Sorry, I know that's exactly how my comment reads. However, given how many CSS frameworks are posted to HN everyday I think it's reasonable to expect at very least the demo to be mobile friendly, especially if it's touting material design.
I'm curious about your choice of license[0]. I've been considering the use of a non-commercial license for a project I'm working on. Would you mind discussing:
1. Your motivation for the choice. Is it to prevent people from reselling the theme?
2. The impact, if any, that the choice has had on adoption. With the popularity of the project, it doesn’t seem to be an issue. In your experience are users not using your project to built commercial application? Or are they violation the terms (un)intentionally?
3. Your longterm objectives for the project. Do you plan on making this into a business by selling commercial licenses? Do you plan on having a standard commercial license fee, or do you believe it works better to negotiate each license independently?
Yeah, I really love this project, but I have to say I generally avoid using non-free libraries when developing[0]. (To give one specific use case: if I would like to create a FOSS website, this means that I cannot use this library and provide the whole result under a single free license.)
That aside, this looks really well-done! I already have a lot of sites built around Bootstrap, so I may give this a test drive later today.
[0] Free-as-in-freedom, which includes the freedom to use software for any purpose (so a non-commercial use requirement makes the software non-free).
1. I've used this license because I wanted to give something for free for people that was looking for this kind of theme. The restriction about commercial projects is because I don't want people to resell my theme and because I think that if someone is going to earn something using my work I should get something in exchange.
2. This license seems not a problem, users use it anyway following the terms.
This is absolutely gorgeous and fluid smooth , atleast on Desktop. I can see this becoming very popular in the months ahead.
And why all the hate for the animations ? They are well thought out and provide context .
Design is continuously evolving and Material Design will also evolve to overcome some of its shortcomings such as a lack of information density and a rather flat look.
Why the hate? Some of us have been around for a long time and seen the same UI mistakes repeated over and over. This approach to animation seems to take something that wasn't broken in the first place, and replace it with something worse. On most sites today, I put my cursor over a button and it lights up or fades on hover. If I click it or touch it, it depresses. That's plenty of affordance. I don't see how replacing a simple effect with a dramatic, second long button flash improves matters. And if the material evangelists had their way, this is how every website would work.
Of course you can see this becoming popular in the months ahead. There's always some stupid trend that makes headlines for a few years, then fades away. Remember when gradients and reflections were in? Remember when everyone had to have a splash page? The best design ignores trends and builds upon all we've learned about user behavior since the first command line. There's always room for improvement and experimentation. But as long as we're locked in the fad-of-the-year hype cycle, we turn the whole web into a poorly designed experiment, with users as our unwilling test subjects.
The kind of effect you're talking about goes against material design... actually a lot of what is in the theme breaks the guidelines and their intent.
I'm disappointed that this project didn't start as a fork of bootstrap, then the changes applied. It really seems like a designer trying to make a money play off of other's efforts. I can't be certain that is the case, but that is definitely the feel I get, and even then it seems to be only halfway there with the shadows applied to elements they don't belong in.
I've tried to follow the style of the Bootswatch, in this way it's very easy for users to inject this theme in any Bootstrap website. I'm thinking about writing a separated project sharing the CSS and basing it on some grid system without Bootstrap dependencies, keeping the compatibility with Bootstrap.
This is basically unusable on an iPhone 5S - text/elements bleeding off the panel, unclear scroll areas (easy to swipe the background scroll area). I thought the big use case of MD was to deliver a more intuitive interface especially on mobile. This misses the mark by a wide margin.
Currently this framework supports only desktop devices, the demo is not yet compatible with mobile but will be soon (let me find some time to work on it :P)
You are doing great work Fez, you are very active/responsive to the issues on github. Anyone involved in the project knows the effort that has gone into it.
I will be using your repo later this month, and will be more than happy to help contribute to your library.
Looks like this happens on any device in portrait mode. The text in buttons doesn't wrap, for example - and the main content covers up the menu on the left.
Ideally on a narrow-width device, the menu on the left would show/hide with a layered animation. While this is a good material design implementation for desktop and tablet users, it looks like small-form-factor design was forwent.
The ripple effect when clicking buttons is a 20x20px div with 100% border-radius and a CSS scale transform animation, created when clicked, where clicked.
