I'm ambivalent about material design. I'd love it if the spec were being developed in the open, instead of just throwing an update over the wall every few months. In the past I've noticed contradictions or bugs in the spec, but I don't have anywhere to report it. Can we report those to material-components [0]? In other cases I find the text confusing. Not that I blame the authors, since writing good documentation is very challenging. But people would be empowered to help improve it if were open.

Here's an example of a seeming contradiction in the buttons spec [1]: go to the "Size and padding" section. It shows "64dp min width" and it has "8dp external padding" on each side: 64dp + 8dp + 8dp = 80dp. But then below that it says "Minimum width: 88dp". Where does the remaining 8dp come from? Which one is correct? The "Minimum width: 88dp" point appears a few time, but it's contradicted by multiple buttons on the same page. For example, the dialog's "agree" button or the "share" button in the Top 10 Australian beaches card.

[0] https://github.com/material-components/material-components

[1] https://material.io/guidelines/components/buttons.html

https://getmdl.io/

A complete new implementation has been underway since roughly the beginning of this year. They called it v2.0 of mdl and has been under heavy development. Some of their designs is pretty nice:

https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w...

With the linked announcement they just renamed the mdl project to "material-components-web", nothing more:

https://github.com/google/material-design-lite/issues/4984

https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w...

I just cloned their new repo and started the compiled demos. I see no difference in behavior/design of the new components compared to the old mdl but the architecture is much more modular and can easily be used in any JS framework.

Regarding the Google's MDC-Web [1] the demos look promising, although the components seem to lack polish and animations sometimes get stuck. I hope they will push them to the point where these components will be as good as Angular Material ones. [2]

[0] - http://www.material-ui.com

[1] - https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w...

[2] - https://material.angularjs.org/latest/demo/button

I also had my fair share of experience with all the material-ui, react-mdl, materialize and what not. None of them is production ready. Even if you used plain mdl (which is by Google) there's so much missing like select, calendar, etc

https://puu.sh/sRdzE/f9a952f073.png

As a nit, I'm not very fond of their CSS naming conventions, using a lot of double underscores and double dashes. For example:

> <section class="mdc-card__actions mdc-card__actions--vertical">

Seems like this could be cleaned up a bit with something like:

> <section class="mdc-card-actions mdc-card-actions-vertical">

But... this is just a matter of personal taste. I'm sure they have their reasons for the approach they took.

[1]: http://getbem.com/naming/

I like the idea of standard design components, but sentences like these don't communicate anything.

Material Design has two parts: A physical structure based on how objects lie in the real world (particularly inspired by the physical appearance paper and ink), and animations that seem magical, playful, or imaginative.

This lays out the inspiration behind material design, and differentiates it from skeumorphism: which copies real world elements unimaginatively, and simple "flat" design, which is not necessarily tactile or imbued with a system of animations or motion.

It's a bit puffed up in the obtuse humanities style, but I do get its meaning.

Its occurrence here indicates that Google hires expensive design professionals with impressive ad industry résumés, I guess.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mat%C3%ADas_Duarte

Please watch the video where they introduced material design (way back at some I/O) to see what all those words mean.

edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBD0VlcVS1E

It's a design brief that explains how the new Pepsi logo is the physical manifestation of the grand unified 'theory of everything'.... or something like that. I still can't figure out whether it's meant as a parody.

It's an odd kind of minimalism that contains so much cruft.

EDIT: I'm refering to the parent link, the material.io site.

Here's my chrome network panel: http://i.imgur.com/kUqttf3.png

It's still significantly closer to 800kb than 5mb, though: http://i.imgur.com/0fuGPwj.png

(I'm sure there's a better way to get the full size of the site than looking at all the requests and eyeballing the sum...)

It'll say the total in the bottom left corner of the network tab. 42 requests | 782 KB transferred.

Took me a while to find. It would be nice if this worked: https://rawgit.com/material-components/material-components-w...

[0]https://design.google.com/resources/

https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w...

Why on earth do we need JS involved in what should be some simple HTML / CSS?

If you look at the individual components, though [1], most of them (like cards) actually have no associated JS at all.

Most of the other components, like the TextField (which includes JS to have things like the placeholder text swoop to a mini version above the field once you start typing) have gracefully-degrading versions. Not all of them do, however.

1. https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w...

it's been 10 years since i worked on a web front end. i was just researched building a web based material design app this past 7 days. here is what i found...

    https://getmdl.io/ (mentioned earlier)
    http://posva.net/vue-mdl/
    http://appcomponents.org/material-components/#!/
    https://josephuspaye.github.io/Keen-UI/ (great UI, but uses vue 1.0)
    https://vuematerial.github.io/ (picked this in the end, works with vuejs 2)

    https://getmdl.io/
    OR
    https://vuematerial.github.io/

i wish most web component/js/css/library/helpers in the wild - stuck to html or javascript markup explanation and loosely coupled the templating, bundling & tooling. Instead we have script injection with 3-4 levels of tooling, overhead & magic that is so convoluted & so prone to being out-dated every month - it's depressing.

i'm building the backend in Go - and just wanted to be able to have markup. But i've been stumbling on js libraries intended to run on webpags but requiring tools across nodejs, coffescript, ruby and a dangerous new trend - a web library tighly coupled with their server-side counterpart that basically spits out html/js. so the server sends out js/html to your user - that then makes another request to the server to replace itself with the final html. They call it server-side rendering. WTF!

Was finally able to get components working with just 1 js file(vuejs), bootstrap css customized to only have minimal grid css, and a google font file.

If you like me - have been away from front end frameworks and want to build material UI like web components - check out this article that finally explained what these 101 frameworks on github and in the wild are actually doing to your html

    https://coligo.io/vuejs-components/

Also i'm loving http://vuejs.org (my pick against react/backbone/angular/ember - all of whom have a steeper learning curve)

</rant>

~B

a functional programmer working on an internal admin webapp with material design

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9442869

To wit, I've encountered them for years and I still have no idea what a floating circle with a plus sign in it is supposed to represent. Almost every time I've clicked one, it's begun a process of flow that was not my intention, so I've learned to avoid them.

What Material Design is trying to do is to create a universal design language, based on the assumption that different apps designed in all sorts of different ways is a bad thing. While I admit that bad design comes in many shapes and forms, I actually feel like the context of an app should dictate how it is designed, and that in many cases it will call for something other than bold colored boxy components with assorted degrees of box-shadow.

For example the text input box not having borders and all the slow animations. I struggle to think of a situation where Material is better than just basic css.