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)

Alternative frameworks and libraries


There are a good number of web frameworks and libraries designed to implement Material Design and these differ in the number of components they provide and the levels to which they can be customized. Undoubtedly, the most powerful framework is polymer.

Polymer is a framework that uses Web Components. These are a set of standards that allow web developers to reuse and customize widgets and other components in a way similar to traditional component-based development. Polymer provides a wide range of these elements, and those that will interest us, as material designers, are the paper elements.

Polymer is a powerful and flexible tool but it also requires a fair degree of technical know-how. For example, it is not a simple matter to test your site locally, and you will need to set up a server with Python, or test on a remotely hosted server.

To install polymer using Bower, use the following:

bower install --save Polymer/polymer#^1.0.0

Paper elements are not part...