What Is Material Design? Definition, Uses, and Examples

What Is Material Design? Definition, Uses, and Examples | Elementor

These icons (as well as the icons for many long-standing apps) have become flat and had most of the realistic qualities taken out of them. 

While flat design continues to persist to this day — since minimalism and good, clean design will never go out of fashion — there was a major flaw that needed fixing. 

As Nielsen Norman Group explains: 

“[Flat design] often leads to click uncertainty and decreased user efficiency. When designers flatten the UI, they tend to remove many signifiers that normally tell users where to click.”

Material Design

Material Design was inspired by the physical world. But this wasn’t an attempt to bring design back to the skeuomorphic days. It’s a metaphor (which we’ll look shortly at when we explore its principles). 

Really, what Material Design did was move away from designing completely flat UIs to designing surfaces that were inspired by paper and ink. Think of it like this:

When looked at head-on, a sheet of paper appears flat and two-dimensional. However, in the real world, that’s not actually how it behaves. 

Paper exists in three dimensions. Sheets of paper create shadows, seams, and folds and can be cut and resized for our needs — something that Google aimed to recreate in the digital space with Material Design. 

This example from the Material Design website is one of Material’s trademark styles:

Keep reading the article at Elementor Blog. The article was originally written by Sergei Davidov on 2021-02-02 06:01:15.

The article was hand-picked and curated for you by the Editorial Team of WP Archives.

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