Overcoming Material Design.

Why I’ve developed a negative relationship with the design language, and why you soon will too — that is if it hasn’t happened to you yet.

Okay, I’m going to start this off with one statement; Material Design is great. It has helped unify user interfaces across platforms, and it provides designers with awesome resources (the icons especially 🙏🏽). And while some of you may use Material Design as your UI-North-Star (why are you doing that to yourself), I am not that big of a fan.

Let me give you some background on the short-lived friendship between Material Design and I: It all started in the FABulous Summer of 2014, I was about to enter the 6th grade and my passion in graphic design kick-started. There to help me learn about it, was Google — wo just unveiled their brand new design language, which within the next few months was going to become so overused that you could rename it to any song played on a pop-music radio station. Better yet was the fact that my father and I had just created our startup, which I was the designer for (By the way, you should totally check out the company). Of course, since I was beginning, I used dribbble to guide me through the many upcoming trends of design, including the embarrassing throwback to long-shadows 😷, and one of the up and coming trends was Material Design. I was intrigued; as far as I was concerned, Material Design was the easiest way to design interfaces. I mean everything was figured out for you; the color palettes were from a selection of colors, the interface-structures were given, the components all have instruction, they even tell you what the shadows should look like. It was like one of those fill in the blank stories, where you replace certain blank spaces with words — but in this case, you’re replacing given fields with ones pertaining to your application. Of course, being a sixth grader I couldn’t resist filling all those blanks, and with that, I was hooked.

I’ve always seen Material Design as if Google took the style from Google Now illustrations and just ran with it.

Material Design has designers in a chokehold

How many of you followed a design template…