What is material design?
You'll probably have to ask me this a couple times.
So, material design is a system for designing
interfaces...designing...designing
material design is
a design language.
Material design is
a design system.
Material design is a new perspective on what the human and device relationship can be.
Maybe it's too complex of an idea.
Material design is this design philosophy that's really trying to acknowledge the technology
acknowledge the technology behind the interface.
It's a way for designers to collaborate with users
Material design is a way for designers to get what they want.
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Well, the overarching impetus was really just a bunch of designers wanting to make things better.
A lot of this happened organically
as designers across the company sought to find ways to collaborate.
We realized it wasn't just an Android story or just a
Google story but it could be really
a cross platform design framework story
the current way of doing things was was clashing in all kinds of ways because we
hadn't been thoughtful about the physics of it.
why don't we take that and run with that a little bit, and see if we could
figure out, you know, what is this made of...
what is the material that our software is made of?
John came up with
the idea of
what he described as quantum paper. In order to create these these rich,
tactile user interfaces, and that idea of
it being mostly paper like
but smart paper served as a point of view
about how your surfaces work and why.
There's a very very clear parallel between
the systems book design and the way that humans also
hold and use devices. People use materials
in life every day, and we want them to understand software in the same way.
When we're thinking about how a digital surface works, you think about all the
shortcomings and advantages it has
one of the main things that we run into is that you have this sort of flat plate of glass
which is great because you can -
it's easy to move around - but it also prevents you from actually being able to touch the things
you're working with.
Inside this device there is actually a little bit space
and so we thought
well let's try and take advantage of that, and create a meaningful structure
that goes underneath it, almost like the skeleton filling out this body
from the inside out.
Material design early on was almost like we were going
out and trying experiments
Yeah, it was totally an experiment.
Everyone kinda sat next to each other in a room
working on
all the different aspects and components together.
...kinda riffing off each other
It's one thing to play by yourself - it's another thing to play in a group where you're improvising real-time.
I think a lot of us are used to working more practically
This is the first time where we were being pushed and told--don't worry about that
let's just see what happens now.
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This is something that we've done a few times
We've set up these light rigs to understand how
the shadows work. The depth cues that come from the shadows
really made us think more deeply about
how do we communicate surface? We built a system that enforces
that the light comes in a 45 degree angles that helps keep the shadows
consistent from the top to the bottom of the screen
even as we were designing out the icons, we started to see some really interesting
subtleties you wouldn't normally notice, but
these are things we pick up on and help us to understand that it's a surface.
The strips are spacers
measured out to scale to the way they're
model digitally, so not just x & y but also in z.
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The Floating Action Button, the FAB,
the way that we said there's just one thing stop
with your five buttons here four buttons--make the call--
I thought that was great, and it was not an idea that I was comfortable with at
first
A button sounds like such a simple concept,
though when we kinda took it down to its basics of
well it's this area on screen that lets the user perform an
action, it's a very concentrated thing
that should make you feel powerful and like they're able to complete something.
There were little things like having buttons that depress--felt
a little bit odd because they're not actually depressing--your finger doesn't feel anything
moving down
in fact, this like, millimeter layer of glass between you and the actual
image means that you're not even getting to it in the first place.
So instead we reversed it, so we had buttons that lifted up when you touch them so
it was more of a magnetic
attraction of your finger. There's a logic to it, but also magic in it.
Past the motion, there was the graphic design aspect--the boldness
the typography, the imagery. Those were all intended to give the system a bit
more robustness
you want people to feel comfortable with it, but we wanted it to feel very well
designed.
We created this color spectrum around picking sort of primary color and then
using an accent color
creating this really simplified and easy to use system, while being very definitive
someone who never took a color theory class
could create a combination of colors within their product that felt harmonious.
I design fonts, and one of the things I really like about that
is the font doesn't come to life until another person uses it.
and we really see Roboto as a living typeface that,
you know, as as needs change in as we introduce new form factors
as we need it to do more things, we can continue to revise and continue to update it.
I think a challenge for material design will actually be
the designers' toolset having to evolve as fast
as technology is and the platforms evolve.
To constantly be reevaluating itself and to constantly be thinking about
what's no longer relevant. What did we think was universal, but turned out to
be a fad
or simply the wrong emphasis?
What I love is when people
take sort of the basic principles of material design
and then they take them in a new direction.
Now that we've published the
material design specs,
I'm really excited about the fact that we can go and engage other designers
in conversation
outside of Google.
One of the things I wanted was for third-party designers to take this foundation and build greater design upon it--
the same is true for us internally.
I don't want to be
looking four years down the road, 10 years down the road, and saying,
well material design--all those ideas, those frameworks--they're over.
The principles behind them, I think, should be timeless. Maybe we don't have
them right yet,
but I believe we'll get there.