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Material You – The next stage for Material Design

133 points by tancik 5y ago

Scene_Cast2 5y ago
One of the things I dislike in some modern designs is auto-assigned random colors. On one hand, it's a bit easier to visually keep track of items, but it also looks rather crappy. I'm hoping that this might get a bit better in the future.
crystalball909 5y ago
logo looks familiar https://i.imgur.com/JKn85JX.png https://i.imgur.com/JKn85JX.png
bushbaba 5y ago
Anyone find the page doesn’t render right in mobile safari. Get a bunch of grey boxes.
- mathieuh 5y ago
  Works for me, do you have a content blocker on?
- uncomputation 5y ago
  If you have low power mode on, videos will not autoplay and will (on this page) appear as gray boxes.
- 0x_rs 5y ago
  Content except top navigation bar doesn't load at all on mobile Firefox. It's 2.5MB of JavaScript in the webpage so I guess it doesn't surprise me.
OldGoodNewBad 5y ago
What a hodge podge of a mess of mid-90’s designer Kleenex-box kitsch. What the hell is going on inside Google lately, this is somehow even more offensive than their banned word list we just learned about the other day.
robkop 5y ago
I remember when material design first came out and I thought it was really intelligent, they had derived a way to design based on physical attributes of the real world; light, shadows, cards stacking like pieces of paper... I thought they were really onto something but every few years they now just seem to change it to fit with the fashion, maybe I was too naivete. I've started to wonder if it's even possible to develop a stable form of design that can last, stay up to date and be good looking.
- woah 5y ago
  Design is fashion
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  > I've started to wonder if it's even possible to develop a stable form of design that can last, stay up to date and be good looking. I'll be dead and buried before I give up my Athena widgets.
- Fordec 5y ago
  Yeah, I originally bought Material Design hook line and sinker. A lot of assumptions that bled over from desktop needed addressing in a mobile touchscreen environment. Today? Android UI changes are starting to feel more like fashion than design. A trend to change every year, constantly changing for the sake of change to keep the consumerism going. Not because it solves a new problem in a new way or it is better for people, but because they just need to stir the pot a little bit more because they're out of new ideas but still need to justify charging flagship phone money.
- f6v 5y ago
  MD always felt forced, borderline distracting. For one thing, I can’t stand the ripple effect.
pimlottc 5y ago
Have we officially hit peak Corporate Memphis? https://www.wired.co.uk/article/corporate-memphis-design-tech https://www.wired.co.uk/article/corporate-memphis-design-tec...
- Mandelmus 5y ago
  > “Isometric perspective is interesting, because nothing recedes to a vanishing point,” Rudnick says, “and therefore it also eliminates the variable of time.” He points out that this type of design is particularly popular with fintech and mortgage companies – playing down the passage of time is particularly advantageous to firms selling financial products that you may end up paying off for years. What the fuck do vanishing points have to do with time?
  - Rebelgecko 5y ago
    distance = rate * time For a mortgage company, you don't have a ton of flexibility with your rates— there's a little wiggle room but for the most part your rates will be correlated with the Federal Reserve's interest rates. However, you can control the distance, which lets you alter the logo's perception of time.
    - kaoD 5y ago
      Not trying to sound rude, but this looks like it was generated by GPT3. What do you mean?
      - Rebelgecko 5y ago
        I actually just got into the beta for the GPT-3 API but I think OpenAI's TOS say that I'm only allowed to use the API for the purpose I mentioned in my beta application (writing computer assisted sasquatch erotica). So HN comments would violate their TOS, not to mention the other ethical quandaries. The poster above had a question about the relationship between distance traveled and elapsed time. There's a simple mathematical relationship between the two- when your rate is fixed they're directly proportional. A distance that is 2x as far will take twice as long to traverse.
CallMeJim 5y ago
I upvoted solely for the use of an en dash ( – ) in the title, instead of a hyphen ( - ). Probably comes down to personal aesthetics, but I find it looks so much nicer! For users on Windows, I recommend setting up an AutoHotKey script to convert the string "==-" to "–", and "===-" to "—". Easy to type, very intuitive (typing more characters gives a longer-width dash), and gives your carefully crafted email missives a lingering, hard-to-describe dash of style!
- jhardy54 5y ago
