

Understanding Material Design – Part III: Skeuomorphism vs. Flat Design - rb6teen
https://medium.com/@raveeshbhalla/understanding-material-design-7991b1469a63

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jordanpg
This prompted me to take a few minutes to finally try to see what Material
Design is all about; my previous glances at posts resulted in little in the
way of understanding. Now I understand why.

I watched some of the Google I/O talk:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isYZXwaP3Q4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isYZXwaP3Q4)

To me, the people on stage seemed genuinely uneasy at times and well aware
that the concepts they were trying to communicate were difficult to get
across.

These explanatory posts (all 3) are very well-crafted, if propagandistic. Same
information that Google is providing, in more digestible bits.

My impression is that Google is trying to implement an industry-wide paradigm
shift away from dense style guides, to a world where good design is signalled
by intuition alone (which is referred to indirectly in the talk more than
once). They are planning to do this by offloading design decisions from the
developers as much as possible and creating an astonishingly homogeneous look
and feel across apps. I predict a limited shelf life for this sort of thing.
Novelty goes a long way. Mobile devices aren't desktops.

~~~
rb6teen
Firstly, I'm glad you found the posts well crafted, after spending hours on
the documentation, the videos and having actually had the opportunity to talk
to Googlers at I/O, I felt it necessary to clear the doubts I've seen most
people have.

Regarding the part about creating a homogeneous look, I don't "completely"
agree with that, I can understand that being a worry. Google's been quite
detailed in terms of what is right, what is wrong from purely a keyline
metrics perspective, and if developers follow them very minutely, I can see a
situation arising where several apps look very, very similar.

Having said that, I think the core focus of material design is really going to
be how different apps use animation in their experience, as well as how well
they scale across platforms. Material Design apps should not be judged purely
on the basis of a phone app, or a tablet app, or a website, but how a user who
uses the app across multiple devices finds the experience.

Offloading design decisions for indie developers, however, could be very
useful. Far too many simply haven't cared enough to get their metrics right,
for example. Material Design gives them certain rules to follow, which if they
follow, might not give them uniqueness but at least the users would find them
easy to use.

