As you know, Vibha and I went to the material design conference today at Google San Francisco. In short, I'm sold. Material design, hoo!

I took longer form notes in an etherpad, but here's the long and short of it in the form of four principles:
  1. Tangible surfaces: Your phone is not a view port into an alternate world. The UI of your app should feel tangible, like little bits of paper moving around the screen.
  2. Print-like design: UI elements should be like print on paper. Use a consistent hierarchy for your information.
  3. Meaningful motion: UI panels should never come out of nowhere; the motion and interaction conveys how everything you're looking at is connected together.
  4. Adaptive design: Having a consistent UI across devices of all size does not mean making everything have the same layout.
I realise this all sounds very high level, but it resonated with me quite a lot. Google has even incorporated these principles into their apps on iOS, such as Google Maps which is now using material design!

I'm currently trying to find the exact presentation that was shown today, but in the mean time you can look at this for more info: http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-design/introduction.html

More to come!

Dan

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Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation