Material Design (codenamed Quantum Paper) is a design developed by Google, announced on June 25, 2014 at Google I/O. Expanding on the “card” patterns already in use on Google Now, the Material Design design rules focus on greater use of grid-based layouts, animations and transitions, and depth effects such as lighting and shadows.
Designer Matías Duarte explained that, “unlike real paper, our digital material can expand and change intelligently. Material Design has edges and a physical surface. Overlays and shadows give information about what you can touch and how it will move,” Google says their new design language is based on paper and ink.
Material Design is supported natively starting from Android 5.0, but can be used in previous versions through the v7 appcompat library available to developers. Material Design will be progressively extended across Google’s entire range of web and mobile products to provide a consistent experience across all platforms and applications. Google also released the application programming interface (API) for third-party developers to integrate the design into their applications.
As of 2015, most of Google’s mobile apps for Android have applied the new design language, including Gmail, YouTube, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Maps, Inbox, all Google Play apps, and with a minor fits Chrome browser and Google Keep. It has also been incorporated into the web desktop interfaces of Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Analytics, Google Developers, and Inbox.
The canonical implementation of Material Design for web application user interfaces is called Polymer. This is the Polymer library, a shim that provides web API components for browsers that do not natively implement this standard, and an element catalog, including the “paper elements collection” which contains Material Design elements.