  Alternatively: -- and ---. Some operating system (like iOS) even automatically convert to – and — for you.
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  On Mac, it is Alt Minus and Alt Shift Minus
- Latty 5y ago
  Linux users can set up a compose key and the default is Compose, -, -, . for – (en-dash) and Compose, -, -, - for — (em-dash).
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    WinCompose also works great on Windows. https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose
    - WorldMaker 5y ago
      Windows also has some limited built-in Compose Key/Dead Key (AltGr) support, but it's baked into the Keyboard Layout and very Keyboard Layout specific with some layouts doing a better job than others and no easy ways to copy them to other layouts. (For instance, Colemak's layout on Windows provides a handful of common punctuation/symbols: https://colemak.com/Multilingual https://colemak.com/Multilingual) WinCompose does look like an interesting general option. There's also an open issue asking about adding the idea to the applicable Windows PowerToy: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/6976 https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/6976
uncomputation 5y ago
It’s interesting Google is focusing so heavily on “color” as a primary design element (redesigned Mail, Drive, Docs, etc., unique individualized color palettes(? if I understand that correctly)) when one of the most common tests for UI designs is the grayscale test. I mostly try to avoid senseless “update hate,” but I have accidentally opened the wrong Google App multiple times after the redesign and am constantly grateful for Apple’s “reduced motion/transparency” settings when I have headaches.
- Clewza313 5y ago
  One of the animations on the page shows how the UI can be reduced to B&W.
reikonomusha 5y ago
I can’t help but feel Google’s only consistency is in their trying to be clean, cool, and innovative, but not actually getting the details right, and ending up looking juvenile and Fisher-Price-like. On mobile, the font is too big and too ragged. The colors and shapes look like a Kleenex box aesthetic. The spacing isn’t all that great. I’m absolutely puzzled why a behemoth like Google can’t have exceptional, human design. Apple can do it, which leads me to believe the ability to pull it off is largely cultural. Something or someone in Apple demands design that is relatable, good-looking, and consistent, and Google simply doesn’t have the same driving force. Google’s stuff isn’t bad, but it’s simply not exceptional. (Edit: And to be clear, I mean Google’s design implementation in its entirety, especially beyond Android, including this very webpage which describes their new design.)
- donatj 5y ago
  I suspect it’s structural, and that Apple has a lot more levels of internal design critique — in everything top to bottom. Google seems more loosely linked and in most things seems like the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Naturally, otherwise how to justify PWA vs ChromeOS vs Fuchsia vs Flutter vs JetPack Compose.
    - EvilEy3 5y ago
      You just listed 5 unrelated teams that have nothing in common. What's you point?
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        Oh but they do, each of them wants us to write apps and devices with their OS/technology stack. Lets see which one of them wins out the Google political wars on the long term of Google Attention Span (TM).
King-Aaron 5y ago
I don't like the squiggly sliders.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  I find it funny that I went to the slider section and NONE of the images were actual sliders, even with "web" selected. At least Bootstrap let's you play with the controls on the actual page.
deanCommie 5y ago
I love the concept. Here's the problem: "We built upon this insight to generate unique Material palettes for everyone, derived from a personal signal—wallpaper—that can be applied to their entire experience." I like my wallpapers to be striking, geometric, interesting, but ultimately distinctive from the rest of my phone, where I do want colours. So I hope there will be another way to generate signals for the phone colour pallette.
- marcan_42 5y ago
  Yup. My home screen wallpaper is just black, because I find anything else distracting when I'm looking for an app. My lockscreen wallpaper is just some artwork I like, which has nothing to do with what I would like as a color palette for the rest of the OS. I hope there's a way to decouple this from the wallpaper and it's just an automatic default that can be changed...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- conradfr 5y ago
  I use an app that rotates my background with pictures I took on my phone, I wonder if the UI colors will change every two hours as well :)
miguelazo 5y ago
