Google has announced a new design language for Android’s UI design. Matias Duarte, the head of Android design at Google, talks through Android L design features, creating a new design language called Material. I have pulled out my highlights from his talk. The stand out was the trouble they had taken to create delightful animations to provide clear feedback on touch devices. He said ‘its delightful when your touch is rewarded with animation….’ and I haven’t considered how important this was before. But this presentation really made the point. Its a very confident piece of work.

A radical new approach to design, user experiences are evolving rapidly, and we wanted to rethink the user experience in android to have fresh bold and new look to talk about the design ….

not just for android phones and tablets we worked together, android, chrome, and across all of google to craft one consistent vision of mobile desktop and beyond we wanted a design that was clear and simple, and that people would intuitively understand, so we imagined what if pixels, didn’t just have colour, but also depth, what if there was an intelligent material as simple as paper, but could transform and change shape, in response to touch, and this led us to a way of thinking, that we call material design.

groovy demo video

material design is beautiful and bold because clear typographic layouts are simple and easy to understand. your content is the focus,

we are giving designers familiar tools, like baseline grids that work across screens, grids ensure apps have a consistent rythm and character, and this will allow you to start your designs on a phoneand logically and easily bring that same design to tablet and laptops. And one design doesn’t mean one size fits all. Our guidelines allow you to appropriately adapt the UI, so the users will already know their way around your app no matter what screen they use it on.

now lets talk about animation, its delightful when your touch is rewarded with animation….

step by step how we updated the design, the typography, the grid changes, and finally the surfaces, and bold colours, and how a few small changes can make a really big difference.

To help you take advantage of this framework, we have also completely redesigned and created, one unified set of style guidelines, for every screen and all devices, these guidelines will help developers and designers, alike, understand best practises and build consistent beautiful experiences….