Material You in finally here
During last I/O, Google unveiled the latest version of its Material Design design system, called Material You.
Initially presented as an upgrade for Android 12, Material You is the biggest revision to Material Design since its launch in 2014 and will be rolling out across all Google products in the coming year.
Material You is an adaptable system that takes the building blocks of Material Design and skins it to allow a more personal design language, albeit a distinctly Google personal design language. By doing this, Material You can potentially leads us back to that undesirable state where every new site looks like a Google clone.
More themes for everyone
For years, Android smartphones have had many different themes that you could choose from. But with Material You, it’s theming on steroids. With color science, Google is able to match the theme to your wallpaper instantly and in real-time. So now when you change your wallpaper, it can really change your entire phone.
But theming isn’t just about the home screen, settings and quick settings area of the OS. It is also going to work throughout the many apps on your smartphone. Of course, this will take some work from developers but its way, for Google, to explore a more humanistic approach to design. One that celebrates the tension between design and sensibility and person preferences.
A new set of guidelines
Comfortable: Google wants every user to feel ‘like home’ while using a device. The colors and themes of various parts of the operating system respond to this need for customization. The system is able to selects colors from the background image and translates a hue into tonal ranges. A range of light and dark tones is generated from the extracted color. This allows the same palette to work on light, dark and high contrast themes and with the same color slots.
Iconoclastic: Material You focuses on new forms and systems of interaction between hardware, operating system and applications.
Lively: The goal is to use organic shapes that react to inputs, as a living surface, introducing some sense of vitality through shapes, space, light and movement.
A big update, maybe a new trend
This is the first big update to Material Design in nearly seven years, and it’s a huge update. It’ll be interesting to see how this looks on a smartphone and within apps. As a designer I think it’s a interesting trend to follow, so here are all the official channels about material.io, YouTube , and Twitter to stay up to date and talk about Material You, and more.
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