Did I really just read several paragraphs of corporate marketing babble to discover that this is mostly about a universal wallpaper that carries over to your apps?? Also, the quote about form following feeling is basically ripped off from Apple/Jobs lore. Replace feeling with emotion and it’s almost a direct quote from the Isaacson biography.
- btown 5y ago
  It's a universal cross-app theming framework/guidance based on a customizable five-color palette... derived from a wallpaper that carries over to your apps ;) IMO it's ambitious, perhaps excessively so. I work on a product that we white label and recolorize for various enterprise-scale clients who want adherence to their own color palettes, and there are often things that feel "off" when we change color palettes alone... simply because typography, whitespace, and color go hand in hand to create a brand identity. It's never as easy as swapping colors. And then there's the underlying assumption that a user wants a single color identity to follow them across the aspects of their personal identity. I don't know about others, but I want my social apps to have a different "feel" from my corporate messaging and issue-tracking systems. As Bob Dylan puts it: > "Red Cadillac and a black mustache... Pink petal-pushers, red blue jeans... I'm a man of contradictions, I'm a man of many moods / I contain multitudes." If Bob Dylan is implicitly criticizing your design framework's core assumptions in his latest studio album... you're by definition not Steve Jobs.
  - efitz 5y ago
    Great, so now my enterprise is going to dictate my wallpaper so that my app themes are consistent with internal style guidelines. Thanks Google!
  - thanatos519 5y ago
    My wallpaper is solid black. What palette do I get with that?
    - aembleton 5y ago
      Black, White and some different shades of grey. I'm guessing but I would have thought that that would be what it would derive from solid black.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
No web implementation for date pickers? come on, man.
- diveanon 5y ago
  Anyone who has used material ui knows this struggle.
isaacimagine 5y ago
Seems like this will be an unpopular opinion, but I like the design. How appealing a design is is personal preference, and I think a lot of the elements advertised, say, squiggly sliders, show the flexibility of the system; it's not like all sliders will be squiggly, but it opens up the possibility while still working with the rest of the design language. The emphasis on customization is important as well - a more flexible system means that you can customize things that look more closely to how you want them, whether this be bright and squiggly, or dark and slick. Just my own two ¢. I'm not affiliated, fwiw.
- isaacimagine 5y ago
  There will apparently be an in depth presentation on the new design language in about 11 hours, fwiw. Might answer some questions we all have: https://events.google.com/io/session/357e96f9-128b-4902-b63e-47e10c85fe98?lng=en https://events.google.com/io/session/357e96f9-128b-4902-b63e...
- alt-enter 5y ago
  I'm with you on that. Customization is important to me (one of the main reasons I use Android), and I'm eager to see how this turns out. I really appreciated the custom styling options added to Google Now Launcher and this feels like the next step.
- drusepth 5y ago
  I suspect a nonzero amount of hate online is coming from iOS users, who've always seemed to prefer non-customizable, "curated" designs (e.g. historically being anti-widgets, anti-folders, anti-theming, etc) and not from actual Android users who tend to value customization and diverging from the "standard" interface. Of course, some Android users are going to dislike the new design -- it is a design preference and it's _different_, after all! I love the new design. There are a few rough edges (like the brightness bar!) but I assume it'll be polished over the multi-year roadmap they've given, or at least through each of the dev previews until the Pixel 6 drops.
- Lammy 5y ago
  I like it, but I still miss Holo way more. Peak Android for me was 4.2.2 Jelly Bean before they removed the Phablet UI layouts. I had the Nexus-7-style layouts on a Galaxy NoteⅡ and don't think any phone I've owned since then has topped it interface-wise.
tekkk 5y ago
Well looks better than the previous iteration. Less abstract, more softer. I don't know why it has taken so long to shake off their overly theoretical approach for one that is based on what users perceive as nicer but I'm glad they are not paying their designers for nothing.
lethologica 5y ago
I... don't get it.
numlock86 5y ago
Ah, yes, the cycle continues. Maybe with Android 15 they bring back shadows and with 20 there will be more colors and Material Design will look like Windows XP again and with Android 30 we are back at something that shows three shades of gray at most, with maybe only a solid colored button somewhere.
- thanatos519 5y ago
  Yeah, then Apple will revert macOS to the NeXTSTEP theme!
  - numlock86 5y ago
    That would be pretty dope!
