Material Design is a user interface design system developed by Google. UX (user experience) designers use it to create visually consistent, intuitive, and responsive digital experiences. With built-in motion, layering, and dynamic theming, Material Design helps teams deliver accessible, high-quality UIs (user interfaces) across devices and platforms.
Get a greater grounding of where Material Design came from and why so you can examine where to take it in exciting ways, in this video with Frank Spillers: Service Designer, Founder and CEO of Experience Dynamics.
UX designers use Material Design because it offers a complete, flexible system that balances usability with visual richness that can deliver excellent results in digital products such as apps and websites. At its core, Material Design is a design system that provides a common language of components, motion, and interaction patterns that help teams create cohesive, cross-platform experiences.
One major advantage is its scalability. Whether you’re designing for a single mobile app or a broad ecosystem of products, Material Design offers a modular structure that supports reuse, consistency, and fast iteration. You can customize visual elements—like colors, typography, and layout—while keeping a strong structural backbone.
Material Design is ready to serve up in exciting digital products you can customize to match how your brand wants to meet its users.
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It supports accessible design through built-in contrast guidelines, legibility recommendations, and motion controls that respect user preferences. These features help you create inclusive experiences, although real accessibility still depends on validating against WCAG standards and testing with users to ensure no users are unintentionally excluded.
Explore how to leverage accessible design to reach more users in more ways and help all users in the process, in our video.
Another key benefit is the availability of high-quality tools. Google provides resources such as the Material Theme Builder, icon libraries, and responsive layout systems, enabling designers to prototype and scale quickly without making the mistake of reinventing the wheel.
Last, but not least, Material Design is research-driven. It evolves through user feedback and deep usability studies, a neat point which means that designers can trust that foundational decisions have been well and truly tested. More recent updates to Material Design continue to expand customization, motion, and personalization, making it a flexible and forward-looking choice for modern UX needs.
Discover how to harness the power of user research to take your own design solutions in the right direction, faster, in our video.
Or, to be more exact, four generations and counting, Material Design continues to evolve to respond to UX and UI (user interface) designers’ needs as they deliver inclusive and seamless experiences to countless users in various industries. The saga so far:
Google launched Material Design in 2014 as a design language grounded in real-world metaphors—light, motion, and material surfaces. Known internally as “Quantum Paper,” it introduced elements like cards, elevation, and shadows to give digital content tactile properties.
Material Design emphasized clarity, consistency, and predictability—a refreshing way for designers to mimic the physics of real-world interaction. Surfaces moved naturally, responded to touch, and transitioned fluidly, which gave users a sense of control in a way they had not known previously.
In 2018, Google released a revised version commonly referred to as Material Design 2. This update neatly responded to growing criticism that apps using Material looked too similar. The “sequel” to “Material Design 1” nicely addressed that cookie-cutter concern. Designers wanted more freedom to express brand identity and fine-tune things to put their unique stamp on what users would come to know—and, more importantly, how they would feel—about their product and brand.
Material Design 2 delivered by introducing greater flexibility in color, typography, and shape. The new Material Theme Builder permitted deep customization, letting brands stay recognizable without straying from core usability principles. It also updated component guidelines and icon sets for better readability and adaptability.
Material You, introduced in May 2021 with Android 12, marked a philosophical shift that took things in an even more customizable direction. Instead of enforcing visual consistency across platforms, Material You prioritized user personalization.
At its heart is the Dynamic Color System, a generator that builds a color palette based on the user’s wallpaper. This affects app themes, system UI, typography, and even icon styles such that no two experiences look exactly alike—and that’s intentional. True to its name, Material You embraces individual expression while preserving functionality.
Otherwise known as Material Design 3, this update conveniently also brought better accessibility defaults, responsive layout patterns, and motion principles that adapt across devices. It opened new paths for designers to personalize without compromising clarity or cohesion, just what designers had been seeking to fine-tune even more expressive and personalized digital solutions to bridge their brands to users.
After Material You or (plain) Material 3 came what may be the natural progression in the “series.” Announced in May 2025 at Google I/O, Material 3 Expressive represents the most significant update since Material You. Google termed it, “one of our biggest updates in years,” and for good reason.
It introduces spring-like motion—animations that bounce, stretch, and respond to touch more organically. These interactions feel more alive while remaining subtle. When paired with advanced haptic feedback, the result is an emotionally rich and intuitive experience.
