MATERIAL Design: The material world of software

Editor's note: Google's material design has gone well beyond the Android design pattern, behind the visual standardization that hides the heart of Matias Durate and his Google team behind the changing world. If you're still arguing with a co-worker at the next table about whether material design is flat, look at how far Durate, Wiley and Jitkoff's thoughts have come to see the fiery ambition behind the seemingly simple interface of material design.

"The paper is so advanced that it is as magical as magic," he said. ”

When it comes to the core idea of material design, Matias Duarte, Google's senior vice president, said. The new Google design specification sets out a unified UI visual design and physical rules for the movement of elements. Of course, this design is also a little weird.

In the process of creating this set of specifications, Google's design team felt the need to create a systematic and consistent look and feel, so that it could be widely used in all products, and hopefully it could be applied to Android, Chrome OS, and web design. The design team led by Duarte did not simply create a chromatic version and write a bunch of specs, but began to rethink it from some of the most basic issues. 3 years ago, when Duarte launched Android 4.0, he asked the world: "Does the machine have a soul?" 3 years later, Matias, after releasing material design and Android L, asked, "How is the software formed?"

How is the software formed?

Matter and form

When Google search chief designer Jon Wiley and colleague Nicholas Jikoff face the widely used card design in Google Now, it naturally extends the question: how the software is made up. When you slip a card, it's natural to think, what happens next?

"The color logo will show up in a more colorful form. ”

"It sounds like a meaningless remark," Duarte said, "but it is a very vital idea." "This design leads the design team to see every visual element in the application with a new perspective." Rather than discussing pixels and layers, the design team is more willing to take cards as an entity, thinking about the interface changes and interaction processes of the software.

If these cards have entities and their own physical properties, then it means that the cards interact with each other in motion and need to follow a set of physical rules. Under this setting, you cannot allow them to change at will, just as you cannot allow physical entities to deform arbitrarily.

Imagine a smart material that is as simple as paper, and can also change shape depending on the touch, which allows us to start thinking about what kind of design this material will bring. This is material design.

So the Google design team decided to inject this metaphor into the design, and the interface elements they designed became a piece of magic "paper". As a result, different visual elements are stacked together like flat pieces of paper, floating lightly on the background, with consistent shading and consistent light sources. When you slide a different layer, they are more slippery than the screen, not disappearing.

Brighter color, more tension of the layout, with the physical properties of the paper together, for the material design laid the foundation. Just released in Android L, bright colors and ubiquitous cards are enough to show the material design and the beauty of harmony.

Wiley and Jitkoff said that the emergence of the Material design is not so much a change in the wind direction of Google as the evolution of Google's design philosophy. In the two years from 2012 to 2013, Google launched a "Kennedy project" designed to implement a unified design process across the company. The advent of Material design has also pushed Google's "Kennedy project" into the next phase.

Creativity and Discipline

In Duarte's view, the Material design "unified the train of thought", also "is definitely a constraint factor", but this limit also makes the designs more consistent, easier to make decisions. For example, in an app, design a card that flips to show what's behind the card. In the material design, but not so designed. Because in the material design, the card has a clear physical attribute, in this space there is no room for the card to flip, and will not let it constantly flip to render different content.

' Usually we can easily understand physical entities, but software design often breaks our perception and experience of things, ' says Duarte. This design that goes beyond everyday cognition, Wiley, is a hesitant one, just like a sci-fi movie that does not follow the logic of the inner setting. Duarte pointed to iOS's design philosophy: "I don't (let the UI elements) go through the space at high speed, so the virtual edges don't give you the illusion of cutting your palms." ”

"Design is about finding solutions in constraints," Duarte says, "If the design loses its constraint, it can't be called a design-it's art without constraints." ”

Google's designers still refuse to name the material because it is more flexible and more mystical than a name-bound. Indeed, elements in the Material design follow a series of physical rules, but they do not have a materialized style. They slide back and forth like pieces of paper, but they have an unparalleled "magic".

They do not have physical paper type restrictions, and a transition animation allows them to be free to do or shrink. For Google, these animations are important because it allows users to understand that they are in an app. Wiley that many apps now feel like a movie or TV show that has been clipped, letting users lose the concept of time and space. In his view, the user needs of the app closer to the stage, the plot of the scene to advance, the stage of the story after the choreography and transformation, which is very important.

Towards reality

More importantly, this magical material will appear when you need it. Google has been exploring products such as Google Now for years, and they have become an important part of the material design. The advent of Material design has not forced users to manage data, but is designed to allow users to believe that Google gives the right content at the right time.

This is why the simultaneous introduction of wearable systems, Android Wear, retains only the ability to operate and reply to the notification system. "You don't spend a lot of time interacting with a watch, you just want to look at the message and respond with voice," says Alex Faaborg, the designer of the Android wear platform. This is in the design concept and Google Now basically consistent, but more platform. ”

To accept such a design, users need to trust Google more, whether it's data security or design. Duarte admits: "We want to find the simplest solution that will make the simplest and most easy-to-use design the first place." ”

Ambition: Parc 3.0

Material's ambition is not just to create a consistent standard of appearance and experience for Web pages and software, even beyond the layout of the Android L and Android Wear, which Google hopes to pass Material design Strengthen the connection between people's cognition and computer technology.

In Duarte's view, the Parc Research Center has brought us a graphical interface, and can be clicked drag-and-drop window design, is a very important research results, but it is not a breakthrough progress, because it is only the physical desktop virtualization design, and there is no "object relationship." And Apple has done something similar with touch technology, bringing people into the era of touch and mobile software elements, allowing users and the virtual world behind the screen to create object relationships through touch.

If the Xerox PARC Research Center brings Parc 1.0, then the iphone is Parc 2.0. Now, Google wants material design to become Parc 3.0, to open up a new era. Google believes that the design language of material can take us again, incorporating a touch screen, gesture manipulation, voice control, and Google's own intelligent algorithms and more new technologies. The combination of these technologies allows our brain to understand the workings of the software, the ability to function across devices, and allow us to visually solve the problem.

Material design is the framework that organizes and accommodates all of this, but it has not yet become a landmark product of Xerox desktop and the iphone. But it is really important to integrate the new technologies that we face every day, or that are simple or complex. If Google is able to apply material design to all platforms, such as Chrome OS, Android, Web site, and so on, then users can switch between platforms without adjustment.

At present, Material design is still a concept, it will still keep its mysterious side until Google launches more software to use the designs. But, as Wiley said, it is still in its infancy. Next, there are a lot of things that Google has to do.

"If we can really use it to replace the present design," Duarte said, "The future is really within reach." ”