Give me drop shadows or give me death!
“Omg yeah, just make the design look as terrible as possible.”
“I know, give it a drop shadow!”
“Haha, oh man yeah that would look so bad!”
This was a conversation had in my classroom the other day. Students were making light of their difficult projects, jokingly suggesting they just make them look as bad as possible. “Give it a drop shadow!” was probably the most popular suggestion, among a Papyrus text and animated sprites.
Woe be to me to let that go unchallenged! You see, a sweeping trend in design is beginning to take over the web. There’s nothing inherently new about its individual pieces, but material design has begun to make a significant impact in the way we think about the web.
Material design bases its theory off the idea that the objects on your screen are similar to real world material objects with depth, flexibility, and limitations. It’s not meant to mimic real world items like the polymorphic design of yesteryear, but rather develop a consistent set of limitations, constraints, and abilities of the items you see on screen.
It’s a set of tools to manage content and guide user journey. Shadows and elevation are used to create hierarchy and drive the users experience and interaction. If you’ve ever used anything by google, then you may be very familiar with material design without even realizing it.
Far be it from me to let my friends revel in the dying trend of flat design. So of course I had to intervene and introduce them to an incredible resource for learning the new system. https://material.io/guidelines/ hosts a very thorough guidebook to everything you could possibly want to know about it. I strongly recommend checking it out and seeing what you think. I personally am super excited to start experimenting with the system in my own web design.
My plan as it stands is to build the new transhealthNC website with material design. Its consistent, clear, and flexible standards look like a great way to organize the necessary content on the site. Check it out and let me know what you think!
Follow me and my publication if you’re interested in watching the development of my last semester in college. I’ll be working on multiple projects including transhealthNC, Queue, and even a video game! You’ll have to keep coming back to learn more about each.
