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Material Design

material.io

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Re: Material Design

#51

Post by quanticle »

mi100hael wrote: post #5

Maybe I'm missing something, but I just don't get MD. * The name: What do a bunch of geometric, flat-looking, solid colors have anything to do with "materials." "Material Design" always makes me think the direct opposite: skeuomorphism. * The look: It goes way past "clean" and "elegant" into "bland" and "childish." I don't want a bunch of tiny buttons with indecipherable icons and pastel colors. I want well-organized…

>sites like this seem to be encouraging general usage, but then your site just looks like you ripped off Google's stylesheet.

I don't know why you'd use Material Design for a website. I thought that the purpose of Material Design was to provide a common design language for Android Apps, like the Apple Design Guidelines do for iOS apps. Moreover, Material Design, with its simple platonic shapes and solid colors, seems really targeted towards mobile use. Simple shapes and solid colors can be easily implemented with vector graphics, which means that it's easy to render them in a resolution-independent fashion.

My criticisms of material design come from watching inexperienced users (e.g. my parents) attempt to interact with Google's Material Design apps. My dad refuses to upgrade his Android 4.0 HTC phone specifically to avoid the newer versions of Google Maps. He finds the gestures to be undiscoverable and doesn't like the fact that it takes two to three more swipes to access the same functionality. This is especially a problem if you're using the phone one-handed, while walking around or driving.

Re: Material Design

#52

Post by snodnipper »

mi100hael wrote: post #5

Maybe I'm missing something, but I just don't get MD. * The name: What do a bunch of geometric, flat-looking, solid colors have anything to do with "materials." "Material Design" always makes me think the direct opposite: skeuomorphism. * The look: It goes way past "clean" and "elegant" into "bland" and "childish." I don't want a bunch of tiny buttons with indecipherable icons and pastel colors. I want well-organized…

Sample size of one..._but_ I love material design apps.

For me, it is a attempt to give folks simple / functional patterns that work across different screen sizes and encourage good behaviours such as widget reuse.

MD hopefully discourages organisations from making their own (often weird / lower quality) widgets that only work on certain screen sizes, certain platforms yak yak yak. Furthermore, the standard MD patterns, iconography etc. should decrease the time necessary to understand new apps - reducing user frustration.

I also love their color swatches[1] and naming convention as it allows devs to easily switch colors throughout their apps / widgets.

Sure some might view this as “utility” design _but_ it does give the great unwashed access to good design (quickly and at low/no cost). That enables folk to focus on adding some value.

[1]: https://material.google.com/style/color.html

Re: Material Design

#53

Post by jordache »

Nadya wrote: post #28
MaxKK wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a few links where I can read more about this design direction?

Not the parent, but here are some examples, with a brief description of the style: http://splashnology.com/article/swiss-style-in-modern-web-de... Personally I find most sites that use Swiss Style impossible to navigate/use. They "look nice" (actually, quite amazing in my opinion) but functionality is #1 for most websites and I would never make a site purposefully using this style. Most of the time, there is just too…

Target is pretty much all Swiss with their heavy dependency on Helvetica for everything

Re: Material Design

#54

Post by jordache »

telesilla wrote: post #44
davnicwil wrote: post #10

Buried in there is a tool for a quick view of any site across laptop, tablet and smartphone form factors: http://material.io/resizer/ I've never seen this tool before and don't know if it's new with this site, but it is amazing and I'll be using it a lot from now on! Edit: Thanks for the references to the browser dev tools, which clearly are more appropriate for development - I intended rather more emphasis on the qu…

I agree: while I use the Chrome tools for resizing, this is a lovely interface you could use to impress a client.

Just get a mock up photo of an iphone. Put an iframe inside of it and voila. Zero magic. Just some prep work

Re: Material Design

#55

Post by bsimpson »

SippinLean wrote: post #20
davnicwil wrote: post #10

Buried in there is a tool for a quick view of any site across laptop, tablet and smartphone form factors: http://material.io/resizer/ I've never seen this tool before and don't know if it's new with this site, but it is amazing and I'll be using it a lot from now on! Edit: Thanks for the references to the browser dev tools, which clearly are more appropriate for development - I intended rather more emphasis on the qu…

A similar (better) tool is baked into Chrome devtools

Resizer is linkable, so it's easy to share with your colleagues in design and product. If you're a developer actively working on your own machine, DevTools is probably the better tool for you.