There’s more; Material 3 Expressive improves designer control over theme and motion behaviors, offering enhanced tools for branding and customization. These improvements didn’t come from an arbitrary push to provide more expressive freedom to designers; they’re changes which are backed by research: Google conducted 46 user studies with over 18,000 participants to ensure motion and color contribute to clarity and satisfaction—not confusion. Participants were able to recognize key UI elements up to four times faster.
Expressive design also helped older users spot key elements just as fast as young users across 10 apps tested.
Design your way with a powerful lift from a tried-and-tested system.
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From its earliest days, Material Design leaned on real-world principles: elevation, lighting, texture, and motion. Cards behave like physical paper; shadows create hierarchy; and objects don’t vanish, but transform smoothly. This predictability builds trust with users and reduces cognitive load on them.
Grab a greater grasp of what an effective visual hierarchy does for design, in our video.
Users don’t need to guess what a button does or where a menu will appear; behavior follows familiar rules. This intuitive foundation makes Material Design especially effective for complex interfaces, where creating seamless experiences is all the more important given how any confusion and resulting hesitation can break that seamlessness.
One of Material You’s most innovative features is the Dynamic Color System. It automatically extracts a cohesive color palette from a user’s wallpaper, applying it across the UI for them to enjoy.
A big advantage for designers is how they can leverage this to create highly personalized experiences without manual theming. It’s designed to maintain adequate contrast and can be constrained to align with brand guidelines, but designers should always validate against WCAG and brand requirements. It can be adapted to support brand coherence, although dynamic color may require constraints.
Material Design 3 marked a strategic pivot, taking things away from a more universal style to individual user expression. This is a key part of bringing more relevant experiences home, as it empowers users to shape their digital environments through color, motion, and interaction preferences.
Another point is how this aligns with broader UX trends toward co-created experiences. Designers now think beyond “one-size-fits-all” and offer flexible defaults that adapt to user needs, behaviors, and contexts. Material Design gives users greater scope for personalization while designers should balance this with their brand identity.
Consider users’ contexts when you create designs that resonate with more users in more situations, in this video with Alan Dix: Author of the bestselling book “Human-Computer Interaction” and Director of the Computational Foundry at Swansea University.
Material 3 Expressive deepens the role of motion so that animations mimic spring physics, easing in and out with elasticity. These subtle cues help users track changes and understand spatial relationships between elements—making for more intuitive user experiences while reflecting real-world dynamics in fresh and engaging ways.
Pairing these movements with sophisticated haptic feedback (vibrations or tactile cues) adds another sensory layer. Feedback feels precise, contextual, and supportive—enhancing both delight and usability to help shift up a few gears for designers to provide experiences that go beyond user expectations while keeping them on board every step of the way.
Fine-tune feedback such as through loading and progress indicators to keep users informed and content in seamless user experiences.
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Material Design’s core strength is realism—maybe not so much in look, but in feel. By simulating how real objects respond to touch, motion, and light, it helps designers build interfaces that behave the way users expect them to. This predictability lowers the barrier to interaction, as it paves the way to help users perform tasks and achieve goals. Be it swiping a card, tapping a button, or watching content animate into place, users instinctively know what to do and what will happen; trust follows naturally.
Great interfaces surprise and satisfy—without confusing, and that’s a key part of a user experience. If you consider the vast array of contexts users can find themselves in when they encounter and (attempt to) use a digital solution like an application, the element of “surprise” can be especially challenging to get right.
Material Design balances these opposing forces, enabling designers to deliver successful solutions to users who won’t become frustrated whenever they use the product:
Predictable: Buttons depress, sheets slide from the right, and shadows imply depth; nothing behaves unexpectedly—just what users need when, for example, they’re quickly thumbing at a screen in a busy situation and need to get something done quickly.
Magical: Transitions feel fluid, objects animate gracefully, and changes happen with polish. That level of slickness keeps the communication channel between brand and user fresh and exciting, so even during the most mundane tasks users can feel the brand knows them that much more.
Designers must craft experiences that reveal complexity gradually, through elegant motion and meaningful structure—not abrupt shifts or gimmicks. This skill is what makes progressive disclosure, the art of revealing complexity as and when it’s needed, work so well. Material’s system supports this and more, to help maintain that delicate balance.
