They took the time to make a marketing landing page but couldn't take a few mins to put up the material-components-web demo online? That's one of the web's killer features! It's a bit disappointing to find that missing.
I'm ambivalent about material design. I'd love it if the spec were being developed in the open, instead of just throwing an update over the wall every few months. In the past I've noticed contradictions or bugs in the spec, but I don't have anywhere to report it. Can we report those to material-components [0]? In other cases I find the text confusing. Not that I blame the authors, since writing good documentation is very challenging. But people would be empowered to help improve it if were open.
Here's an example of a seeming contradiction in the buttons spec [1]: go to the "Size and padding" section. It shows "64dp min width" and it has "8dp external padding" on each side: 64dp + 8dp + 8dp = 80dp. But then below that it says "Minimum width: 88dp". Where does the remaining 8dp come from? Which one is correct? The "Minimum width: 88dp" point appears a few time, but it's contradicted by multiple buttons on the same page. For example, the dialog's "agree" button or the "share" button in the Top 10 Australian beaches card.
A complete new implementation has been underway since roughly the beginning of this year. They called it v2.0 of mdl and has been under heavy development. Some of their designs is pretty nice:
I just cloned their new repo and started the compiled demos. I see no difference in behavior/design of the new components
compared to the old mdl but the architecture is much more modular and can easily be used in any JS framework.
I'm excited about this development. I'm really looking forward to a web implementation of Material Design that is not bound to Angular 1 and is production ready. I did a few projects using React + Material Design that was enabled by Material-UI component set. [0] And although Material-UI seems like a really great implementation for React, it's certainly not production ready yet. I did spend a significant amount of time fixing / messing with its code to make things work relatively smoothly.
Regarding the Google's MDC-Web [1] the demos look promising, although the components seem to lack polish and animations sometimes get stuck. I hope they will push them to the point where these components will be as good as Angular Material ones. [2]
Take a look at https://react-md.mlaursen.com it's the most complete and best looking Material implementation I've seen so far!
I also had my fair share of experience with all the material-ui, react-mdl, materialize and what not. None of them is production ready. Even if you used plain mdl (which is by Google) there's so much missing like select, calendar, etc
I'm really excited about the web version of this. I think Google is doing fantastic work, making material design available to and usable by the community. I'm sure their motives aren't entirely altruistic, but I appreciate them nonetheless.
As a nit, I'm not very fond of their CSS naming conventions, using a lot of double underscores and double dashes. For example:
For better or worse, there is reason behind the naming convention. It is known as BEM[1] -- block-element-modifier -- and I've seen quite a few design shops adopt it as standard.
> A material metaphor is the unifying theory of a rationalized space and a system of motion. The material is grounded in tactile reality, inspired by the study of paper and ink, yet technologically advanced and open to imagination and magic.
I like the idea of standard design components, but sentences like these don't communicate anything.
It does communicate a bit, even if it's confusingly worded and targeted to a specific audience.
Material Design has two parts: A physical structure based on how objects lie in the real world (particularly inspired by the physical appearance paper and ink), and animations that seem magical, playful, or imaginative.
This lays out the inspiration behind material design, and differentiates it from skeumorphism: which copies real world elements unimaginatively, and simple "flat" design, which is not necessarily tactile or imbued with a system of animations or motion.
I also hate empty speak, but I think the issue here is not that it doesn't communicate anything, but it does so with overly flowery language. What I'm reading is the "material" concept unifies 1) location in space and 2) motion, and it's based in objects in the real world (e.g. paper and ink) but is a framework that can be creatively extended and built upon.
It's standard design agency rhetoric to impress customers, applied for example when a company has spent a million dollars on a new logo and a font choice, and needs some reassurance that the entire world will view them in a completely different light as soon as the newly rounded/squared/deconstructed logo graces their letterhead.
Its occurrence here indicates that Google hires expensive design professionals with impressive ad industry résumés, I guess.
Material Design is mostly linked to Matias Duarte. I would ask you to take a look at his history instead of just asserting that it's just ad industry professionals.
I hate MD and this video helped me to understand why I hate it: they are trying to do judge by analogy, which causes «analogy driven design», where you should understand analogy to understand what you see. I newer saw real objects to behave like their imaginary «real objects». It looks like they are just getting money for something that nobody knows how to do properly, so they are doing something and arguing correctness of their work with self-made arguments. IMHO, if they will be hired to do an animation film, they will be fired pretty quickly for their «material design», because it looks false.
It's a design brief that explains how the new Pepsi logo is the physical manifestation of the grand unified 'theory of everything'.... or something like that. I still can't figure out whether it's meant as a parody.
Ah, my apologies. It wasn't clear because you originally referred to "four lines of text", and the marerial.io site has got about a dozen links and animations, but I do get your point.