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  Some of the info about the rendering on Googles Fuchsia OS project hints to real time shadow and lighting simulation. So definitely a possibility for a return to something that looks more like real objects in the future.
pjmlp 5y ago
My first thought when they presented it was that thankfully I never use barebones Android.
ankurdhama 5y ago
I wish instead if this they would have added an official "Desktop mode" for Android so that you can connect the phone to monitor/keyboard/mouse and use it like a desktop. Once this becomes part of the android base platform, we would not have to depend on other companies (like Dex from Samsung).
EvilEy3 5y ago
They should've just let Samsung design the rest of Android. A lot of corporate bull without any tangible result.
diveanon 5y ago
Awful name. Reminding the customer of their materialistic nature while simultaneously ripping off the apple "i" schtick.
berniemadoff69 5y ago
i find it hard to believe no one maintaining these 'material.io' pages doesn't notice the animated sticky header [0] popping in and out again and again and again as you scroll down the page. [0] https://i.imgur.com/HPLI85T.gif https://i.imgur.com/HPLI85T.gif
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  I don't see that bug on Firefox (version 88, linux amd64). It slides out as I scoll down and stays hidden when I stop scrolling. It only comes back into view when I scroll up. edit: Are you scrolling with a janky mouse wheel or multi-touch trackpad that might be triggering up events accidentally? It looks like your page jerks up a teeny bit from momentum when you stop--that's probably the issue.
- drusepth 5y ago
  From the look of your gif, it looks like you're just barely scrolling back up for a few pixels between scrolls and the navbar seems to pop up immediately after. Scrolling up gets it to pop out for me, but I need to scroll up a lot more than you do in order to replicate this (scrolling down normally looks fine on Linux/Chrome). Sounds like it might be possible they haven't noticed it and would appreciate a bug report. :)
- dmitriid 5y ago
  Material.io pages are a great study into the problems with Material in general. Each iteration has glaring problems. Links are not links. Buttons are not buttons: https://grumpy.website/post/0Ra93yy33 https://grumpy.website/post/0Ra93yy33 The current design still suffers from this. Fonts in pictures: https://grumpy.website/post/0TEKUvqDX https://grumpy.website/post/0TEKUvqDX Contrast: https://grumpy.website/post/0TEJkwzPA https://grumpy.website/post/0TEJkwzPA
captswag 5y ago
Does Google's own applications follow material design just like the way they document in the material design documentation website? Let's take Gmail or Youtube for example.
nprateem 5y ago
Better than their last try but it still looks like it was designed by a child
- hulitu 5y ago
  It is not nice to say such things about children. To me looks like it's designed by a lobotomized lobster.
jevgeni 5y ago
Flat UI design is the shag carpet of computing.
f6v 5y ago
Ok this is a conspiracy theory, but I think the majority of designers would be out of work if it wasn’t for these endless redesigns that bring little value.
rodarmor 5y ago
Every human brain has inherent, powerful functionality to read depth cues from 2D images to infer object separation, shape, and distance. Flat design intentionally avoids including any of these depth cues that would take advantage of this functionality. It is one of the best examples of form over function I can think of.
ywoski 5y ago
I like this design but I wonder how many apps will actually adopt this. I don't see Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, etc rushing to adopt this (it largely conflicts with their own design language.) Also a lot of smaller companies rarely update theming for apps so I don't see them doing it either (I doubt my banking app cares.) I have a feeling few apps will actually update to this leading to fragmentation. Anyways we will see.
wumms 5y ago
If you're more into rectanglar shapes, have a look at https://www.carbondesignsystem.com/ https://www.carbondesignsystem.com/ "The design system is built React first. We also support core parts of the system in vanilla JS, Angular, Vue, and Svelte. If you’re using a different framework, you can still build components by following our guidelines for other frameworks." (I'm not affiliated)
nfoz 5y ago
In these material designs, I have trouble knowing what things are buttons I can click on.
aasasd 5y ago
I doubt it very much that this customization will be implemented consistently and fully by developers, unless Google themselves solve everything for the programmer and require next to zero changes.
wdb 5y ago
Starting to look alright. Looks a bit more like iOS
wpm 5y ago
God I can’t stand that font.
kgin 5y ago
It’s going to be a really tough sell to tell apps they should give up color as a tool for branding and let user themes take over.