Peer into the power of progressive disclosure to learn how to ease users into digital solutions more successfully, in our video.
Modern UX demands interfaces that serve everyone, a reality which Material Design addresses through:
Auto-generated high-contrast themes
Scalable typography
Keyboard and screen reader support
Reduced motion options for sensitive users
These features come built-in, fast-tracking things to help teams design inclusively from day one. Accessible and inclusive UX design goes beyond compliance; indeed, accessibility is enforced by law in many jurisdictions, but the “spirit” of designing to accommodate all users runs deeper than that. It involves designing for a range of human abilities, devices, and situations—making the best design solutions to serve users in any situation, whoever they are.
Material Design provides guidelines for responsive layouts, semantic labels, and color systems that adapt to the needs of users with visual disabilities—for example, color blindness. It encourages designers to create systems that flex with the user—across languages, devices, and abilities—while maintaining functional clarity.
Consider how to accommodate color blind users in more thoughtful designs, in our video.
While Material Design is powerful and offers exceptional design “lift,” designers must approach it thoughtfully. Here are key considerations:
Material encourages animation, but too much movement—or unnecessary flourish—can distract or confuse and work against the benefits you’re trying to provide users with. Use motion to support interaction, not decorate it.
Material Design has done much to aid users with disabilities. Still, it’s tempting to rely on auto-generated themes without checking contrast ratios or font legibility. However, always validate against WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) standards and test with real users whenever possible.
Material Design provides structure, not sameness—and it’s advanced to a level where it’s fair to say there’s no “excuse” for not fine-tuning your unique brand expression. So, customize shapes, typography, and color palettes to reflect your brand identity. Don't default to the generic Material look—use the tools to stand out, not blend in.
Animations and haptics are engaging, sure, but they can slow down low-end or older devices. So, optimize interactions and offer fallback states for slower connections or older hardware.
Material Design reflects the UX “continuum” it’s in and evolves, in step with users rather than trends. So, make sure you follow the latest guidelines, as older practices may be outdated. Material 3 Expressive changes how you might think about motion and theming—so adapt your design workflows accordingly to help users know where they are, what to do, and how to make the most of your digital product.
Speaking of users’ knowing where they are, remember to leverage effective navigation to help them enjoy excellent user experiences free from frustration or confusion.
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Overall, Material Design has grown from a bold visual language into a deeply personalized, adaptive system built on UX research and user expression in just over a decade. With Material 3 Expressive, designers have more control over motion, theming, and interaction than ever before. At the same time, the system ensures these freedoms support clarity, accessibility, and usability—a true “best of both worlds” deal.
Remember, Material Design is far more than a visual style; it’s a strategic framework for building digital experiences that feel intuitive, inclusive, and beautifully responsive to the human touch. And that human touch is more than just a little instrumental in building the bridge between user and brand, as the former connects with the latter in ways that transcend the “material” sense of a design being just the sum of its parts. It’s so much more. Material Design gives you a springboard to hit the high altitudes where you can spot how to make the “magic” to bridge that divide so users can enjoy seamless experiences every time.
You’ll find Google’s Material Design guidelines and library here and here.
Learn how to create interfaces that mimic real-world objects.
A detailed piece on standing out with Material Design.
Explore additional points in this Prototypr article, Google’s New Material Design “Expressive” Has Me Excited! (& Worried).
Leverage Material Design's rhythm and structure—things like spacing, motion and hierarchy—while you apply your own visual identity. Match its grid and elevation concepts, but pick a unique color palette, typographic voice, or icon style.
Adapt Material's guidelines to your brand voice instead of copying Google's visuals. For example, salute its motion principles—like duration and easing—but design animations to fit your product's personality.
Use components such as cards or buttons in ways that feel familiar and functional, then layer brand textures, shapes, or color accents on top. This approach will preserve consistency and usability while making your design distinguishable, flexible, and authentic to your brand's story.
Get a greater idea of how to apply Google's Material Design - Android Design Language, through our article on it.
Pros: Material Design is a design system that brings a well-tested system of layout, motion, and components that enhance usability and consistency. It accelerates design and development with ready-to-go patterns like floating action buttons, cards, and dialogs. It ensures responsive behavior and supportive accessibility practices by default. Plus, it feels familiar to users, which eases onboarding.
