregnancy before the mother.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...

Suddenly I feel I'm back in 1995. Bring on the dial-up sound... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

Oh great now all we need is geocities and (the old) MySpace to come back. I sincerely hope this is a joke.

Personally, I think in those days the web had more "character".

As always we're oscillating. I too am thinking the older wilder web had something that has been lost nowadays. Everything is very similar even if cuter and more interactive. There were a lot of curious 'design' and aesthetics before.

Sign our guestbook! :D

You beat me to it... I was thinking the exact same thing.

Web people, please don't start to use effects that are only supported by one single rendering engine (okay, Blink+Webkit).

> Web people, please don't start to use effects that punish the eyes and offend sensibilities of people using particular browsers.

Many of these work in most browsers. Google's fonts API only serves CSS and font files specific to the browser. Open the following links in different browsers and watch it change: http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Rancho&effect=shadow-...

Only 5 of them work in Firefox.

Look at the list: "Support: Chrome, Safari".

I like to contrast this with a few links which were posted here a few days ago, regarding how Google is now a design-driven company.

To be fair, they don't use this on their properties. Apple ships Papyrus too.

These have been around (and in beta apparently) for a few years.

You may be fooled by the shiny new wrapper around the docs into thinking this is a new thing.

They can't possibly have been around that long - according to all the other very original comments here, the web would have imploded and turned into 1995 geocities or some such.

Damn! Blink effect is missing. Will have to wait for the next version/update. :D

Pairs nicely with http://code.divshot.com/geo-bootstrap/

.. and spin those logos like a pro with swift3D! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_3D

I just learned they went out of business in 2009 :-(

They will forever be spinning in my heart.

Oh man, the memories are coming back... The real pros hand-traced their 3D logo animations! :)

WordArt is back!

Just in time for the return of XFiles.

ps: gradient overlay is seriously lacking. https://www.google.com/search?q=font+gradient+metal&tbm=isch

nostalgia ... It amazes me to think that back then how we all collectively agreed that those spinning, scrolling, blinking geocities type designs were cool - and tried to imitate them. Now a decade later, collectively laugh at them. This seems common in fashion - but is it true for other art forms as well? How then some art survive the through time and are viewed as beautiful by number of generations that follow? I mean, could we point to some web designs done years back that would still appear tasteful and clever today?

Geocities is like the 70s architecture, or the neoclassicistic architecture.

Totally ugly by today’s standards, but loved back in the day.

The reason the early public WWW is so ridiculous is that it was an entirely new technology and thus we embraced its difference. The closest equivalent to a webpage was a physical printed page and the most obvious thing a webpage can do that printed pages can't is having animations.

It's also easy to forget that while some works of art have endured over thousands or tens of thousands of years, most art likely hasn't. The ancient art we have today is like a Best Of album -- it leaves out all the works that were instantly forgotten or just not good enough and creates the impression that everything was better back then.

Nothing good can come of this

Designers born from 1990's onwards must be warned... This is a dangerous game...

April fools...?

first thing I did was google if this had been an April fools!

One bad thing about using computer in China is, anything Google-related either is painfully slow or deliberately blocked (by GFW). On some website, google-analytics.com become a major speed reducer (browser says something like "sending data to google-analytics.com"). Using fonts.googleapis.com have a similar effect.

Chinese people would have to wait until some Chinese company make similar things available.

Or you just get screwed if you are in China using the western web without a VPN. I find that about 20-30% of the sites actually work, not because they are explicitly blocked by the GFW, because they are using some Google API/font/analytics.

Thankfully, reddit and hackernews are good, and they have pretty much become the web for me while I'm at home (we have a direct connection at work).

One good thing about using a computer in China is that this API is blocked, too, sparing your eyes from horrible damage.

Finally, the missing block to building geocities v2!

We need a new an HTML5 what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor (a new Frontpage/Dreamweaver). Sadly, the HTML "contentEditable" API is in a very broken state.

Hmm, not all font effects listed there can be seen in Firefox (39 beta) and IE (11).

Same here - I thought some of the effects were just very subtle, until I opened the link in Chrome! Oh well, most of our client traffic is not Firefox so this isn't such a huge issue.

Thankfully, a lot of these don't work in Firefox.

Same here (FF on Linux Mint)

Working: anaglyph, emboss, fire, fire-animation, neon, outline, 3d and 3d-float.

Well, I thought the 3d font effect could have some genuine use, now, in 2015. Am I a bad person?

Fire animation is the new blink.

So I post this on designer news and it ends up on hackernews? What. Upside down.

I would say that this is almost more of a "developer design link" than a "designer design link". As in an engineer/dev can implement these "effects", in code without touching graphic editing software.

Looks like Google discovered that they can keep tracking this way users on remaining websites that don't use google analytics. And this time if you start blocking these requests the web page will look bad.

Google Font Effects in use: http://codepen.io/mindconcepts/pen/EjWORQ

So many of these are not supported on Firefox, very disappointing.

As a Firefox user I'm glad this is missing in Firefox.

Maybe it's my age, but I'm getting more and more tired of unreadable pages that take ages and a lot of resources to load.

None of them seems to be supported by Internet Explorer ?

Google is playing angry teenager again.

I'm on Safari Webkit Nightly and a bunch of these that claim to be supported by Safari and Chrome only seem to work in Chrome for me.

Awesome. My sites will be all fire from now on.

No. Please no.

There's a typo. Last line should say "Last updated April 1, 2015."

Thankfully, using FF, I miss out on most of the "fun".

Outline could be legitimately useful, such as for subtitles.

where's BLINK? i want blinking text!!!

Hey Google, April Fools was on April 1st.

Why does this exist?

i want blinking ... blinking !!!!

Why???

Geocities is the new black?

What? No `blink`? Useless.

Cool.

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