Book Image

Learning Material Design

By : Mew, Nadir Belhaj
Book Image

Learning Material Design

By: 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 (12 chapters)

Summary


The Materialize framework provides a very good balance between power and simplicity. With a little knowledge of HTML, attractive interfaces can be put together very quickly and efficiently.

Another advantage of using a framework like this is that we don't need to overly concern ourselves with matters such as metrics and typography, because the material guidelines are applied automatically.

For the more adventurous, Materialize also provides some powerful JavaScript plugins to track and respond to users' navigation around a page, and to further customize components.

There are a growing number of user-friendly CSS frameworks for Material Design, and each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Materialize occupies a position that sits nicely between ease of use and sophistication. It is easy to pick up, and with a little effort, complex and beautiful interfaces can be designed.

Another easy-to-learn but powerful framework is Material Design Lite (MDL), which we encountered briefly in...