Book Image

Learning Material Design

By : Kyle Mew, Nadir Belhaj
Book Image

Learning Material Design

By: Kyle Mew, Nadir Belhaj

Overview of this book

Google's Material Design language has taken the web development and design worlds by storm. Now available on many more platforms than Android, Material Design uses color, light, and movements to not only generate beautiful interfaces, but to provide intuitive navigation for the user. Learning Material Design will teach you the fundamental theories of Material Design using code samples to put these theories into practice. Focusing primarily on Android Studio, you’ll create mobile interfaces using the most widely used and powerful material components, such as sliding drawers and floating action buttons. Each section will introduce the relevant Java classes and APIs required to implement these components. With the rules regarding structure, layout, iconography, and typography covered, we then move into animation and transition, possibly Material Design's most powerful concept, allowing complex hierarchies to be displayed simply and stylishly. With all the basic technologies and concepts mastered, the book concludes by showing you how these skills can be applied to other platforms, in particular web apps, using the powerful Polymer library.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Chapter 10. Material Design Lite

In the last chapter, we saw how the Materialize framework provides an intuitive way to create material web pages. Material Design Lite (MDL), as we saw in Chapter 8, Material Web Frameworks, offers a similarly simple mechanism and is probably even easier to pick up. The reason for this is the slightly different approach used by MDL. This approach involves starting with standard HTML elements and then adding the MDL classes. This not only makes it very easy to learn, but also makes it the ideal tool for adapting our existing web pages into Material Design ones. Perhaps the best way to think of MDL is as an enhanced set of traditional HTML components. Another differing feature is how many of the desired effects can be implemented with some very simple and intuitive CCS.

In this chapter, you will learn how to:

  • Create a page layout with a transparent header

  • Add navigation options

  • Customize the header

  • Include a side bar

  • Add tabs

  • Create a search field

  • Add drop-down menus...