Is it just me, doesn't the Material seem kind of ..boring? Why is it coming out of a company with mediocre track record of UI design? Name one website from Google that actual looks nice and pretty.
Looks like there are four frameworks[0]. Use the Android one for Android, the Polymer one for Polymer, the Angular one for Angular, and the "Material Design Lite" would have to be adapted for everything else - it is plain css, html. Don't know if the Material Design Lite has any JavaScript library.
I hate if I start using a lib, which is kind of half finished and then learn a few month later that work on this project has been stopped and I should use now the new shiny fade of the day successor which is also half finished. Seems to be the standard in the JS world where people change frameworks and libs more often then their underpants.
If you look at the individual components, though [1], most of them (like cards) actually have no associated JS at all.
Most of the other components, like the TextField (which includes JS to have things like the placeholder text swoop to a mini version above the field once you start typing) have gracefully-degrading versions. Not all of them do, however.
it's been 10 years since i worked on a web front end. i was just researched building a web based material design app this past 7 days. here is what i found...
https://getmdl.io/ (mentioned earlier)
http://posva.net/vue-mdl/
http://appcomponents.org/material-components/#!/
https://josephuspaye.github.io/Keen-UI/ (great UI, but uses vue 1.0)
https://vuematerial.github.io/ (picked this in the end, works with vuejs 2)
i recommend using
https://getmdl.io/
OR
https://vuematerial.github.io/
<rant>
Now for some unsolicited venting...
i wish most web component/js/css/library/helpers in the wild - stuck to html or javascript markup explanation and loosely coupled the templating, bundling & tooling. Instead we have script injection with 3-4 levels of tooling, overhead & magic that is so convoluted & so prone to being out-dated every month - it's depressing.
i'm building the backend in Go - and just wanted to be able to have markup. But i've been stumbling on js libraries intended to run on webpags but requiring tools across nodejs, coffescript, ruby and a dangerous new trend - a web library tighly coupled with their server-side counterpart that basically spits out html/js. so the server sends out js/html to your user - that then makes another request to the server to replace itself with the final html. They call it server-side rendering. WTF!
Was finally able to get components working with just 1 js file(vuejs), bootstrap css customized to only have minimal grid css, and a google font file.
If you like me - have been away from front end frameworks and want to build material UI like web components - check out this article that finally explained what these 101 frameworks on github and in the wild are actually doing to your html
https://coligo.io/vuejs-components/
After reading ^ i was able to create my own abstractions using getmdl.io or vuematerial's components like - <searchbox />, <login />, <searchbar />.
Also i'm loving http://vuejs.org (my pick against react/backbone/angular/ember - all of whom have a steeper learning curve)
</rant>
~B
a functional programmer working on an internal admin webapp with material design
My beef with Material Design is that it's too clever by half. It's often pretty, the animations are pleasant, but the interaction is just not intuitive enough for primetime.
To wit, I've encountered them for years and I still have no idea what a floating circle with a plus sign in it is supposed to represent. Almost every time I've clicked one, it's begun a process of flow that was not my intention, so I've learned to avoid them.
What Material Design is trying to do is to create a universal design language, based on the assumption that different apps designed in all sorts of different ways is a bad thing. While I admit that bad design comes in many shapes and forms, I actually feel like the context of an app should dictate how it is designed, and that in many cases it will call for something other than bold colored boxy components with assorted degrees of box-shadow.
I can think of lot's of situations where material design would be an improvement (any UK or US bank site really) but I can't think of a situation where it is King.
For example the text input box not having borders and all the slow animations. I struggle to think of a situation where Material is better than just basic css.
"Basic CSS" is very vague. When you use basic CSS you end up with ugly or inconsistent design. There's a reason we have CSS frameworks and design standards.
While I see you are being punished for the way in which you said it, I do agree with the sentiment of your comment. This site in particular looks like it was designed by an elementary school student playing with powerpoint.
I'm ambivalent about material design. I'd love it if the spec were being developed in the open, instead of just throwing an update over the wall every few months. In the past I've noticed contradictions or bugs in the spec, but I don't have anywhere to report it. Can we report those to material-components [0]? In other cases I find the text confusing. Not that I blame the authors, since writing good documentation is very challenging. But people would be empowered to help improve it if were open.
Here's an example of a seeming contradiction in the buttons spec [1]: go to the "Size and padding" section. It shows "64dp min width" and it has "8dp external padding" on each side: 64dp + 8dp + 8dp = 80dp. But then below that it says "Minimum width: 88dp". Where does the remaining 8dp come from? Which one is correct? The "Minimum width: 88dp" point appears a few time, but it's contradicted by multiple buttons on the same page. For example, the dialog's "agree" button or the "share" button in the Top 10 Australian beaches card.
[0] https://github.com/material-components/material-components
[1] https://material.io/guidelines/components/buttons.html