Title: Google’s Quest to Write the Rulebook for Interactive Design
Context: Google’s new material design is more than just a guideline, it’s a way of thinking about interactivity.
Synopsis: Of all of the things that Google owns in the minds of the general public, the one that it covets most—yet finds so elusive—is design leadership. The design crown is indisputably owned by Apple, yet Google serves up more of its own UI than Apple could ever hope to. The ubiquity of the Google platform(s) goes almost unnoticed, mostly because there is no way to identify what a Google platform looks like. Sure there’s the garish colors, and stark interfaces but De Stijl minimalism isn’t a design philosophy, it’s an aesthetic. Enter “material design”. In much the same way they have transformed so many other aspects of our digital lives from search, advertising, mapping, and video, they now set their sites on the overarching structure of interactivity itself: the design framework. With an eye on the future, Google’s typically “modest” intent is nothing less than to change our current understanding of interaction design and set a course that equally scales across all of its many, many products while unifying the patchwork philosophies that have given us the misaligned experiences we train ourselves to navigate today.
Best Bit: “Material design may have been conceived in service of users, but it’s also intended to help designers. It’s meant to steer them away from making muddled or confusing products, and in this regard, it’s one of the most comprehensive frameworks for interactive design we’ve seen yet.”
via wired.com
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