Understanding Material Design Part I: Material is the metaphor



What if pixels didn’t just have color, but also depth? What if there was an intelligent material that was as simple as paper, but could transform and change shape with a touch?

I remember every detail of Matias Duarte’s keynote speech introducing the world to Material Design. I remember being excited, since I have been a fan of his work for many a year. I remember being hooked to the animations going on behind him, almost as if I were in a trance.

Material Design immediately felt so strikingly beautiful and enchanting. The developer in me was worried: I knew immediately that I was going to have a lot of work to do before Google shipped the L Release. However, the designer in me was excited. Material Design felt elegant, polished, yet simple and obvious. And yet, I was confused.

Any Googler I spoke to talked about Material Design being the most significant change to Android yet. As someone who has been part of the ecosystem since Android 1.x days, I struggled to see why they would consider that: surely Holo still deserved that title, since it gave Android’s UI much needed structure at a time when the platform’s struggle with screens-size fragmentation was about to get worse with tablets entering the market.

I’ve spent quite some time since trying to understand Material Design, watching the videos, reading the documentation, and most importantly, using the developer preview of Android L on my phone. And doing that made me realize I had been thinking of it in the wrong way.

As someone who has preached the Android Design Guidelines for years, I looked at every part of Material Design and thought of which principle was already recommending this. And because of that I began to see Material Design as an evolution of Holo. Matias Duarte said so himself, in his own way, when he said that design, in general, has to keep evolving. I had been mistaken into comparing it with Microsoft’s Metro/Modern UI, or Apple’s iOS 7.

The breakthrough moment in my understanding of Material Design was when I read the documentation page for Layout Principles. There is an amazing amount of detail in that page, but what caught my eye was something quite basic: each and every visual component was broken down and spoken of as if it resides in it’s own individual plane. They were all being spoken of as the “material”, and it suddenly hit me.

Material is the metaphor. And Material is an Object. Real Objects are more fun than buttons and menus.

Forgive me if you don’t quite understand that statement, for it’s me trying to connect the core design principle of Material Design with one of the existing Android design principle.

Connecting the two, I realized why Material Design felt like so much fun: every component was broken down to behave like an object, or a material. And then, measures were taken to ensure that any interaction with that material was enjoyable. More over, by making each object behave as if it existed, metaphorically, I instinctively knew how to use it and any feedback felt obvious.

Something about the Android L release had felt so appealing to touch. I loved dialing a number myself. I loved tapping on an item in the call history to see it rise and show me more information. I loved opening up my calculator for even the most basic of problems. And I now understood why.

Material is the metaphor.