133 points by tancik 5y ago

One of the things I dislike in some modern designs is auto-assigned random colors. On one hand, it's a bit easier to visually keep track of items, but it also looks rather crappy. I'm hoping that this might get a bit better in the future.

crystalball909 5y ago

logo looks familiar https://i.imgur.com/JKn85JX.png https://i.imgur.com/JKn85JX.png

bushbaba 5y ago

Anyone find the page doesn’t render right in mobile safari. Get a bunch of grey boxes.

mathieuh 5y ago
Works for me, do you have a content blocker on?
uncomputation 5y ago
If you have low power mode on, videos will not autoplay and will (on this page) appear as gray boxes.
0x_rs 5y ago
Content except top navigation bar doesn't load at all on mobile Firefox. It's 2.5MB of JavaScript in the webpage so I guess it doesn't surprise me.

OldGoodNewBad 5y ago

What a hodge podge of a mess of mid-90’s designer Kleenex-box kitsch. What the hell is going on inside Google lately, this is somehow even more offensive than their banned word list we just learned about the other day.

robkop 5y ago

I remember when material design first came out and I thought it was really intelligent, they had derived a way to design based on physical attributes of the real world; light, shadows, cards stacking like pieces of paper... I thought they were really onto something but every few years they now just seem to change it to fit with the fashion, maybe I was too naivete. I've started to wonder if it's even possible to develop a stable form of design that can last, stay up to date and be good looking.

woah 5y ago
Design is fashion
SavantIdiot 5y ago
> I've started to wonder if it's even possible to develop a stable form of design that can last, stay up to date and be good looking. I'll be dead and buried before I give up my Athena widgets.
Fordec 5y ago
Yeah, I originally bought Material Design hook line and sinker. A lot of assumptions that bled over from desktop needed addressing in a mobile touchscreen environment. Today? Android UI changes are starting to feel more like fashion than design. A trend to change every year, constantly changing for the sake of change to keep the consumerism going. Not because it solves a new problem in a new way or it is better for people, but because they just need to stir the pot a little bit more because they're out of new ideas but still need to justify charging flagship phone money.
f6v 5y ago
MD always felt forced, borderline distracting. For one thing, I can’t stand the ripple effect.

pimlottc 5y ago

Have we officially hit peak Corporate Memphis? https://www.wired.co.uk/article/corporate-memphis-design-tech https://www.wired.co.uk/article/corporate-memphis-design-tec...

Mandelmus 5y ago
> “Isometric perspective is interesting, because nothing recedes to a vanishing point,” Rudnick says, “and therefore it also eliminates the variable of time.” He points out that this type of design is particularly popular with fintech and mortgage companies – playing down the passage of time is particularly advantageous to firms selling financial products that you may end up paying off for years. What the fuck do vanishing points have to do with time?
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  distance = rate * time For a mortgage company, you don't have a ton of flexibility with your rates— there's a little wiggle room but for the most part your rates will be correlated with the Federal Reserve's interest rates. However, you can control the distance, which lets you alter the logo's perception of time.
  - kaoD 5y ago
    Not trying to sound rude, but this looks like it was generated by GPT3. What do you mean?
    - Rebelgecko 5y ago
      I actually just got into the beta for the GPT-3 API but I think OpenAI's TOS say that I'm only allowed to use the API for the purpose I mentioned in my beta application (writing computer assisted sasquatch erotica). So HN comments would violate their TOS, not to mention the other ethical quandaries. The poster above had a question about the relationship between distance traveled and elapsed time. There's a simple mathematical relationship between the two- when your rate is fixed they're directly proportional. A distance that is 2x as far will take twice as long to traverse.

