Matias Duarte is one of our favorite guys in the Android world. He’s the one that really helped Android with their recent design changes. If you look back at Android from Gingerbread and earlier, it looked down right ugly. But starting with ICS we saw what Matias was envisioning with Android. And now on KitKat, it looks amazing. At the Accel Design conference, The Verge’s Editor in Chief, Josh Topolsky got a chance to sit down with Matias Duarte, and talk about all kinds of things. Including design, Google I/O and more.
Martias begins talking about design, basically what is design to him. Also how design phased into Android and made it user-friendly. He also talks about how there’s no real formal definition of design, which we see with a lot of Android apps these days. The two then change over to ‘death of mobile’ which is a bit strange for Duarte to talk about given his job title, head of Android design. Duarte thinks its necessary for designers to stop designing for just one device, and to design for multiple devices. And he doesn’t just mean tablets and smartphones, but TV’s, cameras, refrigerators and more.
About 20 minutes into the interview, the two transition on over to Google I/O and Android Wear and talk about how design is going to be a huge part of Google I/O this year. Which we’ve been hearing rumors about with the latest rumors and leaks about the new designs for different apps as well as the icons. Josh tries to get a date on when Android Wear is available, and Duarte won’t budge. Oh well we’ll have to keep waiting. They finish out the interview talking about flat designs, and why they are the “in” thing right now.
This kind of hypes up Google I/O a bit for us, and it’s about two months away. How many of you are excited for Google I/O?