Dieter Bohn Release me from this Material Design prison

I loved Material Design when I first saw it. For about five minutes. And then it started to bother me. Huge, empty, semantically meaningless blocks of color. Every app looks the same. Every app works the same. Even Google’s own Material Design apps quickly lost their charm. Of course, the only thing I had to look forward to was a new design language from Google which would be quickly disseminated and soon turned into a new nightmare of sameness and conformity.

Thankfully, Google took a different path. Google is now releasing tools and guidance to help developers design apps that adhere to Material Design principles and best practices, without being locked into a specific aesthetic.

And Google is even leading by example, with apps like the new Google News, which looks hardly “Material” at all, and the new Gmail which, in my opinion, looks like an absolute mess.

Freedom is progress. I embrace the chaos.