CallMeJim 5y ago

I upvoted solely for the use of an en dash ( – ) in the title, instead of a hyphen ( - ). Probably comes down to personal aesthetics, but I find it looks so much nicer! For users on Windows, I recommend setting up an AutoHotKey script to convert the string "==-" to "–", and "===-" to "—". Easy to type, very intuitive (typing more characters gives a longer-width dash), and gives your carefully crafted email missives a lingering, hard-to-describe dash of style!

jhardy54 5y ago
Alternatively: -- and ---. Some operating system (like iOS) even automatically convert to – and — for you.
forgotmypw17 5y ago
On Mac, it is Alt Minus and Alt Shift Minus
Latty 5y ago
Linux users can set up a compose key and the default is Compose, -, -, . for – (en-dash) and Compose, -, -, - for — (em-dash).
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  WinCompose also works great on Windows. https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    Windows also has some limited built-in Compose Key/Dead Key (AltGr) support, but it's baked into the Keyboard Layout and very Keyboard Layout specific with some layouts doing a better job than others and no easy ways to copy them to other layouts. (For instance, Colemak's layout on Windows provides a handful of common punctuation/symbols: https://colemak.com/Multilingual https://colemak.com/Multilingual) WinCompose does look like an interesting general option. There's also an open issue asking about adding the idea to the applicable Windows PowerToy: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/6976 https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/6976

uncomputation 5y ago

It’s interesting Google is focusing so heavily on “color” as a primary design element (redesigned Mail, Drive, Docs, etc., unique individualized color palettes(? if I understand that correctly)) when one of the most common tests for UI designs is the grayscale test. I mostly try to avoid senseless “update hate,” but I have accidentally opened the wrong Google App multiple times after the redesign and am constantly grateful for Apple’s “reduced motion/transparency” settings when I have headaches.

Clewza313 5y ago
One of the animations on the page shows how the UI can be reduced to B&W.

reikonomusha 5y ago

I can’t help but feel Google’s only consistency is in their trying to be clean, cool, and innovative, but not actually getting the details right, and ending up looking juvenile and Fisher-Price-like. On mobile, the font is too big and too ragged. The colors and shapes look like a Kleenex box aesthetic. The spacing isn’t all that great. I’m absolutely puzzled why a behemoth like Google can’t have exceptional, human design. Apple can do it, which leads me to believe the ability to pull it off is largely cultural. Something or someone in Apple demands design that is relatable, good-looking, and consistent, and Google simply doesn’t have the same driving force. Google’s stuff isn’t bad, but it’s simply not exceptional. (Edit: And to be clear, I mean Google’s design implementation in its entirety, especially beyond Android, including this very webpage which describes their new design.)

donatj 5y ago
I suspect it’s structural, and that Apple has a lot more levels of internal design critique — in everything top to bottom. Google seems more loosely linked and in most things seems like the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Naturally, otherwise how to justify PWA vs ChromeOS vs Fuchsia vs Flutter vs JetPack Compose.
  - EvilEy3 5y ago
    You just listed 5 unrelated teams that have nothing in common. What's you point?
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Oh but they do, each of them wants us to write apps and devices with their OS/technology stack. Lets see which one of them wins out the Google political wars on the long term of Google Attention Span (TM).

King-Aaron 5y ago

I don't like the squiggly sliders.

SavantIdiot 5y ago
I find it funny that I went to the slider section and NONE of the images were actual sliders, even with "web" selected. At least Bootstrap let's you play with the controls on the actual page.

deanCommie 5y ago

I love the concept. Here's the problem: "We built upon this insight to generate unique Material palettes for everyone, derived from a personal signal—wallpaper—that can be applied to their entire experience." I like my wallpapers to be striking, geometric, interesting, but ultimately distinctive from the rest of my phone, where I do want colours. So I hope there will be another way to generate signals for the phone colour pallette.

marcan_42 5y ago
Yup. My home screen wallpaper is just black, because I find anything else distracting when I'm looking for an app. My lockscreen wallpaper is just some artwork I like, which has nothing to do with what I would like as a color palette for the rest of the OS. I hope there's a way to decouple this from the wallpaper and it's just an automatic default that can be changed...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
conradfr 5y ago
I use an app that rotates my background with pictures I took on my phone, I wonder if the UI colors will change every two hours as well :)

miguelazo 5y ago

Did I really just read several paragraphs of corporate marketing babble to discover that this is mostly about a universal wallpaper that carries over to your apps?? Also, the quote about form following feeling is basically ripped off from Apple/Jobs lore. Replace feeling with emotion and it’s almost a direct quote from the Isaacson biography.

