Making Material Design

Google Design
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 2 months, 2015–2023
YouTube
1.4M views · 11 years ago · documentary · dated

Google Design's "Making Material Design", a behind-the-scenes film on how Google's Material Design language was created. It covers the ideas of paper and ink, motion, color and a consistent system across products.

HN treats it as the official origin story of Material Design, and as the moment minimal, lower-density interfaces became the norm, with critics saying it solved a Google problem rather than a user problem.

“the writing was on the wall: if you want to build a google-grade portfolio, create designs that resemble this”
Design systemsUI design craft
#materialdesign#googledesign#designlanguage#color#motion

4 comments from Hacker News

m
@mtw2015 · in “Making material design [video]”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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@duck2015 · in “Making Material Design [video]”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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@frozenlettuce2023 · in “Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases”
That was mostly just my cynical take. Around 2007-08 I read in a(physical) Brazilian web design magazine that you can have two types of design: - for short, ephemeral experience, your design should be striking - the user will just look at the thing once anyway, so you should capture the attention in spite of how ease of navigation. Eg. a website for a rock band tour. - for experiences that will need to be repeated lots of times (eg. using a corporate system, reading the news), you want the design to be boring and predictable. I think that minimalism has been used to push interfaces that reduce information density - regardless of how the density would be useful in that context! After the original Material Design video ▶ this video the writing was on the wall: if you want to build a google-grade portfolio, create designs that resemble this. After some time users got used to that kind of look and now sites with high density of information look alien.
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n
@nadc2015 · in “Google Design”
I think you've hit the nail on the head. They talk about how individuals with no colour theory can now pick out harmonious colours. [1] This solves an internal Google problem though, not a user problem. There's a thin line between consistency and monotony and at the minute Material Design seems to be on the wrong side of that line. [1] ▶ this video
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