Designing the perfect Lollipop.

If you’re like me, you jump between a number of different devices throughout the day—reading a magazine on your tablet, checking the time on your watch, chatting with your friend on the phone, even plotting your route in the car. More and more, our screens work together, each helping make your life a little bit easier. But if design is the way they communicate with us, it often feels like each one is speaking a different language. That’s why we unveiled material design earlier this year: one consistent design language flexible enough to span devices across mobile, desktop, and beyond. Design is a major focus for Lollipop—the latest version of Android—which begins to roll out today.

Material design: tactile surfaces, bold graphic design, fluid motion 
When you think about mobile, an important aspect is the feel of the devices in your hand. Because of this, touch is one of the primary elements of material design, which is inspired by real life materials like paper and ink.

With material design we also based our work on the foundations of good graphic design, using strong colors and bold typography to create clear hierarchy and focus attention on content.

Motion brings the material and the graphic together, explaining how the system works, and adding moments of delight that move you through the system, easily and fluidly.

Extending material design throughout the apps you love 
A number of apps that you know and love have been working hard to build material design into their framework. It is important that every app be able to take on its own unique personality and experience while fitting in the larger system. A few of our favorites are launching updates shortly:    

The Wall Street Journal, Tumblr and BuzzFeed with material design.

Bringing the design conversation to you 
While we first introduced material design this summer, today’s updates are just the beginning of delivering a modern design language for the next wave of devices in your life. It’s a conversation we’d like to keep going. Starting tomorrow, we’ll be gathering some of the best design thinkers from around the industry at FORM, a cultural event for wide-angle design conversation. And we’ll be continuing the conversation with you online, on Google+ and Twitter and at google.com/design. We look forward to working with you to help push the limits on what’s possible through design.

Posted by Nicholas Jitkoff, Designer

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