Material Design is a set of rules, guidelines, components and best practices for creating bold and beautiful graphic interfaces driven by typography, scale, color and position.
Google developed Material Design to unify the user experience including style, branding, interaction, and motion, and create a consistent visual language for all of their products and across different platforms.
Material design is a hybrid of flat 2D designs and 3D environments they exist in. It takes signals from paper and ink designs and make a standard look across all platforms. In addition, It uses Elements like gradients and drop shadows to imitate physical space. Google’s Material design considers material to be a homogeneous digital “fabric” created with pixels. Users can tap, swipe, or pinch this material fabric and it will move according to user interaction.
Material design provides a uniformity of experience that Google products have been lacking. Material design solved many problems that arouse not only from Flat Design but from Skeuomorphism also.
In Skeuomorphism, loading time of the site is high. It also has limitations on how things supposed to look. Flat-design is less intuitive, too limited, clickable elements get mixed up with non-clickable icons and text. This make some users find it a bit boring. Material design is an improved version of Flat design, it stresses on minor details like animations, shades and layers.
Material Design importance lies in being an adaptable design system. It is backed by open-source code, and Google support. It is beautiful and minimalistic at the same time. Besides, it saves a lot of time.
Material bold colors and stand-out typefaces, motion, buttons, icons, and depth shadows enhance user experience, and create a natural-feeling that’s interesting and would definitely give life to any design component.
When would you use it?
- Material Design works well for designs that use standard components like buttons, menus, toolbars, icons, modals etc.
- Another good use is when we want to design and develop a robust user experience (UX) extremely quickly.
- Additionally, if we want to create a design or application tightly integrated with Google and we want it to have the same look and feel as other google products
How do you use it?
Google has provided best practices and guidelines for proper implementation of Material Design.
Material Design website contains all the documentation, components & design resources, as well as step by step instructions on how to implement Material Design in your web-application.
I've created a pen to demonstrate how I use Material Design in my web applications.
The pen below shows 4 types of Material Components that could be added to any design, I added some depth shadows to both sections to illustrate a natural look and feel. Of Course I chose the colors from Material Design Color Tool Library, which I find great in accessibility testing while choosing colors.
At the bottom of my pen, I’ve added a short demo for a card designed with a title, some text and action material icon buttons at the bottom.
Want to get some inspiration about Material Design?
Check out Material Design Award Winners for 2020. If you have any question about this article, feel free to contact me & I’ll do my best to help you.
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