Material Design, the visual synthesis of good design
Hi how about guys!
Nowadays it is impossible to conceive our days without our mobile devices. In them we store (and often spend) much of our lives. Contact phones, games, messages, photographs and countless more information we generate day by day, which coexists through various platforms and applications, arranged in the most practical way to share it with those we love throughout the world.
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However, we rarely stop to think about the effort it has meant, as well as the countless trials and errors that have been made, to make the user experience (better known concept in its acronym in English, UXD) the best, when using different applications and browsing websites. To a large extent, Google has devoted much of its efforts to continuously improve its applications, to ensure the functionality of each of its products. In this blog post, we are going to talk a little about Material Design, Google's great bet to unify the user experience through different devices and platforms.
Good design and technological possibilities
In short, Material Design is a visual language designed for users, which synthesizes the classic principles of good design and mixes them with innovation and the possibilities offered by technology and science.It was developed by Google and announced at the 2014Google I/O conference. It seeks to improve Android display (obviously), but also generate a unified web experience across any platform and device sizes. All this, through a card-based interface, as first seen in Google Now.
Anyone who knows web design or app development will know how difficult it is to make them work properly, considering all the sizes of devices and resolutions that currently exist in the market. Hence the importance and usefulness of this Google proposal.
Matter as a metaphor
The reality is that, no matter how "digitized" our life is today, our conception and understanding of the world, we realize it through the whole set of senses we have. That is, we have the ability to anticipate circumstances thanks to the appearance (or sound, smell or taste, etc.) of them.
For example, we know that something is about to fall, when we detect a lack of stability in the object. This logic has been taken to the development of Material Design, seeking to generate an analogy between a real space and the "space" we have within a website or application.
In this way, the surfaces and edges of elements within an app or website seek to provide visual clues based on reality, helping users quickly understand the possibilities. However, the flexibility of Material Design also allows the creation of new possibilities that replace those in the physical world, without breaking the rules of physics itself. It is about the possibility of turning a two-dimensional digital space, into a three-dimensional one.
Nothing is left to chance
The basic foundation of Design is the composition, as well as its formal elements (typography, grids, space, scale, color, images, etc.) and these guide the visual decisions within Material Design.
For it is precisely these elements that create hierarchy, meaning and focus. Color choices, edge-to-edge images, large-scale typography, and intentional white space create a graphical interface that immerses the user in the experience. A good composition achieves much more than simply pleasing the eye.
Movement means
Within Material Design, movement is considered as the main engine of the user experience, because the interactions within an app transform and reinforce the entire design in it, always seeking not to break the continuity of the experience itself.
In this way, movement not only attracts attention, but becomes a significant element, allowing attention to be focused and maintaining user continuity.
As we can see, Material Design is not about code or programming languages, but about designing for real people. This proposal of visual language, allows us to return to the basic principles of Design, where less is more. That's why at Galahad Studio we believe that design matters, because the people for whom it is created matter.
Did you know this development? Do you think that unification in visual language is an opportunity or a limitation?
Don't forget to leave your comments.
Best regards!
