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)

Materialize


Materialize is one of the easiest ways to implement Material Design in our web pages, as well as very helpful in automatically adjusting elements such as text size to take differing screen sizes. It provides a limited but pertinent set of material components, such as navigation drawers, ripple effects, and cards. The best way to learn about Materialize is to try it out for ourselves.

Setting up

If you have ever used Bootstrap, you will recognize immediately how Materialize is structured. You will begin by downloading the files from this link: http://materializecss.com/getting-started.html.

You will note that there are two main downloads available, Materialize and Sass:

Until you become familiar, and for the sake of this exercise, it is recommended to start with the standard version. From a learning point of view, downloading the files is a better option, as this allows us to examine and edit these files. However, you can also use a CDN to access these resources remotely. This has...