What is Material Design?
Introduction
Material Design is a design system created by Google to help their team build high-quality digital experience for Android, iOS, Flutter, and the web. The design system provides cue-rich features and natural motions that mimic real-world objects.
The main principles of Material Design
Material is the metaphor
Material Design uses depth; fundamentals of light and content hierarchy to create a unified user experience across various devices and platforms. The use of light, depth, and movement helps convey how objects move, interact, and exist in space with other pieces of content on the page. Realistic lighting helps define areas/spaces.
Bold, graphic, intentional
The use of grids, space, scale, and colour helps create hierarchy, meaning, and focus on a page loaded full of content. Colour choices, large-scale typography, white space, and edge-to-edge imagery help create a bold and graphic interface that immerses the user in the experience.
Motion provides meaning
Motion helps reinforces the user's actions. The action takes place in a single environment without breaking the user’s experience. Motion provides focus attention and feedback while transitions help keep the user’s experience continuous.
What helps build the material design experience?
Components
The material components are interactive building blocks that create a user interface. These building blocks help build the interface and user experience. These components rover a range of interface needs such as a display (a card, lists and sheets), navigation (navigation drawers and tabs), and many more.
Content Behaviours
Content drives interactive behaviour whether the user is looking up the weather, taking a photo or reading the news. Without content, the design would be full of empty blocks. When the user interacts with content, they are also interacting with the material in the design. Actions should mimic real-world processes and behaviour should feel intuitive based on the user’s goal. For example, when you click on a submit button, the user should feel like they are clicking on an actual button.
Theming
Theming of your material design is important, as it will help users connect with your brand through colour and typography association. Theming includes applying colour to your UI to help indicate important areas for users’ attention or to help identify when an action has taken place. Colour is important in Material Design.
Summary
Material Design is a design system that helps designers to stay focused on bringing an immersive user experience across different platforms. The use of shapes, colour, lighting and white space help bring content hierarchy and helps draws attention to the user’s eyes. Material Design isn’t a set of defined components but it is a set of guidelines that can help improve user experience and interaction with the digital realm.
Video: Google Material Designed Explained Fast by Antony Conboy
Resources
Google Resources
Material Design Inspiration