Material design is a comprehensive approach to visual, interaction and motion design for the multi-screen world. Android 5.0 Lollipop and the updated support libraries help you to create material UIs. Here’s a rundown of some of the major elements of material design and the APIs and widgets that you can use to implement them in your app.

Tangible surfaces

In material design, UIs are composed of pieces of digital paper & ink. The surfaces and the shadows they cast provide visual cues to the structure of the application, what you can touch and how it will move. This digital material can move, expand and reform to create flexible UIs.

Shadows

A surface’s position and depth result in subtle changes in lighting and shadows. The new elevation property lets you specify a view’s position on the Z-axis and the framework then casts a real-time dynamic shadow on items behind it. You can set the elevation declaratively in your layouts, defined in dips:

<ImageView …
    android:elevation="8dp" />

You can also set this from code using getElevation()/setElevation() (with shims in ViewCompat). The shadow a view casts is defined by its outline, which by default is derived from its background. For example if you set a circular shape drawable as the background for a floating action button, then it would cast an appropriate shadow. If you need finer control of a view’s shadow, you can set a ViewOutlineProvider which can customise the Outline in getOutline().

Cards

Cards are a common pattern for creating surfaces holding a distinct piece of information. The new CardView support library allows you to create them easily, providing outlines and shadows for you (with equivalent behaviour on prior platforms).

<android.support.v7.widget.CardView
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content">
    <!-- Your card content -->

</android.support.v7.widget.CardView>

CardView extends FrameLayout and provides default elevation and corner radius for you so that cards have a consistent appearance across the platform. You can customise these via the cardElevation and cardCornerRadius attributes, if required. Note that Cards are not the only way of achieving dimensionality and you should be wary of over-cardifying your UI!

Print-like Design

Material utilises classic principles from print design to create clean, simple layouts that put your content front and center. Bold deliberate color choices, intentional whitespace, tasteful typography and a strong baseline grid create hierarchy, meaning and focus.

Typography

Android 5.0 updates the system font Roboto to beautifully and clearly display text no matter the display size. A new medium weight has been added (android:fontFamily=”sans-serif-medium”) and new TextAppearance styles implement the recommended typographic scale for balancing content density and reading comfort. For instance you can easily use the ‘Title’ style by setting android:textAppearance=”@android:style/TextAppearance.Material.Title”. These styles are available on older platforms through the AppCompat support library, e.g. “@style/TextAppearance.AppCompat.Title”.

Color

Your application’s color palette brings branding and personality to your app so we’ve made it simple to colorize UI controls by using the following theme attributes:

• colorPrimary. The primary branding color for the app; used as the action bar background, recents task title and in edge effects.
• colorAccent. Vibrant complement to the primary branding color. Applied to framework controls such as EditText and Switch.
• colorPrimaryDark. Darker variant of the primary branding color; applied to the status bar.

Further attributes give fine grained control over colorizing controls, see: colorControlNormal, colorControlActivated, colorControlHighlight, colorButtonNormal, colorSwitchThumbNormal, colorEdgeEffect, statusBarColor and navigationBarColor.

AppCompat provides a large subset of the functionality above, allowing you to colorize controls on pre-Lollipop platforms.

Dynamic color

Material Design encourages dynamic use of color, especially when you have rich images to work with. The new Palette support library lets you extract a small set of colors from an image to style your UI controls to match; creating an immersive experience. The extracted palette will include vibrant and muted tones as well as foreground text colors for optimal legibility. For example:

Palette.generateAsync(bitmap,
        new Palette.PaletteAsyncListener() {
    @Override
    public void onGenerated(Palette palette) {
         Palette.Swatch vibrant =
                 palette.getVibrantSwatch();
          if (swatch != null) {
              // If we have a vibrant color
              // update the title TextView
              titleView.setBackgroundColor(
                  vibrant.getRgb());
              titleView.setTextColor(
                  vibrant.getTitleTextColor());
          }
    }
});

Authentic Motion

Tangible surfaces don’t just appear out of nowhere like a jump-cut in a movie; they move into place helping to focus attention, establish spatial relationships and maintain continuity. Materials respond to touch to confirm your interaction and all changes radiate outward from your touch point. All motion is meaningful and intimate, aiding the user’s comprehension.

Activity + Fragment Transitions

By declaring ‘shared elements’ that are common across two screens you can create a smooth transition between the two states.

album_grid.xml
…
    <ImageView
        …
        android:transitionName="@string/transition_album_cover" />
album_details.xml
…
    <ImageView
        …
        android:transitionName="@string/transition_album_cover" />

AlbumActivity.java
Intent intent = new Intent();
String transitionName = getString(R.string.transition_album_cover);
…
ActivityOptionsCompat options =
ActivityOptionsCompat.makeSceneTransitionAnimation(activity,
    albumCoverImageView,   // The view which starts the transition
    transitionName    // The transitionName of the view we’re transitioning to
    );
ActivityCompat.startActivity(activity, intent, options.toBundle());

Here we define the same transitionName in two screens. When starting the new Activity and this transition is animated automatically. In addition to shared elements, you can now also choreograph entering and exiting elements.

