Googles Material Design

Google´s Android L was presented recently on Google IO 2014. During a featured session, called „Material design principles“, Matias Duarte, Nicholas Jitkoff, Jonathan Lee, Christian Robertson and Jon Wiley from Google gave a interesting speech about what we have to expect from the new Material design that will come with Android 4.x / 5.0 (or will it be called Lollipop?).

In this posting I will give some additional thoughts about the principles presented from Google´s design team.

Material design in a nutshell

In fact there a two key considerations about the new design, that were emphasized by the Google employees.

Cross-Platform capability, or to take the buzz-word „responsive design“. On any platform, a smartphone,a tablet or on a TV set, an app should „feel“ the same and behaving similar.
Meaningful design patterns and reasonableness – Every button and it´s position on the screen, even every animation should give some meaningfulness to the control of an app. This means how you place your UI elements and how you build them up or blend them in should correnspond to the way you intend your app users to use your app. You should emphasize on specific elements (for instance: slight animation when switching the view) to draw your users attention to a specific and relevant part of the screen.

In the following sections I am showing some principles that come with the Material design you need to consider when building new UI layouts.