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Material UI

material-ui.com

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Re: Material UI

#161

Post by tim333 »

orbifold wrote: post #85
tomelders wrote: post #44

I had a talk with myself at the weekend about making a concerted effort to cut out the snark when I comment on the web.... And I'm about to fall at the first hurdle. Being "on trend" isn't good UI design. But I can see how we got here. Through OS X and iOS, Apple's UI ethos became the gold standard in UI design. It was so well designed that it was easy to imitate and by simply adopting the core elements of Apples UI…

The current trend is rooted in the fact that computer displays approach the visual fidelity of paper prints by now (> 300dpi). Consequently a more print like design language is adopted, which often features a small selection of colours and simple geometric shapes. The large variety in print design demonstrates that this is not an unreasonable restriction. In my eyes the translucency of windows in Yosemite is a much n…

>The current trend is rooted in the fact that computer displays approach the visual fidelity of paper prints by now (> 300dpi)

My impression (I'm not expert) is that the trend is rooted in the opposite - the crappy displays of cheap phones. The old fancy graphics of say Windows 7 could not render quickly or at all on cheap phones so with the advent of responsive design companies used flat design so the same graphics could be used on all devices including cheap phones.

I get the technical issue but I still find it a bit ugly.

Re: Material UI

#162

Post by tim333 »

alexsopilot wrote: post #126
orbifold wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current trend is rooted in the fact that computer displays approach the visual fidelity of paper prints by now (> 300dpi). Consequently a more print like design language is adopted, which often features a small selection of colours and simple geometric shapes. The large variety in print design demonstrates that this is not an unreasonable restriction. In my eyes the translucency of windows in Yosemite is a much n…

The "Folder" metaphor is something I've been considering a lot lately. It seems so ingrained in modern computing. Apple has started to move away from it tags and "All my Files." I struggle to think of a better way to solve organizing and collecting items than into nested groups.

I find the Apple OSX finder's half hearted attempts to hide the file system a pain in the arse.

What does work quite well for me is the default approach of Gmail where your emails are in basically one folder with a good and fast search facility (and tagging)

Re: Material UI

#163

Post by calinet6 »

xg15 wrote: post #127
calinet6 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, let's not consider every copycat that comes along a valid and complete implementation of good UI guidelines... This one surely is not.

The problem is that many people will use those copycats as the basis for their own app designs. Not everyone is willing to really understand the reasoning behind the design spec down to such minute details as an arrow placement if he can be hip and trendy with something that superficially looks like the same design. If a design is so easily misunderstood with such (comparably) large consequences for the user, that's…

I don't believe it's easily misunderstood; I think people just don't know how or why to create a quality implementation based on an original. The spec is actually remarkable in the level of depth it goes to teach you not only about the design guidelines themselves, but also the reasoning and psychology behind it. Really, it's probably the best full on UX specification ever produced (and I'm not saying that lightly).

It just shows that it's very difficult to get this stuff right. There's still going to be a bell curve, with most implementations and copies ending up in the mediocre middle, but overall, the guidelines might bring the quality of the overall market up. That's all we can hope.

Re: Material UI

#164

Post by tomelders »

AtTheLast wrote: post #158
peterchon wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

flat design is trending because we have so many "designers" who can't design.

What do you think separates a "designer" from a designer?

I would say Consideration. I am a designer, and I work with lots of designers. Design is harder than it looks and even brilliant designers don't get it right 100% of the time, but I can see a clear difference between the types of designers whose work "looks right" and designers who have approached a brief with the aim of figuring out what "works right".

It's easier to be the former than the latter both in terms of skill and the politics of the client relationship, and that's why there are so many "designers" and so few designers.

Re: Material UI

#165

Post by nazka »

tomelders wrote: post #164
AtTheLast wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think separates a "designer" from a designer?

I would say Consideration. I am a designer, and I work with lots of designers. Design is harder than it looks and even brilliant designers don't get it right 100% of the time, but I can see a clear difference between the types of designers whose work "looks right" and designers who have approached a brief with the aim of figuring out what "works right". It's easier to be the former than the latter both in terms of sk…

Yes. A real designer isn't just a UI artist. Art is one skill among others. A real designer should also understand: UX, human behaviour and interaction, logic, visual language (architecture, shape, color, animation) and other skills...

Most designers don't get it right because they don't have these skills, they are only artists. And because of that they don't understand why a particular design is better than another or even what their own design expresses.

To do a real design, it asks you to do a ton of research and going back and forth between art and UX. Doing brain storming to implement old and new logic elements in a fashion way.

It's like the iOS 6 it was a big step forward because it was a design: simple, expressive, and functional. The guys who created it understood all of that. Then again, Apple followed the fashion trend more than the logic and did the iOS 7 design criticized even before it was out. The problem, among its specific fashion, was that the design was so flat it was destroying UI information. Plus visual problems: sometimes the color seems to mean something but you find one red button that isn't one, sometimes the shape, sometimes the animation...

Here is an example of what a designer should do to design a UI. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2013/06/27/desi...

Re: Material UI

#166

Post by jwr »

jwr wrote: post #143

I worked through the demo and actually kind-of liked it, until I got to the checkbox page. How is that checkbox design better than the commonly used empty square for unchecked, and square containing an X or a V for checked? I can't even tell if the boxes are checked or not! I would seriously advise taking a look at the usability of these checkboxes.

[can't edit the comment anymore and this merits a correction]

It turns out that it was a bug and checkboxes were rendered on my screen in a way that was not intended by designers. So the comment above is invalid.

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