This project raised a question for me: what is the copyright or licensing situation with Google’s Material Design? The specification itself appears to be copyright Google, but several implementations of the specification on the Web are under permissive licenses:
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms you can find below.
You can use this software for free only for no-profit projects. If you'd like to use this software in a commercial project you may contact the author (Federico Zivolo) of the software and ask for his permission and fulfill his conditions.
The floating labels in input text fields are a nice finding.
The click animation for most elements is too strong, though, at least on the desktop. I haven't tried on touchscreens, they may be good enough feedback for direct finger touch, but they are distracting when using the mouse for clicks.
Is the exact highlight animation mandated by Material guidelines, or can it be tweaked? I believe a fast, simultaneous "fade" effect that made the animated circle/rectangle lighter while its moving would be enough to make it subtler and less aggressive.
I find it strange there's so many different material design implementations (for the web, no idea how it's going on in android), shoudn't at least the CSS be centralized to avoid uneccesary efforts and then provide specialized packages for things like bootstrap, jQuery UI themes, angular, react etc that all use the same base CSS?
I know it's probably utopic but it looks like there's a lot of "wasted" energy in these kind of projetcs.
I would like something like this as well. But when I've started the project (and even now) there are not good implementations in pure CSS of Material Design. Mine is the one that tries to follow the specs more than others, but I've not lot of time to dedicate to it so the process is kinda slow.
If Google released their own, then presumably these would mostly disappear. I guess Google's focus right now is on Android, although elements of Material design are appearing on things like Google Docs, so they'd think they'd release that publicly, just as Twitter did with Bootstrap.
In fact, Google offers a downloadable zip file of color swatches, which is a bunch of adobe files. Great for designers who use those tools, less than ideal for designers who don't.
How about don't slow down navigation to play an animation. Function over form. Every time. Never artificially slow your user down for the sake of "pretty". Pretty is subjective, snappy is objective and appreciated by everyone.
The navigation feels like when I was 12 and wrote my first c++ program adding "cool loading animations" for no reason.
This demo is intended as a clone of the Polymer demo page, and it must tell the user say "wow", not say "productive!". It's the developer that includes this framework that will have to make its app productive.
Having looked at the polymer page I see what you were going for and I can even agree with the above poster who commended your clever implementation of the animations. You even have a point saying it's on the developer.
I just can't help but feel that many of these new design ideas and frameworks that are constantly posted are completely missing the mark by valuing "this looks pretty" over "this actually works".
They break the back button. They break scrolling. They slow down the loading of new content by animating it. All these things while pretty create a worse user experience, and by including it in examples they make it inevitable it will find its way into the wild. I'm not asking for everything to work in lynx, I just want to not feel like my browsing has been handicapped.
Other than menus (which don't follow material design guidelines), and modals... I don't think the designer really understands how material design is supposed to work.
I'd been thinking that it would be nice to see a material design theme go into bootstrap.. I like that VezVrasta has integrated the color pallet but not sure how well integrated it is.
I would say that the Jumbotron, wells, etc shouldn't be raised materially, and that the shadow effect should probably simple be a sub-class used by the JS based overlays, which should then follow the material design guidelines.
I get that animations can help users sometimes. But these animations are waaaaayyyyy too long.
Everyone stop with this material design bullshit. Just because Google released a new design language with a fancy name doesn't mean you have to mindlessly copy the most shallow parts of it. The fundamentals of UI design didn't change. Carry on.
This bootstrap material design also does not resonate here .. its hard to get right. I do not like the animations or pointless overlapping panels either.
But stop? I disagree because Google's material design is not about the animations. Its about using minimal appearance chrome to strengthen UI context. Is it part of something, or is it "laying" on top of it? Is it approaching me, or laying back? Its 2,5D.
For example note how the button shadow intuively distinguishes it from a card or other UI-panel.
I see good things for Material Design whenever we have 2,5D or 3D displays in our devices. And so wil iOS with its icon/background parallax effect, which for now is only a gimmick. These where basically made with that in mind.
"Its about using minimal appearance chrome to strengthen UI context."
Keeping chrome to a minimum and adding context are great design principles. But I wouldn't call it material design. It's called good design. I don't think we need a new name for fundamental design principles that have been known for years. Just calling it "material design" attracts the copycats, who would rather copy the look than understand the fundamentals. We should simply talk about good design, and encourage people to study timeless design principles.
