Mobile technology has transformed everyday life. Providing users with a gratifying user experience has become the key goal of every app provider. With attractive UIs, great content and easy navigation, mobile apps have taken the world by storm. Now imagine if your favourite website also looked like an app? Google's Material Design Lite has made it a reality.The material design specification was first published by Google Developers in 2014. Its goal was to create tools and provide guidelines for designing state-of-the-art websites across a breadth of devices. With Material Design Lite, Google brings its Material Design recommendations to the web using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It acts as a toolkit for app developers to create and build apps based on the Android and Chrome language.
Easy to Install
- Material Design Lite has very few dependencies, and hence is easy to install and use.
- It is framework agnostic, and can be used with any front end solution to design an eye-catching website.
- Additionally, it has a low overhead in terms of code size enabling smooth styling of websites.
- It makes the process of app design simple by allowing developers to pick a colour, choose a web layout, customize a template and build a material design like website.
Freedom to Develop Customized Websites
- Material Design Lite gives web developers the freedom to choose pieces of design to build a website true to their specific requirement.
- The pieces or paper elements can be moved and rotated as per the need. They can be used individually or together to create a material-design style site and provision advanced user interaction.
- It allows developers to plug in the most appropriate design piece into an existing website, without having to use other Material Design components.
A wide assortment of responsive templates have been specially built that lets developers optimize design for websites with heavy content like blogs and marketing sites. The templates specify the range of sites that can be developed with Material Design Lite and can be easily downloaded from their Templates page.
Innovative Components
Material Design Lite consists of a library with a rich set of innovative components such as material design buttons, cards, menus, tool tips, spinners, input-fields, typography and many more. Material Design Lite gives tips on creating feature-rich home pages and enables easy site navigation. It also provides instructions on guiding users to the most relevant search results. Developers can create attractive forms that can be easily filled by users through their mobile phones.
Material design is more than just guidelines for developing attractive app layouts.
- It is a whole set of recommendations on how users would like to interact with websites through a wide range of devices.
- Hence it offers tips on embedding realistic animations and choosing the right colours that result in the design of user-centric websites.
- Additionally, responsive grids and breakpoints enable developers to design websites that adhere to Material Design and adaptive UI guidelines as mentioned in their spec sheet.
- The guidelines provide developers with tips on creating unified designs and offer an insight into the flow of content on different screen sizes such that they can ensure consistency of content across high and low resolution displays.
Seamless Integration
Material Design Lite supports seamless animations between different screens. The colour palette lets developers design apps using different colours leveraging on benefits like consistency and less effort. The palette also allows them to create consistent apps for different devices, from smart phones to tablets, PCs to TVs. Additionally, Material Design Lite works impeccably on major browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari.
And More...
- With Material Design Lite, Google lets developers build flexible multi-devices.
- It gives suggestions on how to make websites look great and interact beautifully.
- It offers certain principles of app design and performance optimization such that the content is delivered to the user as quickly as possible.
- It enables developers to take advantage of features that will satisfy users in the best possible manner.
- It incorporates sufficient security to protect users' data from being compromised.
- Additionally, it also suggests key principles on how to maximize revenue and improve overall user experience by implementing responsive and relevant ads.
- Developers can now take advantage of the responsive web design by adding relevant images and videos to the website in the simplest and most efficient of ways.
Download it today
Developers have an option to choose from a theme customizer or pre-built CSS available at their content delivery network or download the Material Design Lite code and build their own versions. By adopting Material Design Lite, developers get access to a feature-rich toolkit that makes web design an easy and fun process.
The Bottom Line
Material Design Lite, Google's interactive design concept, enables developers to design websites with beautiful design and striking UIs. The discrete pieces of design allow developers to build highly customizable websites, thus giving them a personal touch.
Author Bio - Keval Padia is a Founder & CEO of Nimblechapps, a fast-growing iOS development company. The current innovation and updates of the field lure him to express his views and thoughts on certain topics.