Google Wants To Expand Material Design By Introducing A Set Of Designing Tools

Material Design

Material Design is a design language created by Google. It has been the design foundations of many Google products, as well as third-party apps as well as websites.

According to Google, "Material is a metaphor, a system for uniting style, branding, interaction, and motion under a consistent set of principles. With Material we believe product teams can realize their greatest design potential."

With its popularity rising, Google is still expecting more people to use Material Design. As a strategy, it releases a new set of designing tools. This is partially its way to expand its design language by making it friendlier and easier to implement

Material Design was introduced in 2014 alongside Android Lollipop. Initially, it was meant to make people rethink how software should be designed on touchscreens. But now, Google wants the design to be a unified system that combines theory, resources, and tools for crafting digital experiences.

So it's much more about interaction than how it looks.

Previously, the search giant has released several tools to help designers and developers to build products using it, now the company wants more than that.

Design As A Continuous Effort

Material Design

Design is not just something to please the eyes. It's also about interactions and how can something be represented in a way that appeals in user-experience. Because design is an art of continuous problem solving, Google kept investigating and validating needs by crafting and developing new ideas to create new solutions.

As a "metaphor" to rationalize design and implementation, Material design is a shared language to help designers and developers to create a style, brand, interaction and motion under a cohesive set or principles.

"We believe a better design process yields better products, which is why we're expanding Material to be a system that supports the principles of good design and strengthens communication and productivity with new tools and inspiration. We hope these resources will help teams realize their greatest design potential, and we’re eager to see the results.

And because the new suite of tools are open-source projects, Google is expecting their expansions to be fast.

Gallery

Gallery is where users can organize their design workflow in one place. This way, everyone in a team can have a clear view and keep up with any progress and process. Here, team members can give feedback on everything.

The set of tools work similarly like a GitHub for designers. It makes things easier for people to upload, share, and comment on designs. With version control, users can also add different interactions. And because it also has a presentation layer, users can give out simple web links when they want to share the design to others.

Stage

Stage is brought forward by the teams behind Pixate and Form. Stage changes the way designers and developers build interactive experiences. It enables a more dynamic intentional and systematic workflow for crafting digital experience, apposed to static design.

This way, users can speed up their prototyping process and enables them to test out and demo movement in their apps at much earlier stages.

Remixer

Remixer is a real-time, on-device, connected UI tweaker. Designers and developers can create prototypes of apps that they can interact with directly, and with it, they can also make adjustments on-the-fly to Android, iOS and web interfaces.

App makers can also change values across multiple devices.

Putting The Tools Into A New Home

To make things easier for designers and developers, Google also launched Material.io. In its quest to make all of Material Design accessible, the company put existing works together into one place.

The website and its tools are not exclusively meant for people trying to work with Material Design; they're also for those that are inspired by the same philosophy. The idea of integrating the motion and feel of apps early in the design process is essential to Material Design. So in the website, Google establishes a new visual identity to those that have interest in the the design's initiatives.

People can get support on the latest visual guidance, as well as releases from tools and reusable components.

The goal of Material.io is to focus on different aspects of design process, and to streamline the works. And besides the listed tools above, Google also included a Resizer as an interactive viewer, and Devices that is essentially a list of device sizes, resolutions and more.

With the set of tools, Google hopes that ti will get more designers and developers to adopt Material Design in their work.