The animations don't feel as bad on a touchscreen. I think the biggest problem with material design in this sort of context is that Google made something that feels nice enough on mobile but feels trashy on PC.
Lots of people do. I am sure people asking to learn about design on this site have been directed to dribble.
Actually design is a very ambiguous word for me as a developer. I use it to include application architecture, and user workflows amongst other things, while many other people seem to think its all about the shinny pictures on the front page.
The first mention I have ever seen of dribble on this site was from you, just now.
I have had the opposite experience and it seems to me that design articles posted here tend to be focused on user experience improvements, research based explorations into best practices, and calls to stop gimmicky mumbo jumbo like scrolljacking.
I consider it as high distraction. Yeah, sure it looks great in demos and talks, but do we really want to have two seconds animation every time one switchs tab? Or would you like to have this kind of design in tool you use everyday, editor or IDE?
IIRC, in the design guidelines longer animations should be limited to context switches, where anything under two seconds is "acceptable speed" and anything under half a second is "fast".
There's no need to use the most extreme animations for minor actions in the interface, and the linked page is obviously a showcase, not a real application.
Hello, thanks. I see lot of people would prefer what you're asking, and actually the Material Design specs are not followed very well by me regarding the animations. If you'd be so kind to open an issue on the GitHub page I'll be happy to assign a priority to it and work on it when I find some time.
An interface should be snappy and get out of your way, not try to impress with pointless animations. That screams graphic designer trying and failing to do UX. Which is material in a nutshell really.
Material animations are not (entirely) pointless, they are designed to improve user's awareness of UI's behaviors - primarily by making transitions between related screens less "beam-me up, Scotty" Teleport-like.
Sure, it may be prone to abuse, but the base theory is sound. By tapping into the perceptual abilities of movement and shadows, some parts of the inner structure and layout of the interface (which are usually only known to the dialog's developer) are exposed to the user in an intuitive way.
What's some of the best UX design you've done? Can you tell me about affordances, and why the Materials design falls short on them? On desktop? On touch devices?
For us developers, a command line and vim (or emacs, not trying to start a war) can be the epitome of UX -- once we learn all those shortcuts.
But for users, there's a lot more that comes into play. Indicating to a user when something can be interacted with and - more importantly, many times - how it can be interacted with is very important. Usually such indications will also inform about what kind of result will happen from the interaction: will the form submit, will the page reload, will I see a list of additional options?
Just as important is indicating to the user that yes - you just interacted with something that can be interacted with. Depending on the action, this can be something as subtle as an underline - or as obvious as showing a loading indicator.
The Material animations aren't just eyecandy for the sake of eyecandy. While touch screens are getting better, there are still situations where a touch doesn't necessarily register as a touch. It's super important to indicate to the user that a touch has been registered. It's just as important that this happens immediately, instead of after - say - a round-trip request to a server somewhere.
If you've built and designed a user interface that has amazing affordances, a general perception of 'speediness' even if the server is being slow, and treats touch users as a first-class citizen ... I'd really like to see your work!
We do need to let users know a touch has been registered. In some cases all you need is a color change. Other time, a slight fade in or small animation. But having content areas fly in for almost a whole second is overkill. That's why this site is a poor example of the technique.
having content areas fly in for almost a whole second is overkill
...except for those cases when it's not. Major context changes such as switching applications benefit from more explicit animations, that physically convey where everything goes or comes from; those can run from less than half a second to about two seconds for more showy "Welcome to product X" screens. If the old interface simply disappears, the user has no clue on how to restore it. That's why you get nifty "minimize" animations in all modern desktop environments that care about more than processor cycles.
In the Material design, animations are also intended to increase affordance by showing what areas are interactive, without requiring the extra chrome of everything having 3D borders.
I think you misunderstand. I'm not against animations. The minimize animation in today's operating system is a perfect example of how animation can simplify the user experience (although I do think the OSX shrinking animation is a tad dramatic). But keep in mind, those animations are still short compared to the examples here. Whats more, the linked example uses the fly in animations for interactions without major context changes. Switching from pages in a document is hardly the same as switching applications.
There are some glitches when animating layouts. The "primary action button" (is that what the floating circle was called?) sometimes covers the scrollbar after resizing the window, and jumps around on mouse-over; and when the browser window is not maximized, after selecting an option in the left vertical menu, the floating panels jump around a lot vertically before stopping. I'm using latest Chrome on Windows 7.
