Google today unveiled a front-end framework for web developers who wish to implement the search giant’s Material Design elements to their websites. Material Design is a design language created by Google after they decided that they no longer wished to continue using their previous design, Holo. Released in 2014, Material Design is a vibrant design language with emphasis on grid layouts, matte colors, fluid animations and, most of all, simplicity. Originally marketed to be used solely on mobile platforms, mainly Android, Material Design quickly gained in popularity and Google decided to expand its presence in other areas. One of the first ones being the online version of Inbox by Google.
Fast forward to today and now you don’t even have to be an Android developer to be able to take advantage of the design language and its simple beauty. Dubbed Material Design Lite, Google’s latest offering to the public is a small size (27-KB compressed) framework that will allow all and any web developers to implement the design to their layouts. Google has made the explanation of Material Design Lite as simple and painless as possible, as it is completely written in vanilla HTML, CSS and Javascript. Hosted on their CDN, you don’t even have to download and compile anything unless you feel the need to, to be able to get started. All that is needed are some simple additions to your website and you can get started using Material Design Lite. If you do feel the need to download and compile the framework yourself, you can do so as Google has provided all of the necessary material on the press page.
Google states that users with heavy text websites, dashboards, and stand-alone pages are going to benefit the most from Material Design Lite. This means that not all sites are going to benefit from using Material Design Lite, so you should definitely take a look at the sample sites that Google has provided to see if the design and layout would flow well with your website. All in all, this is a great gift from Google is you have been meaning to spice up your site or if you just wanted to make some minor changes but couldn’t quite figure out where to start.