Google’s keynote presentation has already been viewed over a million times, and it is still treated as the key resource for understanding everything we need to about material design. 

Material design has one goal – to offer users a consistent experience among multiple devices without causing any confusion. In terms of principles, it borrows heavily from print design. It aims to render the physical characteristics of paper into a digital medium, making it possible for an application or website to replicate those characteristics. Like paper, a material design interface can change size and shape.

But, material is only that part which is contained within the application. Any content outside of it isn’t.

The final objective here is portability across platforms with an emphasis on user-initiated actions, such as touch and motion. For example, when an element is touched, it can deliver a digital magnetic reaction, which allows for a perfect transition between the ripples and the reaction itself, instead of delivering two individual images.

Now, before we explore the principles of material design, it is best to determine whether you actually need it. Of course, as always, the answer to a question like this isn’t straightforward or simple. It ultimately boils down to your exact need and circumstance.

But, there is one thing we can all agree on, and that is, great design offers both functionality and uniqueness. Needless to say, the former quality is of the utmost priority. We all know aesthetics is pointless if functionality is compromised.

So, when considering adapting material design, we must first see it from the perspective of our goals. What is it that we are looking to achieve here? To put it simply, is material design likely to play a key role in helping you reach your end goals?

If your answer is, we can begin exploring its principles.

Know Your Key Resource

To really understand material design, you will have to start by looking at Google’s official resource. This resource is updated in a timely fashion and hosts all the information you need to build material design.

The Google material design resource isn’t platform specific either. It focuses on more than just the Android-specific stuff. So, you basically have access to information concerning all aspects of material design, discussed in the context of projects in general.

So, start by studying the first few chapters of the resource to get well-acquainted with the basic principles.

Understand What ‘Material’ Is

The term material design isn’t something that just got conjured up. The very idea behind material design is to create designs that mimic the real world to a particular level of generalization. You obviously do not something overwhelming, where there is no difference between the real world and the one on the screen. The goal is only to express the concept of material.

You see, we all know what ‘material’ is. We know what something feels like even before we touch it. We know what cloth feels like, what metal feels like, or what wood feels like. We can even process multiple layers, i.e. a piece of cloth over another object or paper over an object.

So, with material design, it’s all about using the apt strategies to communicate the same hierarchy of elements. The main thing to remember is that you have to do all this with the most basic design tools, such as shades or shadows.

Don’t Ignore Primary and Accent Color

The best way to adhere to this principle is to select three hues for your primary palette and one color to serve as the accent. The primary colors are obviously for the main elements of the overall interface. This typically includes fonts, boxes. Fields, and backgrounds.

The accent color is the accent color. Its duty is to offer a certain advantage when the main element is being displayed on the screen.

One more thing to remember here is that your accent color needs to be of a higher contrast than the primary colors.

Be Smart with Whitespace

As stated earlier, print design is the foundation on which material design rests. As a result, they happen to share very similar principles. Just like it is with print design, whitespace plays a major role in any kind of material design. It allows improvements with regard to typography and also, layout text.

Whitespace is actually a very important tool when it comes to creating focus and grabbing attention. So, keep things to a minimum and increase the amount of whitespace. Use large typography for the primary headings and don’t think twice about leaving empty spaces in your design.

Embrace Motion

Google believes that motion adds more meaning to design.

So, when incorporating material design, do not ignore motion as a key component. As humans, we experience motion in our daily lives. Motion allows us to develop a perception regarding how things function and where we need to focus.

The same principle applies to material design, and that’s why motion plays a major role here in boosting interaction. When motion is used, users gain a better perspective of the design’s usability.

There are different elements that can be leveraged to create motion. For instance, when a user carries out an action, you can try to animate the reaction to indicate that the action will deliver the expected results and that the input has been received.

Use the Colors Provided in Images for Image Centered Design

Google suggests extracting colors from chosen images and adding them to the palette. There’s plenty of reasoning behind this, and it would be hard not to agree with the tech-giant. When we use the same colors, we create consistency, which is the primary goal of material design.

There is a strong sense of uniformity with the same color schemes, allowing users to recognize and relate immediately.

Looking to learn more about material design? Get in touch with Us.

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There are plenty of statistics to support this. For instance, 57% of users on the Internet will not recommend a website that possesses poor design on mobile screens.

In other words, if your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices, you’re likely to lose more than half your prospects. Needless to say, this makes it very clear as to just how important responsive design is.