I like that they make me think about things like depth to differentiate what's active ,
I like the little line in inputs ,it encourages users(me included) to fill the input,
the ripple effect is small and cheap animation and communicates to the user a click .as is with checkbox etc
the morphing transitions is their best idea , As a user I hate flickers , if you blink you miss them overlay are even worse unless you are alerting.
First of all, I like the design. But about the animations...
Web browser engines are not particularly good in animation. I was viewing this with (not quite latest) Firefox and the animations were really choppy (with my less than 3GHz PC). As in really annoying and made user interaction next to impossible. Other browsers may work better.
Secondly, animation (especially in browsers) is very power consuming if you target mobile devices. Of course, this isn't something a web designer would have to care about, because unlike for "native" apps, you can't tell which web site was consuming all the battery. (and battery consumption means bad reviews in app stores)
I work for a mobile device company and I can tell you, for every minute a major web designer spends adding animation on a popular web site, a systems engineer spends an hour trying to optimize the power consumption (with changes to WebKit/Blink, device drivers and the kernel).
Web browsing power consumption is a major benchmark how device manufacturers choose their parts vendors. One of the key benchmarks is picojoules required to render nytimes.com front page. (this is ridiculous but that's how the industry works)
Quite simply: your design would be a lot better if you'd remove most (if not all) of the animations. Especially the mouse click circle (which appears so late it's distracting) and the things that scroll from the bottom (which scroll so choppily that it's annoying). They don't add anything to the usability of this site, on the contrary they make it work slowly.
do you think that the listed specs in the comment are truly accurate regarding the types of machines needed to properly display Material design elements, or just the author's way of indicating the the current state of technology?
The thing is, it doesn't really matter. You can't program your interface for quad-core processors and 16GB of RAM because if 50% of the userbase is using 1GB on an ARM processor then you either have to design two interfaces or cater to the lowest denominator.
At the risk of being productive with my comment, please read Google's information on material design (http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-design/introducti...) and you'll understand that this isn't animation for animatio's sake or design for design's sake.
Looks really nice, one nitpick: You use the placeholder-as-label anti-pattern (src: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/forms.html#the-placeholder-attrib...) in the search field of the navbar. That almost put me off before I'd even seen the nice floating label pattern under the fold.
There are some "floating label" versions of the components that alleviate that problem, and may come handy at places where the available space is really limited, such as mobile applications.
I love material design, and this is more related to material design than this theme, because this is a beautiful and faithful implementation for web, but that button ripple is obnoxious.
It also makes the ui seem very sluggish, because the traditional pressed state of a button is instant feedback, and this is an animation that takes a couple hundred ms or so to complete.
Seems like there is a bug in the number validation example. When non-numeric data is entered, the floating label moves back into the input field making it very difficult to read. This is on Chrome.
Other than that, this looks pretty cool; I particularly like the floating label animations. I may have to give it a try in my next project!
It looks pretty cool. There's one thing about the demo site that I found really confusing though - those white rectangles look like they should be modal dialogs but they aren't. I kept trying to dismiss the donation popup before I realized navigation wasn't disabled.
I am writing this comment only because of the so many negative comments on the thread.
Kudos to FezVrasta for building thing. Clearly it is not perfect but I am sure he will work on ironing out the issues. Also if the license is MIT I would use it in my projects too.
This is really nice. Great work! Ignore the haters - you're on the right track with this. Most of the people giving you guff are not the type that create things - they're the ones who pretend to create things.
Definitely one to watch. There is a lot to like here. I'm not saying it's for everyone but I see this as something you would use with Ionic to deliver a very good Android 5 look and feel solution.
You know, I really want to like it, but I just don't.
I think Material works very well on touch surfaces. There are a ton of good design principles that it champions, but the interactions are strange on desktop.
actually you are right lol.. I've used this class because was something that in "material design" is not documented... probably would be better use panels and add to well some different effect. I'll open an issue.. (#279)
If you like to be abel to use material in bootstrap (or more) make sure you check out semantic UI. Open source as well, let's you toggle between...everything really :)
This looks pretty awesome as well, thanks for sharing.
Ugh, have any of you actually used android l? Google runs video ads for the nexus 5 and 9 with the devicea turned off because they look atrocious when turned on.
