Google New Material Design Concept – Intuitive Metaphors Allowing the Mind to Work Less

Yesterday Google presented their Material Design concept, the underlying design system that allows for a unified experience across platforms and device sizes. It is the natural evolution of a path Google has been on for a while. Last year they disclosed their new UI framework using Cards UI at its heart and showed how this helped them achieve design that scales across devices and web. Yesterday they presented the Material Design concept, a must-have resource for Android developers and designers providing systematic and detailed guidelines on design and interaction fundamentals such as animation, color, typography, layout principles and structure, components and essential patterns.

To get to the core of the Material Design concept, the Android team analyzed the visual language which unifies the classic concepts of good design with the solid understanding of the most fundamental physical properties, said Matias Duarte, Google's Director of Android user experience.

 

The team chose to use a metaphor of paper surface as the unifying principle because people have a long history of interacting with paper and surface and because they are physical and exist in the world. The team relied on the tangible metaphor that users understand intuitively to accelerate the understanding of their UI.

 

Surfaces are intuitive, that’s why we use them as the foundation, said Duarte in his presentation. They organize space and rationalize the interaction. It allows to make the mind work less.

You can watch the presentation which elaborates on the thinking that guided the Android team to create their visual language here.

Two months ago I asked the rhetorical question is Cards UI the future of mobile . Today Cards is one of the components part of the Material Design concept and it will be soon the dominating design pattern across the Android design landscape.

Click here to learn more about Material Design and to download the resources.

Click here to learn more about Telerik UI for Android – a suite of native components such as Chart, Calendar and AppFeedback.