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)

Summary


Building material web apps and pages is, in many ways, far easier than mobile devices. A great deal of the work is done for us. Provided we are happy to accept out-of-the-box solutions, material web UIs can be assembled in minutes. Frameworks such as MDL and Materialize are very well documented and very easy to become familiar with quickly. Many frameworks can work together, allowing us to select the features we want the most.

Spending the time to master a more sophisticated tool such as polymer is very often worth the effort, as the level of customization that the framework can provide will open up a world of possibilities.

Material design is ultimately a visual language and should transcend individual tools and platforms. It is the principles regarding proportion, light, color, and motion and not which HTML tag we use or which library we download that make an interface a material one or otherwise. Material Design websites and apps are becoming more and more abundant, and as we shall...