

The Best of Material Design, Daily - rohan1024
http://www.materialup.com

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Zak
I find the white backgrounds in Material obnoxious. It's as if Google's
designers work in well-lit offices and don't test this stuff in dark
environments where a white background hurts to look at. Light backgrounds also
waste power with AMOLED screens.

I can understand why Google wasn't inclined to include a full theme engine on
Android and ask to app developers to support that, however it seems to me that
having a system-wide light-mode and dark-mode would be a great feature for
devices centered around mobility and therefore not always used in well-lit
offices.

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clay_to_n
Material on Android supports dark themes super well. Comes with MATERIAL.LIGHT
and MATERIAL.DARK by default. It's up to the app developer to include an
option to switch in the settings, but this is common in apps that are focused
on reading.

Most people prefer light.

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skeoh
Would be nice in this case for the setting to be global rather than per app.

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proexploit
And force the developer of every app to do two complete themes (assuming they
have some branding / color scheme)? While I agree it would be nice if everyone
did have the option, I don't think it makes sense as a requirement.

~~~
karl42
You could have a global setting which is used by all apps supporting that
theme.

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Animats
Those are the best examples of material design? Most of them are phone
screenshots, higher than they're wide, on a blah background. The "material
design" thing is supposed to be about dynamic effects. You click on things and
they ripple. If the site let you go to the actual site or app being described,
that would be more interesting. Or they showcased the material effects on
their own site.

Everybody has solid-color rectangles now. They're boring.

~~~
mattaus
MaterialUp is actually pretty smart about this: \- It integrates with sites
such as CodePen or JSFiddle: i.e: [http://www.materialup.com/posts/add-
button](http://www.materialup.com/posts/add-button)

\- You can view app screenshots directly from the site (see below) and it you
click on the big preview, it'll take you to the actual app. i.e:
[http://www.materialup.com/posts/dailymotion](http://www.materialup.com/posts/dailymotion)

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gavinpc
Material design is about _semantics_ ; the documents make that clear [0]. When
people "get it wrong," that's what they are usually missing.

Even deeper than the semantics of material, though, is the ontology of the
space. If you think that most bad design decisions flow from an inadequate
conceptual model of the domain, check out this 1998 MIT thesis from Mark
Foltz, "Designing Navigable Information Spaces." It has changed my world.

[0] [http://google.com/design](http://google.com/design)

[1]
[http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/infoarch/publications/mfoltz-...](http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/infoarch/publications/mfoltz-
thesis/)

PDF version at

[http://rationale.csail.mit.edu/publications/Foltz1998Designi...](http://rationale.csail.mit.edu/publications/Foltz1998Designing.pdf)

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moeedm
Really hope this Material Design nonsense doesn't take off. It's awful
(especially on the web).

~~~
andybak
Considering a bunch of people seem to be a) fairly keen on it and b) seem - at
least at first glance - seem to have thought fairly hard about issues related
to UX and aesthetics, surely you can put a teensy bit more effort into your
critique?

EDIT - money where one's mouth is time. Here's my take: There's some great
stuff and some slightly less convincing stuff in the original 'Material'
concept pitch but the problem is that the devil lies firmly in the details and
it's already getting Cargo Cult-ed to hell and back - even in Google's own
core products.

However - I've generally found the quality of the critiques to be far below
the quality of the topic being critiqued and I'm quite comfortable calling
people out on lazy reactions if they haven't bothered to convince me that
they've given the subject the attention it deserves.

EDIT2 - Another thought has congealed after reading some more comments. The
cargo cult is partly the fault of the original pitch. You can't propose
something that is ostensibly as based on abstract principals as 'Material
Design' is and only give a single implementation as the example without
inviting people to fail to see through the surface details. Show us 'Material
Design' with a completely different look and feel and then we might find it
easier to grok the underlying principles and not get hung up on the specific
choices made for this particular implementation.

Or to put it another way - how would Material Design look if you wanted to
distance yourself from the new Google branding as much as possible? What would
remain constant?

~~~
moeedm
I don't have to say much, just go and read the manifesto for Material Design.
It's a lot of words that don't mean anything [1].

Another problem with it is that it's extremely trendy. Bright, almost
fluorescent colors, ridiculous amounts of whitespace almost to a fault, long
shadows, arbitrary grids for icons, etc.

The bigger problem is that Google decided to become smartasses about creating
a new design language. They took it way too seriously and I think who this
hurts the most is the developers who make apps for Android. They don't know
what Material Design means -- really means, as in how Google sees it. Third
party developers will never really be able to adapt it properly and what
you're going to end up with is a whole new type of visual fragmentation in
Android.

This look already looks dated, and I can't imagine what it will look like in a
year.

[1] [http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-
design/introducti...](http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-
design/introduction.html#introduction-goals)

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rebelidealist
I'm not a designer and would like professional designers to weigh in. With
most Material Design apps/sites, doesn't the ultra bold colors distract away
from the content? I thought content is suppose to be king not the UI.

~~~
pcurve
I design enterprise apps. I have to justify every single color used. If a
color doesn't serve function, then I don't use it.

In my opinion, Google hasn't had good track record with UI/UX and building
usable products.

Microsoft's take of Material design is superior. Case in point, their
outlook.com.

~~~
ewzimm
You bring up a good point. If people want to figure out how to do Material
Design in a non-Google context, all they need to do is get a Windows Phone and
see how it's implemented in apps there, both dark and light themes. Google's
design language is mostly a variation on Microsoft's.

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Bud
The "best" of light grey text on a white background!

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joncp
I just updated to Android Lollipop and now my phone is full of that MD crap. I
soooo want to roll back.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Yeah, I won't accept the update, and I've disabled most of my Google apps,
where they shove Material on you even if you're on KitKat.

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pcurve
I think people are taking Material Design too literally.

All these sites look the same.

They're letting Material Design become 'the' primary branding element.

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happster
Here is a good explanation of Material Design principles:
[http://materialdesignblog.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-
googles-...](http://materialdesignblog.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-googles-
material-design/)

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TheAceOfHearts
Anyone else notice that all images flicker slightly when you hover over any
image?

I'm on a 15" rMBP and scrolling on Chromium is painfully laggy.

It's also painfully obvious that the people responsible for making this did
not bother reading the actual spec.

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neals
I made a couple of apps now in Material design, but I must say it is hard to
maintain some form of unique identity. It's hard to not just be 'skinning' and
come up with interesting ways of display UI elements and data.

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bobykarot
The constant zoom-in/zoom-out on the Tools page is killing my eyes. Dont know
if that's intended but that's really annoying.

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adriancooney
I'm all for emulating good design but I feel like these guys are blatantly
ripping of Product Hunt [1], right down to the last detail. Everything from
the daily aggregation concept and the flyout preview to the presentation of
the likes as avatars.

[1] [http://producthunt.com](http://producthunt.com)

~~~
clay_to_n
There are tons of "ProductHunt for X" websites. Here's a list of them, on
ProductHunt: [https://www.producthunt.com/kwdinc/collections/product-
hunt-...](https://www.producthunt.com/kwdinc/collections/product-hunt-for-x)

~~~
adriancooney
Wow, I stand corrected. I had no idea the idea had spread this far. My
apologies!

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aikah
flat design is dead already ? /s