Cons: It can feel generic if you apply it without customization. If developers don't understand the underlying principles, implementations can feel stiff or toneless. Heavy reliance on Material may run at odds with a unique brand identity. It can encourage a “cookie-cutter” look unless you intentionally adapt spacing, color, typography, and tone.
Optimize by mixing Material's structure with original visual language to balance efficiency with distinctiveness and make what comes out your own.
Delve into design systems to better understand where Material Design is coming from and where you can adapt it to.
To begin, map overlap: find shared components like buttons, cards, or dialogs. Align grid, spacing, and elevation conventions to maintain visual balance. Pick a dominant system—Material can provide foundations like layout, spacing scale, motion timing—and then layer in the other system's visuals, icons, or interaction patterns sparingly.
Use Material's responsive grids with your own visual styling and iconography. If another system brings, say, a distinctive navigation pattern, embed it inside Material's container frameworks. Always test in prototype form to ensure combined patterns feel cohesive. Document where one system yields to the other. That way, you gain structure and performance from Material while preserving visual and behavioral uniqueness from your other system.
Peer into prototyping to understand more about how crafting prototypes offers low-risk and high-feedback ways to see what might work best as a solution.
Material Design rests on three core pillars:
Material is physical: It translates real-world surfaces and shadows into digital layers with realistic lighting and elevation, and guides hierarchy and touch.
Bold, graphic, intentional: It embraces vibrant colors, large typography, meaningful white space, and clear visual hierarchy to deliver clarity and focus.
Motion provides meaning: It uses smooth, responsive animation to connect UI changes and preserve user context, making interactions feel natural.
All together, these principles can help you build interfaces that feel tangible, navigable, and alive—where layout, color, and movement reinforce each other to guide user understanding and engagement.
Get right into color symbolism to find out more about how to reach users in the best ways color-wise.
Material Design 3 uses a flexible, responsive grid system built on a 4dp baseline (not just 8dp as before). This finer scale helps maintain vertical rhythm across components, text, and icons, ensuring precise alignment and spatial consistency.
Layouts are still structured with a 12-column grid for responsive design, allowing elements to stack or span columns based on screen width. While breakpoints like 600dp (tablet) and 840dp (desktop) still apply, Material Design 3 emphasizes window size classes—Compact, Medium, and Expanded—to guide adaptive UI behaviors more dynamically across devices.
Components should align to the grid to establish rhythm and hierarchy, but Material 3 allows for more layout flexibility. Elements like FABs or overlays can intentionally break the grid to enhance usability or emphasize actions. Use baseline grids for vertical alignment and apply consistent padding and spacing (multiples of 4dp or 8dp) to maintain clarity and structure.
This modern grid system supports scalable, adaptable layouts that work elegantly from phones to foldables to desktops. To build faster and better, develop a strong understanding of responsive design and how Material 3's layout philosophy supports both consistency and creative freedom.
Get a greater grasp of responsive design to help fast-track this section of your design process.
Material Design 3 defines a hierarchy of typographic styles including Display, Headline, Title, Label, and Body (with sub-levels like Large, Medium, and Small). It uses Roboto (Android) or Noto (multilingual), but you can replace them with your brand's fonts if you follow the scale. Use different emphasis levels, such as Regular, Medium, Bold, to prioritize content. Set clear line heights using units like sp (on Android) or rem/px (on web)—for example, 16sp text with ~24sp line height.
Stick to consistent styles across headings and body text. Respect letter spacing (tracking) values and use responsive scaling so text adjusts to screen size, to make reading comfortable, predictable, and visually rhythmic across your UI.
Explore the world of typography to apply the best typographical choices for your users to enjoy better designs.
Material Design 3 (Material You) introduces major updates to its gesture and color systems for cross-platform, accessible design.
Gestures like swiping, dragging, and pulling must be adapted appropriately to each platform—for example, avoid drawer-opening swipes on iOS, where they may conflict with back navigation. Material supports feedback like ripples, velocity-based interactions, easing animations, and 48 dp touch targets to ensure reliable and intuitive gestures.
The color system now defines five core roles: Primary, Secondary, Tertiary, Neutral, and Neutral Variant. Tertiary adds flexible contrast or expressiveness alongside brand colors. The new surface system replaces opacity layers with seven tone-based surfaces (e.g., surfaceContainerLow, surfaceContainerHighest) for consistent depth and hierarchy. Deprecated roles like background, onBackground, and surfaceVariant should now be replaced by surface, onSurface, and surfaceContainerHighest.