btown 5y ago
It's a universal cross-app theming framework/guidance based on a customizable five-color palette... derived from a wallpaper that carries over to your apps ;) IMO it's ambitious, perhaps excessively so. I work on a product that we white label and recolorize for various enterprise-scale clients who want adherence to their own color palettes, and there are often things that feel "off" when we change color palettes alone... simply because typography, whitespace, and color go hand in hand to create a brand identity. It's never as easy as swapping colors. And then there's the underlying assumption that a user wants a single color identity to follow them across the aspects of their personal identity. I don't know about others, but I want my social apps to have a different "feel" from my corporate messaging and issue-tracking systems. As Bob Dylan puts it: > "Red Cadillac and a black mustache... Pink petal-pushers, red blue jeans... I'm a man of contradictions, I'm a man of many moods / I contain multitudes." If Bob Dylan is implicitly criticizing your design framework's core assumptions in his latest studio album... you're by definition not Steve Jobs.
- efitz 5y ago
  Great, so now my enterprise is going to dictate my wallpaper so that my app themes are consistent with internal style guidelines. Thanks Google!
- thanatos519 5y ago
  My wallpaper is solid black. What palette do I get with that?
  - aembleton 5y ago
    Black, White and some different shades of grey. I'm guessing but I would have thought that that would be what it would derive from solid black.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

No web implementation for date pickers? come on, man.

diveanon 5y ago
Anyone who has used material ui knows this struggle.

isaacimagine 5y ago

Seems like this will be an unpopular opinion, but I like the design. How appealing a design is is personal preference, and I think a lot of the elements advertised, say, squiggly sliders, show the flexibility of the system; it's not like all sliders will be squiggly, but it opens up the possibility while still working with the rest of the design language. The emphasis on customization is important as well - a more flexible system means that you can customize things that look more closely to how you want them, whether this be bright and squiggly, or dark and slick. Just my own two ¢. I'm not affiliated, fwiw.

isaacimagine 5y ago
There will apparently be an in depth presentation on the new design language in about 11 hours, fwiw. Might answer some questions we all have: https://events.google.com/io/session/357e96f9-128b-4902-b63e-47e10c85fe98?lng=en https://events.google.com/io/session/357e96f9-128b-4902-b63e...
alt-enter 5y ago
I'm with you on that. Customization is important to me (one of the main reasons I use Android), and I'm eager to see how this turns out. I really appreciated the custom styling options added to Google Now Launcher and this feels like the next step.
drusepth 5y ago
I suspect a nonzero amount of hate online is coming from iOS users, who've always seemed to prefer non-customizable, "curated" designs (e.g. historically being anti-widgets, anti-folders, anti-theming, etc) and not from actual Android users who tend to value customization and diverging from the "standard" interface. Of course, some Android users are going to dislike the new design -- it is a design preference and it's _different_, after all! I love the new design. There are a few rough edges (like the brightness bar!) but I assume it'll be polished over the multi-year roadmap they've given, or at least through each of the dev previews until the Pixel 6 drops.
Lammy 5y ago
I like it, but I still miss Holo way more. Peak Android for me was 4.2.2 Jelly Bean before they removed the Phablet UI layouts. I had the Nexus-7-style layouts on a Galaxy NoteⅡ and don't think any phone I've owned since then has topped it interface-wise.

tekkk 5y ago

Well looks better than the previous iteration. Less abstract, more softer. I don't know why it has taken so long to shake off their overly theoretical approach for one that is based on what users perceive as nicer but I'm glad they are not paying their designers for nothing.

lethologica 5y ago

I... don't get it.

numlock86 5y ago

Ah, yes, the cycle continues. Maybe with Android 15 they bring back shadows and with 20 there will be more colors and Material Design will look like Windows XP again and with Android 30 we are back at something that shows three shades of gray at most, with maybe only a solid colored button somewhere.

thanatos519 5y ago
Yeah, then Apple will revert macOS to the NeXTSTEP theme!
- numlock86 5y ago
  That would be pretty dope!
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
Some of the info about the rendering on Googles Fuchsia OS project hints to real time shadow and lighting simulation. So definitely a possibility for a return to something that looks more like real objects in the future.

pjmlp 5y ago

My first thought when they presented it was that thankfully I never use barebones Android.

ankurdhama 5y ago

I wish instead if this they would have added an official "Desktop mode" for Android so that you can connect the phone to monitor/keyboard/mouse and use it like a desktop. Once this becomes part of the android base platform, we would not have to depend on other companies (like Dex from Samsung).

