Great, now someone needs to write a "disable animated fonts" extension.<p>Extensions required to make the web usable:<p>AdBlock: <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/adblock-edge/</a><p>NoScript: <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/</a><p>Toggle Animated GIFs: <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toggle-animated-gifs/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toggle-animat...</a>
"When making headers or display texts on your website, you'll often want to stylize your text in a decorative way."<p>Oh dear.<p>"..with minimal effort to produce beautiful display text"<p>The original fonts are tweaked painstakingly by a designer. The "effects" are like putting lipstick on Mona Lisa.<p>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.<p>Schoolkids will love these exciting tweaks, no doubt.
Suddenly I feel I'm back in 1995. Bring on the dial-up sound... <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0</a>
These have been around (and in beta apparently) for a few years.<p>You may be fooled by the shiny new wrapper around the docs into thinking this is a new thing.
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?
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.<p>Chinese people would have to wait until some Chinese company make similar things available.
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: <a href="http://codepen.io/mindconcepts/pen/EjWORQ" rel="nofollow">http://codepen.io/mindconcepts/pen/EjWORQ</a>