Material Design

Google just recently came up with Material Design. This was supposed to give a more dimensional effect to Flat Design.

Google’s Goal:

We challenged ourselves to create a visual language for our users that synthesizes the classic principles of good design with the innovation and possibility of technology and science. This is material design. This spec is a living document that will be updated as we continue to develop the tenets and specifics of material design.

This is very exciting because once Flat design hit the web, everyone fell in line. But with this, Google has created guidelines, if you will, of best practices for design both on the web and in general. I have no problem falling in line with Google’s guidelines because Google’s main goal is to provide the best website to its users. So if Google is telling us what they consider to be the best design practices and some suggestions on how to make websites better, well then I will certainly sit down and hear it.

Google also released a more website-compatible option called Material Design Lite which creates a framework and aims to optimize for cross-device use, gracefully degrade in older browsers, and offers an experience that is immediately accessible. Again this is great because Google has basically given us a blueprint on how they want to see websites built out and designed. I’d be very curious to see how well the world wide web reacts to this.

Reference article by AWWWards on 2016 Web Trends