Material Designing – A Major Trend To Lookout In Web Design Landscape
Owing to its high-usability, material design is considered to be the next happening revolution not only in Android technology, but also in the web development sphere. The neat and clean user experience developed by Google for Android devices has managed to grab the eyeballs of almost everyone in the web designing industry.
What Exactly Is Material Design?
When Google developed material design, the main aim was to bring in technology and science into the classic values of exceptional design. In simple terms, material design tends to tell us that web design should be considered similar to physical product design.
The whole concept of material design is that the design should bear a resemblance to the real world, however with a limited level of abstraction. With material designing, you are ensuring that it doesn’t look too realistic, so that it seems to imitate the real world elements.
Major Components Of Material Design?
Let the monks explain 2 major blessings that are wrapped with material design:
- Material
- Motion
(Source: lemanoosh.com)
- Material: Material aims to provide a context to the design. Visual cues are acquired with the help of the surfaces and edges of the material. For instance, we understand the dimensions of a table, because we see the model. However, we get the context only after looking at the contents on the table like the laptop, notepad, and pen that it is a study-table. Thus material design gives a distinguishing look in order to facilitate better understanding.
This combination of style and content provides context to the user. The user is able to get a proper understanding of the UI that you provide, as the designed material provides context.
- Motion: Motion works on a similar concept as above. The flow of an applications works towards providing a context. In this behaviour, there is no inconsistency in the design or navigation. For instance, the home feed on your mobile phone consists of a list of cards.
When a single card is touched, the material expands to become the full width and height of the screen instead of the dimensions. The material of the card expands to become the full height and width.
The Differences Between Flat Design And Material Design
- If the targeted users are more adjusted with digital interaction, flat design is something that they will like. However, if the users are good with reactive response for their actions, they will easily adapt to the material designing environment. Material designs are more communicative.
- Both flat and material designs have a minimalist approach. However, material is inclined towards combining the real and the digital world.
- Flat design has no skeuomorphisms, while material design adopts it.
- Flat design emphasizes on minimal usage of stylistic elements. Material design makes more use of responsive animations and transitions.
Why You Should Go For Material Design?
- Branding: Material design is built using light and flat objects along with crafty color combination. If you are looking to brand your app, you could do so with the help of two or three colors that will give a distinguishing feel to the app.
- User engagement: Material design enhances the user experience as it provides a visual language between your business and the user. An enhanced user experience will directly result into higher engagement and help in successful achievement of business goals, including leads and revenue.
- UX/UI: Material design provides a great platform to deeply interact with the user. It provides interactions that are meaningful and responsive. Material design gives you an opportunity to delight the audience with its futuristic interactivity.
- Sleek & Simple: There is minimal input process and the most effective output on an interface that is designed with the material design. The floating actions button and the magnetic feel on tapping, enhance the value of the otherwise simple design. It is as sleek and simple as a mobile app.
- Documented Rules: There are a pre-defined set of styles and principles that are provided with the material design so that there is minimal hassle of explaining the concept to the designer. The language is developed in a manner that even a non-designer could easily execute your requirements.
- Virtual Feel: Frequent actions like the mouse over and tap give life to the materials that are layered over the web page. These responses are meant to convey to the user that they are interacting with a virtual object.
The Best Tools To Get Started With Material Designing
After knowing so much about material designing, may be you are considering implementing it in the next project. If that’s the case, maybe you should start considering the best framework for your project. So, let us have a look at the top material-design based frameworks that you could start your project on.
- Google Material Design Lite: Material Design Lite is a lightweight framework that has been built with the help of simple CSS, JavaScript, and HTML. It is quite convenient to integrate the components. Google calls it a library of components for the web developers and has a dedicated site, io that gives access to the interface where we could implement all the elements step-by-step. The library includes major components like the cards, sliders, column layouts, text fields, checkboxes, and more.
- Materialize: This is a framework that was built by a group of students from Carnegie Mellon University and is one of the most used frameworks for Material Design. It is the most comprehensive framework with a host of components like CSS, JavaScript, icons, and fonts.
- Material-UI: The engineers at Call-Em-All have developed this and are currently working with it for their own projects. They have released it as an open source, and they also make sure to update it if new material design guidelines are laid down by Google.
- Angular Material: The Angular Material framework is supported by Google internally. All the instructions, including the API are written in a lucid manner and present all the features that were specified by Google in the material design concept.
Examples Of Some Websites That Have Implemented Material Design
This website has made bold use of colors and each object seems to be well defined owing to the use of colors. The images are clean and sharp and represent the monuments and other objects of travel quite successfully.
The clean and colourful circles carrying icons of some of the prominent digital properties, is a clear example of how the new-age digital objects could be used in material design.
The fact that material design adopts real life objects is evident here as the mobile phone here is clearly designed to resemble a real one. The edges and surface are very clean and successfully give a context to the audience.
The button animation is perhaps the best feature in all the components of material design. The button spreads out and bounces when you bring the mouse over the social media buttons. It is a subtle animation and is not interruptive.
The Future Of Material Design
A cleaner approach for displaying information has made material design the “IT” thing in the web design sphere. A futuristic design concept, it actually takes inspirations from real life. Every object in the universe is made up of layers, and material design follows the same concept. The material design is majorly focussed on user experience and allows more depth than flat design. Constant developments in the technology, along with Google considering a total revamp of YouTube in line with material designing has proved that this design technology has a solid foundation and will only grow in the future.
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