UI changes brought by Android Material design

Google Matias Duarte said, "Material design is beautiful and bold because clean typography and layout are simple and easy to understand." Content is the focus.

Google The I/O 014 Developer Conference announces the new design language "Material designs" for all of its platforms, including Android, Chrome OS and Web pages.

Google Matias Duarte said, "Material design is beautiful and bold because clean typography and layout are simple and easy to understand." Content is the focus. "

Material Design debuted in Google + 's app upgrade last month, replacing new icons and fonts with a more uniform interface level. The design of the entire interface is based on what Google calls "a unified theory of rationalized space and motion systems." Google says the design language will redefine Android and web-side applications, including Gmail and Google Calendar, of course.

" This is a very advanced paper ink, which is no different from magic. "This is Matias Duarte, vice president of Google Design, Matias Douatte The central principle of material design. The metaphor for this metaphor is the new design direction behind Google, which provides a complete set of physical concepts and rules for the appearance and operation of the software.

Google's design team wants to create a "more consistent look and feel" that can be applied to all products, including Android and Chrome OS. When the idea was built, the team did not start with a specific palette color or a guide, but first asked a question: What was the software made of?

Substance and form

The answer comes from a design quest. At the time, Jon Wiley, Google's Chief search designer, and his colleague Nicolas Jetkov (Nicholas Jitkoff) expressed concern about the ubiquitous card-based design that originated in Google Now, Joen Willie. They looked at the cards and thought, "What does it look like when you slip away from a card?" ”

"This is a very naïve question," Douatte said, "but this has sparked a strong spark." "This idea leads the team to build a new way of thinking about software components. The design team treats the cards and the sliding surfaces as real, tangible objects relative to the discussion of pixels or abstractions on the screen.

If these cards are real materials with physical properties, then it means that there are rules that govern how they move and live on the screen. You can't do anything to them as you want, as if you can't do anything about the actual object.

So the design team decided to develop a "material" that was similar to paper ink. This paper ink shape flat, slightly floating on the background surface, color white. They have consistent shadows and consistent lighting. When you move these "substances", they do not disappear, but move to other places. They do not move by themselves without the user moving.

This bold decision comes with bright colors and conspicuous fonts, which you can see in the Android L system for the first time: it has a variety of colors and layers that can slide back and forth, but it still retains sense of space and consistency.

Willie and Jetkov said the new aesthetic idea was more like a design concept than a major change. Google launched the Kennedy Project (Project Kennedy) in 2012 and 2013 to unify the company's design language. With the release of material design, this continues to move forward. "As a whole, it conveys the feeling of a multi-coloured light," Jetkov, "and its icons look colorful and the interface is very concise." ”

Creativity and restraint

"Material design unifies people's minds, which is definitely a constraint." But these constraints make the design simpler and more coherent. "Jetkov said. For example, you might want to leave the card behind to see what's on the back, but it won't work in material design. These software, like real objects, have physical properties, and there's no room in the phone to flip them, so we can't see what's on the back.

Douatte says we can understand physical objects, but software often breaks our cognitive pattern. The software breaks the theory of skepticism, because in some movies, something happens that doesn't follow its original internal logic.

"Design is to find a solution in the constraints," Douatte said, "If there is no constraint, then there is no design-that became art." ”

Google's designers still refuse to name the material, giving them more flexibility and a more mystical aura. An important reason for rejecting a name is that although it follows certain physical rules, it does not belong to a pseudo-materialized style. Material is not a one-on-paper imitation, but "magic paper."

It can do things that physical paper can't do, like resizing with animations. Google says these animations are important because it helps users understand that they are in an application. "A lot of software feels like a simplified version of a movie or TV that lets you lose the concept of time and space." "said Willie. For users, they want to see the app become a "drama". "They're going to jump from one moment to the next," he said. "The scene is changing and the content on the stage is choreographed and transformed, which makes sense. ”

Become a reality

More importantly, this material can appear when you need it. Google has been researching for years about products like Google Now, and the algorithms behind it have become an important part of this new design concept. Rather than requiring users to manage their own data, Material design asks users to believe that Google can give them what they need at the right time.

This is also why the wearable system Android Wear does not provide the user with the ability to respond to messages other than the reason, the Platform designer Alex Faberg (Alex faaborg) said: "You do not spend a lot of time to interact with the watch, you just want to look at the notification and quick voice response." This is the same as our research and development philosophy for Google Now, but for the entire platform. ”

"We came up with the simplest solution," says Douatte. One of our design practices is to put simplicity and practicality at the forefront of user design. ”

PARC 3.0

Google's ambition to develop material design, in addition to providing a consistent look and feel for software and Web pages, goes beyond Android L and Android Wear, and the company wants to strengthen the relationship between people and computer-interactive technologies.

Douatte said, "Xerox Parker Research Center (Xerox PARC)," the superposition of the operating window and mouse is an important research in this field. But it's not a breakthrough, because it's a virtualized physical desktop with no "object relationships". Apple has also been developing in this field, bringing people into the world that can touch and move software elements.

Google believes its new design language can push people forward again, incorporating technologies including touch screens, gestures, voice controls, and even Google's own smart algorithms. Together, these technologies provide a software operation model for the brain that has cross-device capabilities that allow us to intuitively address what we are experiencing.

Material design is the organizational framework for this model of software operation, but it has not yet become a star product for Xerox desktop and iphone. If Google can deliver on its promise to apply material design to all platforms, including Chrome OS, Android and web, people can switch between these platforms without needing to adjust.

Now material design is just an idea, and it will remain mysterious until Google launches more software that uses the language. But as Willie says, "We're still in the early stages." "Google will be busy preparing for the next thing.

"If we can design with future materials instead of today's materials," Douatte says, "Then the future is right." ”

reference: http://www.tmtpost.com/118534.html http://www.ithome.com/html/android/92017.htm