Google’s Advice on Making a Company Design Language

I just relaunched my website and made it adhere closer to something called material design. This is Google’s design framework:

Rich Fulcher is the head of Material Design UX and Engineering at Google.

He recently gave talks about how to create your own design language within your company, and why strong culture plays a critical role in the design process (curtesy of TechCrunch).

When Larry Page returned as CEO of Google, he gave the company a very vague but clear instruction. “Make Google beautiful.”

Google Design went out to reimagine how to company presented its products.

However, creating a unified design language for a company as large as Google was no easy task. Fulcher breaks down how small steps were taken until the larger picture started coming together. Once those larger pieces were formed, the implementation process started with the core, consumer-facing products, such as Search, Maps, Gmail, and more.

A company’s design language was a complex thing to build, but Fulcher explains the business value of a even having a company-wide design language and giving other companies tips on some good reasons.

A Framework or More?

Material Design is the marriage of company design guidelines and a design framework. The reason it’s both is because of the radical openness of Google (which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it). Material design is imposing which is a way Google uses freely available frameworks to spread their image throughout the web in a subtle manner.

Other design frameworks:

• Bootstrap
• Semantic-UI
• Foundation
• Pure
• Skeleton
• UIKit

Material Design’s Philosophies

Material is the metaphor

A material metaphor is the unifying theory of a rationalized space and a system of motion. The material is grounded in tactile reality, inspired by the study of paper and ink, yet technologically advanced and open to imagination and magic.

Surfaces and edges of the material provide visual cues that are grounded in reality. The use of familiar tactile attributes helps users quickly understand affordances. Yet the flexibility of the material creates new affordances that supersede those in the physical world, without breaking the rules of physics.

The fundamentals of light, surface, and movement are key to conveying how objects move, interact, and exist in space and in relation to each other. Realistic lighting shows seams, divides space, and indicates moving parts.

Bold, graphic, intentional

The foundational elements of print-based design — typography, grids, space, scale, color, and use of imagery — guide visual treatments. These elements do far more than please the eye. They create hierarchy, meaning, and focus. Deliberate color choices, edge-to-edge imagery, large-scale typography, and intentional white space create a bold and graphic interface that immerse the user in the experience.

An emphasis on user actions makes core functionality immediately apparent and provides waypoints for the user.

Motion provides meaning

Motion respects and reinforces the user as the prime mover. Primary user actions are inflection points that initiate motion, transforming the whole design.

All action takes place in a single environment. Objects are presented to the user without breaking the continuity of experience even as they transform and reorganize.

Motion is meaningful and appropriate, serving to focus attention and maintain continuity. Feedback is subtle yet clear. Transitions are efficient yet coherent.

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Author: Natu Myers (Website: Natumyers.com)

Natu is a cryptocurrency investor and software engineer who is experienced in building large scale applications. He built Innovator.Supply, an HR recruiting software for VR, AR, and chatbot enthusiasts. This was followed his other service, Hypetroop Market. He has a fitness page on Instagram. Stemming from his time at Queen’s, he was a defensive lineman on the Queen’s Gaels football team. Being a multipotentialite, he finished a business incubator program after graduating, launched his own album on iTunes, and he stays up to date industry-penetrating software startups and crytocurrency investment methods while gaining IT experience.