Re: Material Design

#57

Post by desdiv »

Terribledactyl wrote: post #18
mi100hael wrote: post #5

Maybe I'm missing something, but I just don't get MD. * The name: What do a bunch of geometric, flat-looking, solid colors have anything to do with "materials." "Material Design" always makes me think the direct opposite: skeuomorphism. * The look: It goes way past "clean" and "elegant" into "bland" and "childish." I don't want a bunch of tiny buttons with indecipherable icons and pastel colors. I want well-organized…

I'm sorta indifferent to it, but these are what I've slowly picked up on. > The name I think what they are going for is a language agnostic building set of icons/interactions that sorta relate to real physical objects. Without becoming "floppy disk means save" in 2016 > The look I think they want high contrast, and for it to work on any device aspect/orientation. And somehow take the previous to a pretty far conclusi…

>I'm pretty sure this is just Google's site. Owner OrgName : Google Inc.

His full sentence was:

    The appeal: sites like this seem to be encouraging general usage, but then your site just looks like you ripped off Google's stylesheet.
I took it to mean:

Google is using sites like this to encourage general adoption of Material Design all over the web. But if you, as a designer, adopt Material Design for your own site, visitors to your site will just assume that you ripped off Google's site design.

Re: Material Design

#58

Post by sangnoir »

reinhardt1053 wrote: post #37
mi100hael wrote: post #5

Maybe I'm missing something, but I just don't get MD. * The name: What do a bunch of geometric, flat-looking, solid colors have anything to do with "materials." "Material Design" always makes me think the direct opposite: skeuomorphism. * The look: It goes way past "clean" and "elegant" into "bland" and "childish." I don't want a bunch of tiny buttons with indecipherable icons and pastel colors. I want well-organized…

I don't get why on HN, every top voted comment in every submission is a negative criticism.

Those who agree with the linked article tend to be less motivated to vote a concurring comment than those who disagree with the article and can't wait to express their disagreement via voting for a contrarian argument.

Things get interesting at the 2nd level; the highest voted reply to the top comment is usually a counter-counter-argument. The roles have been reversed and the yea-sayers are now more motivated to vote than nay-sayers. It's fascinating

Re: Material Design

#59

Post by sangnoir »

bdcravens wrote: post #47
whamlastxmas wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no problem with it. The alternative is having Bill from the marketing department making design decisions ("we need a big pink button in the top right that says AMAZING DEALS") and generally impossible to navigate web pages. I cam across a site on my phone yesterday that forced you to swipe left and right to read multiple screens of text of a news article. Fuck that.

I don't think that dichotomy exists. I definitely feel that the entire web should not look like Android.

I feel your pain. Remember when the web looked like the latest Mac OS 10.x of the day? Glossy buttons and brushed aluminum (and later, linen) everywhere. Web design is rather faddish.

Re: Material Design

#60

Post by erikpukinskis »

reinhardt1053 wrote: post #37
mi100hael wrote: post #5

Maybe I'm missing something, but I just don't get MD. * The name: What do a bunch of geometric, flat-looking, solid colors have anything to do with "materials." "Material Design" always makes me think the direct opposite: skeuomorphism. * The look: It goes way past "clean" and "elegant" into "bland" and "childish." I don't want a bunch of tiny buttons with indecipherable icons and pastel colors. I want well-organized…

I don't get why on HN, every top voted comment in every submission is a negative criticism.

I wonder if it's because of ties to academia. The academic origins of the internet, the Google/Stanford thing, the generally high quantity of people with degrees...

Academia is all about criticism. You don't succeed by doing something well, you succeed by situating something new in a context of previous work. That requires you first to understand previous work and its limitations.

Even in the business world, which is quite competitive, you can follow in footsteps. You can see how someone else created a hot dog stand, and just make your own. You don't have to find some flaw in the other hot dog stand, you just have to do it.

Academia demands you to find a flaw in the other hot dog stand and then argue that yours is different.

Coders seem to follow along in that path. We are always needing to find the next thing, so we are constantly finding ways to argue the existing stuff won't do.

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