Container roles (not generic surface colors) are now used to fill components like cards and buttons. Android 12+ also supports dynamic color, which generates personalized palettes from user wallpapers. Tools like the Material Theme Builder and Figma plugin help designers create accessible, branded themes with design tokens and tonal variants.
Contrast guidance and accessibility remain critical; designs must accommodate color blindness and maintain legible contrast across states like hover or disabled.
Discover the many concerns of color blindness, one of the aspects of accessible design you will want to address effectively.
Material provides a comprehensive icon set optimized for clarity and consistency. Use the official Material Icons font or SVG library. Pick icons from the recommended categories—such as navigation, action, or alert—that align semantically with their functions.
Pair icons with labels when you need to for clarity, especially for unfamiliar symbols. Respect design rules: 24 dp grid for icons, use singlecolor silhouettes, and center-align shapes.
When applying brand identity, you can create custom icons that follow Material's grid, stroke width, and corner rounding to maintain visual harmony. Always source from the official repository to stay up to date, adhere to licensing, and keep icons intuitive, accessible, and consistent.
Investigate iconography to come away with helpful insights about how to use these invaluable ingredients of interactive design.
Google Design Team. (2025). Expressive design: Google's UX research. Google Design. https://design.google/library/expressive-material-design-google-research
This Google Design blog post delves into the research underpinning Material 3 Expressive, described as the most rigorously studied update to Google's design system. With insights drawn from 46 global user studies involving over 18,000 participants, the article explains how expressive elements—such as color, shape, size, motion, and visual containment—can evoke positive emotions without sacrificing usability. Notably, these expressive designs enabled users to locate key interface elements up to four times faster and equalized visual detection speed across age groups. The piece underscores the evolution of design from mere aesthetics to data-driven emotional resonance, serving as a blueprint for UX teams aiming to build interfaces that feel both familiar and refreshingly engaging.
Duarte, M., & Robertson, C. (2024). From Minimal to Meaningful: Evolving Material Design meant turning four common principles on their heads. Google Design. https://design.google/library/minimal-meaningful
In From Minimal to Meaningful, Matías Duarte (VP of Design at Google) and Christian Robertson reflect on the decade-long evolution of Material Design, from its 2014 debut to the present-day Material Design 3. Based on a Config 2024 talk, the essay outlines how the team challenged four entrenched design conventions—form follows function, start with a brief, avoid design by committee, and prioritize consistency over variety. They explain how embracing emotion, collaboration, iteration, and personalization shaped Material's progression, culminating in features like Dynamic Color. This piece is important because it illustrates Google's evolving philosophy on creating digital experiences that are functional, emotional, and user-centered.
Sapio, D. (2020, September 21). 10 Key Takeaways from Google's Material Design Guidelines. Design Culture Now. https://www.designculturenow.com/blog/10-key-takeaways-from-google-s-material-design-guidelines uxintegra.com+11designculturenow.com+11byteandbuy.com+11
Danny Sapio's article distills ten actionable insights from Google's Material Design guidelines. Published on September 21, 2020, it starts with how subtle animations and icons can communicate gesture capabilities—even in minimalist contexts—and progresses through broader applications of Material principles. The guide emphasizes using motion as a signifier, thoughtful use of color and typography, and how to translate Material's theoretical structure into concrete UI affordances. It serves UX designers especially well by connecting Material's high-level concepts with the everyday decisions designers make when building intuitive and polished interfaces.
Spargo, S. (2025, June 30). Designing and Building Apps with Material Design. FullStack Labs. https://www.fullstack.com/labs/resources/blog/designing-and-building-apps-with-material-design
In Designing and Building Apps with Material Design, Samantha Spargo explains how FullStack Labs leverages Google's Material Design system to streamline app development. She outlines the system's strengths, including its extensive research foundation, customizable framework, and robust component libraries. Spargo traces Material Design's origins to Google's 2014 initiative—initially called “Quantum Paper”—and emphasizes its evolution through ongoing updates. The article highlights the unparalleled documentation available at material.io, which provides detailed guidelines for designers and developers. This resource is significant because it demonstrates how Material Design enhances efficiency, consistency, and collaboration in building modern web and mobile applications.
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