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 3. Common Components

With software installed and a grounding in the principles of Android layout design, we are now in a position to explore the components that make up mobile applications and the material rules that govern their appearance. This chapter covers some of the most common visual components, dialogs, and menus.

After selecting a material-compliant palette, we revisit the toolbar, again using it to replace the old action bar, which is itself a member of the menu family. The Asset Studio is then used to select and configure suitable material icons to represent our menu items and the layout guidelines for phones, tablets, and desktops, which are detailed. The chapter then moves on to actual menus and we construct both the overflow and contextual varieties along with the Java routines required to capture menu events.

This chapter starts to delve further into the code required to develop Android applications. This will involve both XML and Java, although XML is our primary programming...