Material Design is something that was initiated in it’s operating system after the flat design trend took off. It was designed to add levels of depth into an otherwise completely flat enviroment. The idea is that material is a metaphor for the “unifying theory of a rationalized space and a system of motion, this is emboldened by print based design techniques that fully take advantage of typography, grids, space, scale, color and use of imagery. This means it creates a brilliant visual hierarchy, meaning, and focus. Another element of material design that perfectly fits my brief is that by adding motion to the techniques previously mention, the user is then presented with an easy to understand UI that is visually pleasing to most users.
A lot of techniques apply to material design, and they improve the overall look of the UI. The first is the use of light and shadow;
Depths of the elements also matter;
The use of images create really powerful pages and amplify the meaning of the content;
There are even specific colours that should be used, there are multiple resources in which you can find them.
It is also important to remember there are multiple tones to remember;
Below are screenshots of the iPhone adaptation of the Google Calendar application, you can see a great example of the shadow technique being employed.
Next up is the Google Maps introduction, note here the use of the colours, the same ones found in the palette shown above.
These examples perfectly show how to mix the palette and images to create the perfect visual content
References;
akbrodie.wordpress.com 