What is Material Design?

In UI/UX design, we often come across the term Material design, hear professional UI/UX designers talk about Material design, and think it is some fancy word only for designers with years and years of experience. In this article, we will try to explain what Material design is in simpler terms along with the needs and features of Material design.

So, let's start with what is Material Design.

👁 What is Material Design

Material design

Material design is an open-sourced design system built and supported by Google in order to provide a specified and consistent design language for their products and services. As we said, material design is a design system by Google. But what is a design system? A design system is a combination of rules, standards, and components that can be combined together in order to design any application. Therefore, material design is simply a design system by Google.

Material design was introduced by Google in 2014 and since then it has been a widely adopted design system by many companies. Material design not only helps companies but also is a great resource for individual UI/UX designers. Some features of the Material design are:

• Consistent design
• User-Centric design
• Cross-Platform design
• Open-Sourced
• Aesthetics
• Developer-Friendly
• Adaptability
• Accessibility

We will discuss these features in detail in the sections below.

Why Material design?

As we discussed, Material design help teams of designers to easily build high-quality, digital experiences. From design guidelines to developer components, Material can helps us build products faster. These are enough reasons that shows why there was a need of Material design. In this section we will discuss these points and well as some more points on why do we need Material design. Some points on the the need of Material design are:

1. Creating consistent user interface

We all know how wide the range of products/services Google has. Material design was created for designers to create a consistent user interface across all of the Google products and services in different platforms, different screen sizes, different hardware etc. By improving consistency, we can improve the overall user experience of the products/services.

2. User-Centricity

Material design is based on the principles of design in order to provide a user-centric design. Material design, since the rollout of its first version Material design has focused on principles to create user centric UI by multiple features, for example, by making it easy for users to understand and navigate through apps and websites.

3. Promoting Open- Sourced design systems

While Google could have created Material design closed-source and made tons of money from it, Google decided to make Material Design an open-source design system, which means that anyone can use it as a framework for their own design projects.

This was an important reason in creation of Material design that there were many design systems specially, design systems internal to various companies that no one else could use. google made Material design for making design system accessible to everyone. This open approach has contributed to widespread adoption of Material design.

4. Some more reasons

We already discussed the top 3 most important reasons why Google created Material design, here are some more not so important reasons for which Material design was created:

• Creating aesthetically great UI
• Creating a Developer-Friendly tool
• Creating a tool adaptable to various industries and use cases
• Creating a tool focused on Accessibility

Material 3 Design

Material design was introduced in 2014 and since then we have seen 3 versions of Material design by Google. Material 3 is the latest version of Material design released by Google in 2021. Like the previous two versions, it has maintained its legacy and is a widely adopted design system by Google and many other companies.

According to Google's own introduction to material 3,

"Material 3 is the latest version of Google’s open-source design system. Design and build beautiful, usable products with Material 3."

One of the most useful resources for material 3 design system is its official website which is called "m3.material.io". this website includes everything you need to know about the material design 3 as well as the actual implementation for a Android, flutter and the web.

The "m3.material.io" contains of the following sections for any Ui/UX designer:

• News and launches
• Design system updates
• Resources

Features of Material Design

Material design is loved by designers all around the globe for the features it provides. By using the guidelines, tools, and open-source components provided by Material design designers can build professionally designed products in lesser time. Some of the most noticeable Material design features are:

• UI design: In Material design, material guidelines provide the best practices and user interface design. Within the guidelines, you'll find components which are the building blocks that makes the product usable and functional. Material design using usability and platform guidance makes sure that the application/website/software product works fine for all users, regardless of platform they are using.
• Gallery: Gallery is a collaboration tool provided by Material design that helps you organize comments and iterations. Gallery provides you features like uploading your designs to Gallery to so that you can share and collaborate with your team.
• Inspect Mode: In Material design, you can use Inspect mode for the developer documentation and links to Material components to create pixel-perfect UI. Documentation helps you gain more insights and tick all the check boxes for the perfect user interface.
• Simplify your workflow: Material design also provides the resources and tools that can help you simplify your workflow. For example, Theme Editor provided by Material design is a branded, simple library that helps you build beautiful user interface.
• Guidance: In material design, each component page includes guidance on how the components should be used by the designer, it also provides interaction pattern and design specs. Material design gives the designer all the information needed to ensure that the user interface is designed with lesser if not no flaws.
• Open-sourced: Material design is open-sourced. Therefore, it has a large community of designers and developers continuously making material design better. Since Material design is open-sourced, it is free to use. Open-source code is available for iOS, Android, web, and Flutter to help you start building your ideas in no time.

Conclusion

Material design is an adaptable design system, it is an open-source design system, that helps teams easily build high-quality, digital experiences. Material design is a great way to know how design patterns are used by companies like Google and how a company as big as Google think towards creating a user interface.