Welcome to Learning Material Design, a comprehensive guide to the latest and hottest design philosophy for mobile and web applications. More than just a design language, Material Design represents a powerful shift in how modern digital interfaces look and behave. Based largely on traditional design principles, Material Design brings a tactile look and feel to apps and pages, giving screen elements physical properties such as fluid, realistic motion and the ability to depict a third dimension using shadows.
Covering all major design principles and guidelines and including enough of the technologies and code required to implement them, the book is designed so that you can get started with building your own material interfaces from the very beginning.
All the commonly used material components, such as cards and sliding drawers, are covered in terms of both design guidelines and code structures. This element-specific approach is coupled with details on how Material Design can be applied to interfaces in general, and how to use these guidelines to create material transitions and navigation processes.
Although concentrating largely on mobile interface design and using the powerful Android Studio development environment, the latter part of the book focuses on how the principles learned earlier can be just as easily applied to designs of web and desktop interfaces with a number of helpful and simple-to-use CSS frameworks, particularly Materialize and Material Design Lite.
This book is only the beginning of a journey into what may well become one of the most persistent digital design paradigms we have yet seen. But by the end, you will have learned not only the design theory behind materials, but also enough of technical know-how to put what you have learned into practice and be in a position to create or convert Material Design applications on your own.
Chapter 1, Getting Started with Material Design, introduces some of the basic precepts of Material Design, but concentrates largely on how to set up a development environment and create a simple "Hello World" app. This includes an introduction to the material theme and palette.
Chapter 2, Building a Mobile Layout, is where we concentrate on some fundamental processes in designing an Android interface, such as the content hierarchy and how components are positioned and scaled within it. The second portion of this chapter covers support libraries and how these can help us make Material Design backward compatible.
Chapter 3, Common Components, covers the most frequently used mobile material components, such as app bars, menus, and modal dialogs, along with the creation of action icons for menus.
Chapter 4, Sliding Drawers and Navigation, explains the typical material navigation techniques, in particular, the navigation menu and sliding drawers.
Chapter 5, Lists, Cards, and Data, is where we see how the recycler view can be used to organize data in the form of a list, and how separate fields of mixed media can be applied to the card view widget.
Chapter 6, Animations and Transitions, covers transition from one screen to another, including hide and reveal animations and how components that are shared across screens are animated.
Chapter 7, Material on Other Devices, is where we look at how Material Design is applied to the Android TV and Wear platforms.
Chapter 8, Material Web Frameworks, takes us on a brief tour of one of the most commonly used technologies for applying Material Design to web pages. This is done using ready-made CSS and JavaScript frameworks.
Chapter 9, The Materialize Framework, delves deeper into the Materialize web frameworks, demonstrating how common components, animations, and navigation are achieved.
Chapter 10, Material Design Lite, is the final chapter. It covers the most popular material framework—Material Design Lite. As in the previous chapter, we explore the most commonly used components and features.
Android Studio and SDK are both open source and free, and instructions on installation and configuration are included in the book.
This book is ideal for web developers and designers who are interested in implementing Material Design in their mobile and web apps. No prior knowledge or experience of Material Design is required, but some familiarity with procedural languages such as Java and markup languages such as HTML will provide an advantage.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The Tools directory contains exactly what it says, that is, tools."
A block of code is set as follows:
<TextView
android:id="@+id/text_view"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:layout_centerHorizontal="true"
android:layout_centerVertical="true"
android:text="@string/hello_world" />When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<TextView
android:id="@+id/name"
android:layout_width="wrap_content"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:layout_alignParentTop="true"
android:layout_toRightOf="@+id/profile_pic"
android:textSize="24sp" />
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
bower install <package> bower update <package> bower search <containing> bower list
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "You can then open the SDK manager from the menu via Tools | Android | SDK Manager or the matching icon on the main toolbar."
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