
Google Font Effects - neo2001
https://developers.google.com/fonts/docs/getting_started#Effects
======
coldpie
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/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/)

NoScript: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/noscript/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/noscript/)

Toggle Animated GIFs: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toggle-
animat...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toggle-animated-
gifs/)

~~~
ponyous
> Extensions required to make the web usable:

> NoScript: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
> US/firefox/addon/noscript/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
> US/firefox/addon/noscript/)

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

~~~
coldpie
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.

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

~~~
wtallis
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.

~~~
Arzh
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.

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

GooGleoCities, perhaps?

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

~~~
ssharp
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.

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

------
fsloth
"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.

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

~~~
devbug
Ironically, more accessible for the blind.

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

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

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

~~~
agumonkey
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.

------
sz4kerto
Web people, please don't start to use effects that are only supported by one
single rendering engine (okay, Blink+Webkit).

~~~
Ambroos
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-...](http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Rancho&effect=shadow-
multiple|3d-float)

~~~
kuschku
Only 5 of them work in Firefox.

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

------
paulojreis
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.

~~~
bla2
To be fair, they don't use this on their properties. Apple ships Papyrus too.

------
ZeroGravitas
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.

~~~
scrollaway
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.

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

------
chrisan
Pairs nicely with [http://code.divshot.com/geo-
bootstrap/](http://code.divshot.com/geo-bootstrap/)

~~~
robogimp
.. and spin those logos like a pro with swift3D!
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_3D](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.

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

------
agonzalezro
WordArt is back!

~~~
agumonkey
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](https://www.google.com/search?q=font+gradient+metal&tbm=isch)

------
tathagatadg
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?

~~~
pluma
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.

------
conorgdaly
Nothing good can come of this

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

------
afandian
April fools...?

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

------
hyh1048576
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.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
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).

------
ttol
Finally, the missing block to building geocities v2!

~~~
frik
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.

------
kenrick95
Hmm, not all font effects listed there can be seen in Firefox (39 beta) and IE
(11).

~~~
josefresco
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.

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

~~~
edgarvaldes
Same here (FF on Linux Mint)

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

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

------
pm
Fire animation is the new blink.

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

~~~
josefresco
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.

------
takeda
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.

------
html5web
Google Font Effects in use:
[http://codepen.io/mindconcepts/pen/EjWORQ](http://codepen.io/mindconcepts/pen/EjWORQ)

------
Grue3
So many of these are not supported on Firefox, very disappointing.

~~~
huuu
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.

------
ponytech
None of them seems to be supported by Internet Explorer ?

~~~
sccxy
Google is playing angry teenager again.

------
cmiller1
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.

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

------
nodata
No. Please no.

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

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

------
ashmud
Outline could be legitimately useful, such as for subtitles.

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

------
AbraKdabra
Hey Google, April Fools was on April 1st.

------
thrillgore
Why does this exist?

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ehosca
i want blinking ... blinking !!!!

------
frandroid
Why???

------
psybermancer
Geocities is the new black?

------
koliber
What? No `blink`? Useless.

------
GaiusCoffee
Cool.

