When building a website, a clean and simple UI should be one of the first things to think about. A minimalistic aesthetic of the interface allows your users to easily spot the areas of interest on your website, without having to wander around with their eyes. When it comes to creating streamlined UIs, Material Design offers a flexible and accessible solution.
With Material Design, you get access to a professional suite of tools for website design, developed and maintained by Google. The system offers many benefits and has been in steady development since 2014.
What is Material Design?
In 2014, Google released its now-signature design language – Material Design. Even if you haven’t heard of Material Design before, you have definitely witnessed it. Most Google services, including Google Search and Google Docs, have been designed using Material Design.
It’s a unified system with a simple set of rules that creates a coherent and user-friendly interface. It also contains many guidelines and good practices that you can make use of when designing your website to ensure better transparency and increase user engagement.
The benefits of using Material Design
While Material Design began as an internal system for Google’s use, it’s quickly been adopted by website design specialists all over the world. Some competing brands and platforms to Google also use their Material Design language, because there simply aren’t many better alternatives.
Using Material Design, you gain access to a masterpiece created by one of the industry giants. To make web design even simpler, you can make use of component libraries to build your code faster and make it more accessible. Material UI is one of the most popular libraries used with React.js.
Google’s design language can also save a lot of time, as you don’t have to spend time and resources on creating your own UI from scratch. This also means that you get to avoid common design mistakes, as Google makes sure Material Design is kept updated and polished.
How to get started with Material Design?
Starting out with Material Design can easily get overwhelming, especially if you’re not very familiar with similar design systems. Google’s guidelines on the design language cover very complex use cases, while most other design systems only cover basic ones. This makes it easier to maintain a uniform interface structure, as the guidelines will help you customize your UI in almost any situation.
Since 2014, Google has been keeping extensive documentation on Material Design, including instructions on how to use it and properly implement it. Even though Material Design might sound complex, it is actually a very flexible system, and much of the specifics of the design are left entirely up to you.
As an additional bonus, your customers will connect your website’s design to that of Google. Because of that association, your website will immediately appear more secure and trustworthy – something very important for startups and new businesses.