But, it isn’t enough to just jump onto the responsive web design bandwagon. You see, like most other things, responsive design isn’t a constant. It evolves and changes. You need to make sure you’re updated about those changes in orders to keep staying relevant in the market.

You simply can’t afford to get lazy in today’s highly competitive landscape. So, it’s best to know what’s happening around. Keeping in line with this sentiment, we’ve listed out a few responsive web design practices that are likely to be a big deal in 2018 and further.

Take a look and implement the ones that apply to your site the most.

An uptick in micro-interactions

One of the most interesting things that experts have taken note of this year is the growing use of micro-interactions. If you’re wondering what they are, let us explain – micro-interactions are variables in a design that make it possible for the user to interact with a web page without having to reload it time and again.

A good example of this would be the whole Facebook reactions thing. These are features that have been added to indicate a response to the post. You have multiple reactions to choose from, ranging from a simple like to laughter.

But, here’s the thing – when you react to the post, does anything get altered? Well, not at all. The post stays the same.

These are called micro-interactions and they will soon become key components in the user experience mix. In fact, it has been predicted that 2018 will be the year where they gain mainstream attention.

Improve your mobile IQ

Mobile designs have come a long way in terms of the coverage they receive amongst mainstream media. Everybody is talking about them and journalists want more attention focused on all things mobile. This is simply due to the fact that most of the online traffic today originates from mobile devices.

But, here’s the thing – you need to separate apps from websites. The responsive design of apps isn’t the same as the responsive design of websites. However, there’s a good chance you might end up working on both of them under certain circumstances.

At this time, what you need to remember is that apps may have components that are identical to what you might use for a website. But, certain semantics will not go down very well in terms of responsive web design. For example, A/B Testing for apps is very different than A/B testing for websites.

Innovative grids

We have seen trends where certain grid-based designs were all the rage. For example, we had 12-unit grids, common column amount grids, and the rule of thirds. However, to keep people interested, you need to get their attention in a more subconscious manner.

Grid layouts can be helpful with regard to this. They can maintain the site’s aesthetic value while making it possible for you to incorporate as much uniqueness as possible. This is mainly achieved through various methods of page organization. For instance, you can experiment with column combinations that aren’t too common or even experiment with the white space. You can also play around with the CSS grid; identify new ways to organize pages.

Smart typography

Focus on using a typeface that fits your responsive pages. For example, your desktop site may work best with Helvetica 24 pt. However, the same may not be true for the mobile versions. So, try something else. Maybe Arial is better suited for smaller screens.

There are fonts that do well on a large screen while others perform better on a mobile screen. This is because fonts are inherently designed to appear the way they should, that is, large or small. So, using appropriate fonts based on the screen size makes things far more effective.

However, be careful. You might end up disturbing the aesthetics and even pushing out certain texts. This is where textual hierarchy can be leveraged. Play around with sizes to offer a better experience.

Keep it vibrant

When it comes to colors, the latest trend is to keep things as vibrant a possible. Experts from companies such as Elegant Themes agree that 2018 and onward will be a period of vibrancy. Vibrant colors are what most designers are going to experiment with.

Creative Bloq also published a blog on Flat Design 2.0 and the recent shift towards creating gradients using vibrant colors. It is believed that this is something we’ll be seeing a lot of.

Vibrant colors were rarely relied on in the past due to the simple fact that most mobile screens weren’t up to the task of reproducing them properly. However, that’s not the case anymore. Smartphones have really changed the game and offer several advancements that make design experimentation almost limitless.

Plus, the screens on mobile phones today have evolved greatly, almost eliminating the differences they possess in comparison to larger desktop screens. So, content on smaller screens today is just as effective as it is on larger screens.

So, there you have it – the latest trends in responsive web design. Now, it’s not necessary to actually apply all of them. The key is to experiment and find out what works best for your market. So, some due diligence is required before you simply incorporate these ideas.

Take the time to understand how your market could react to such changes. There’s a slight chance that the industry you’re in and the market you cater to might not respond favorably. So, look for other innovative options.

But, having said that, what we’ve just discussed is likely to work for most businesses as these are the current trends.

For all your responsive web design needs, get in touch with Crafted, one of NYC’s top-ranked digital agencies.

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As with all kinds of other technology, even websites need to evolve in order to meet current demands. The trend right now is for websites to boast of what is known as “responsive web design”. Websites with responsive web design are becoming the norm today and if you’re not keeping up with this requirement, you’re making a huge mistake.

So, here are some of the reasons why you need to start considering responsive web design, but, before we go into that, let’s look at what exactly is responsive web design.

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