EvilEy3 5y ago

They should've just let Samsung design the rest of Android. A lot of corporate bull without any tangible result.

diveanon 5y ago

Awful name. Reminding the customer of their materialistic nature while simultaneously ripping off the apple "i" schtick.

berniemadoff69 5y ago

i find it hard to believe no one maintaining these 'material.io' pages doesn't notice the animated sticky header [0] popping in and out again and again and again as you scroll down the page. [0] https://i.imgur.com/HPLI85T.gif https://i.imgur.com/HPLI85T.gif

qbasic_forever 5y ago
I don't see that bug on Firefox (version 88, linux amd64). It slides out as I scoll down and stays hidden when I stop scrolling. It only comes back into view when I scroll up. edit: Are you scrolling with a janky mouse wheel or multi-touch trackpad that might be triggering up events accidentally? It looks like your page jerks up a teeny bit from momentum when you stop--that's probably the issue.
drusepth 5y ago
From the look of your gif, it looks like you're just barely scrolling back up for a few pixels between scrolls and the navbar seems to pop up immediately after. Scrolling up gets it to pop out for me, but I need to scroll up a lot more than you do in order to replicate this (scrolling down normally looks fine on Linux/Chrome). Sounds like it might be possible they haven't noticed it and would appreciate a bug report. :)
dmitriid 5y ago
Material.io pages are a great study into the problems with Material in general. Each iteration has glaring problems. Links are not links. Buttons are not buttons: https://grumpy.website/post/0Ra93yy33 https://grumpy.website/post/0Ra93yy33 The current design still suffers from this. Fonts in pictures: https://grumpy.website/post/0TEKUvqDX https://grumpy.website/post/0TEKUvqDX Contrast: https://grumpy.website/post/0TEJkwzPA https://grumpy.website/post/0TEJkwzPA

captswag 5y ago

Does Google's own applications follow material design just like the way they document in the material design documentation website? Let's take Gmail or Youtube for example.

nprateem 5y ago

Better than their last try but it still looks like it was designed by a child

hulitu 5y ago
It is not nice to say such things about children. To me looks like it's designed by a lobotomized lobster.

jevgeni 5y ago

Flat UI design is the shag carpet of computing.

f6v 5y ago

Ok this is a conspiracy theory, but I think the majority of designers would be out of work if it wasn’t for these endless redesigns that bring little value.

rodarmor 5y ago

Every human brain has inherent, powerful functionality to read depth cues from 2D images to infer object separation, shape, and distance. Flat design intentionally avoids including any of these depth cues that would take advantage of this functionality. It is one of the best examples of form over function I can think of.

ywoski 5y ago

I like this design but I wonder how many apps will actually adopt this. I don't see Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, etc rushing to adopt this (it largely conflicts with their own design language.) Also a lot of smaller companies rarely update theming for apps so I don't see them doing it either (I doubt my banking app cares.) I have a feeling few apps will actually update to this leading to fragmentation. Anyways we will see.

wumms 5y ago

If you're more into rectanglar shapes, have a look at https://www.carbondesignsystem.com/ https://www.carbondesignsystem.com/ "The design system is built React first. We also support core parts of the system in vanilla JS, Angular, Vue, and Svelte. If you’re using a different framework, you can still build components by following our guidelines for other frameworks." (I'm not affiliated)

nfoz 5y ago

In these material designs, I have trouble knowing what things are buttons I can click on.

aasasd 5y ago

I doubt it very much that this customization will be implemented consistently and fully by developers, unless Google themselves solve everything for the programmer and require next to zero changes.

wdb 5y ago

Starting to look alright. Looks a bit more like iOS

wpm 5y ago

God I can’t stand that font.

kgin 5y ago

It’s going to be a really tough sell to tell apps they should give up color as a tool for branding and let user themes take over.