Google's Material Design

Material Design is the standard for designing and creating websites and apps.

3 Min Read

06 May, '22

What is Material Design?

Introduced in 2014, Google’s Material Design guidelines have become a signature tool of their websites and apps. It’s been a response to old, user-unfriendly, and chaotic design styles, and it aims to bring order and unity to various digital platforms.

Material Design is guided by print design methods and hierarchy to provide an engaging experience. It gives value and improves engagement by introducing users to new features and functionality at relevant moments. It offers a consistent design language guided by print design methods, typography, grids, space, scale, colour, and imagery to create hierarchy, meaning, and focus backed by solid guidelines that are well-considered.

Still today, there are plenty of use cases outside of Google’s platforms where Material Design is also a strong choice.

Why use Material Design

Material Design is effectively an entire design ecosystem composed of interactive building blocks for creating a user interface. It includes complex use cases that provide a set of rules and structures for designers.

Google maintains the Material Design and exhibits extensive guidelines for use and implementation. Keeping user experience at the forefront, Google includes Android haptics, subtle animations and feature functionality that is built into the guidelines.

The introduction of Dark Theme gives flexibility for designers to apply the Design System to various brand aesthetics.

Dark themes reduce the luminance emitted by device screens, while still meeting minimum colour contrast ratios. They help improve visual ergonomics by reducing eye strain, adjusting brightness to current lighting conditions, and facilitating screen use in dark environments

Draw backs

Although the Material Design system is very solid, in my opinion, there are a few considerations.

Because the Material Design system is associated with Google, it is identifiable and is not consistent across all platforms. iOS users are simply not familiar with Android.

Motion and animation are part of the guideline and have adopted associations; if they are simply left out, the user could feel that something is missing.

Although Google's Material Design has a comprehensive guideline, beginners may find it more complicated and harder to implement than other styles like flat design.

Conclusion

There will never be a perfect design language or template, and however, for an app being designed primarily for Android, Material Design is a solid choice; as a result, any app based on Material Design principles is going to feel like a native app.

The advantage of using Material Design is that Google has done UI and UX research so that individual developers don't have to. As a result, customers benefit because they can learn apps faster, thanks to consistent navigation and behaviour.