Ripples

Materials respond to users’ touch with an ink ripple surface reaction. Interactive controls such as Buttons exhibit this behaviour by default when you use or inherit from Theme.Material (as will ?android:selectableItemBackground). You can add this feedback to your own drawables by simply wrapping them in a ripple element:

<ripple
    xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:color="@color/accent_dark">
    <item>
        <shape
            android:shape="oval">
            <solid android:color="?android:colorAccent" />
        </shape>
    </item>
</ripple>

Custom views should propagate touch location down to their drawables in the View#drawableHotspotChanged callback so that the ripple can start from the touch point.

StateListAnimator

Materials also respond to touch by raising up to meet your finger, like a magnetic attraction. You can achieve this effect by animating the translationZ attribute which is analogous to elevation but intended for transient use; such that Z = elevation + translationZ. The new stateListAnimator attribute allows you to easily animate the translationZ on touch (Buttons do this by default):

layout/your_layout.xml
<ImageButton …
    android:stateListAnimator="@anim/raise" />
anim/raise.xml
<selector xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
    <item android:state_enabled="true" android:state_pressed="true">
        <objectAnimator
            android:duration="@android:integer/config_shortAnimTime"
            android:propertyName="translationZ"
            android:valueTo="@dimen/touch_raise"
            android:valueType="floatType" />
    </item>
    <item>
        <objectAnimator
            android:duration="@android:integer/config_shortAnimTime"
            android:propertyName="translationZ"
            android:valueTo="0dp"
            android:valueType="floatType" />
    </item>
</selector>

Reveal

A hallmark material transition for showing new content is to reveal it with an expanding circular mask. This helps to reinforce the user’s touchpoint as the start of all transitions, with its effects radiating outward radially. You can implement this using the following Animator:

Animator reveal = ViewAnimationUtils.createCircularReveal(
                    viewToReveal, // The new View to reveal
                    centerX,      // x co-ordinate to start the mask from
                    centerY,      // y co-ordinate to start the mask from
                    startRadius,  // radius of the starting mask
                    endRadius);   // radius of the final mask
reveal.start();

Interpolators

Motion should be deliberate, swift and precise. Unlike typical ease-in-ease-out transitions, in Material Design, objects tend to start quickly and ease into their final position. Over the course of the animation, the object spends more time near its final destination. As a result, the user isn’t left waiting for the animation to finish, and the negative effects of motion are minimized. A new fast-in-slow-out interpolator has been added to achieve this motion.

For elements entering and exiting the screen (which should do so at peak velocity), check out the linear-out-slow-in and fast-out-linear-in interpolators respectively.

Adaptive design

Our final core concept of material is creating a single adaptive design that works across devices of all sizes and shapes, from watches to giant TVs. Adaptive design techniques help us realize the vision that each device reflects a different view of the same underlying system. Each view is tailored to the size and interaction appropriate for that device. Colors, iconography, hierarchy, and spatial relationships remain constant. The material design system provides flexible components and patterns to help you build a design that scales.

Toolbar

The toolbar is a generalization of the action bar pattern, providing similar functionality, but much more flexibility. Unlike the standard action bar, toolbar is a view in your hierarchy just like any other, so you can place instances wherever you like, interleave them with the rest of your views, animate, react to scroll events and so on. You can make the Toolbar act as your Activity’s Action Bar by calling Activity.setActionBar().

In this example, the blue toolbar is an extended height, overlaid by the screen content and provides the navigation button. Note that two further toolbars are used in the list and detail views.

For details of implementing toolbars, see this post.

Go Forth and Materialize

Material Design helps you to build understandable, beautiful and adaptive apps, which are alive with motion. Hopefully, this post has inspired you to apply these principles to your app and signposted some of the new (and compatibility) APIs to achieve this.

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By Katherine Kuan, Developer Advocate

Updated material design Tumblr app on Nexus 6.

Last week, we unveiled the Nexus 6 and Nexus 9, the newest additions to our Nexus family that will ship with Android 5.0 Lollipop. Together, they deliver a pure Google experience, showcasing fresh visual styles with material design, improved performance, and additional features.

Let’s make sure your apps and games are optimized to give your users the best mobile experience on these devices. We’ve outlined some best practices below.

Nexus 6

Screen

The Nexus 6 boasts an impressive 5.96” Quad HD screen display at a resolution of 2560 x 1440 (493 ppi). This translates to ~ 730 x 410 dp (density independent pixels).

Check your assets

It has a quantized density of 560 dpi, which falls in between the xxhdpi and xxxhdpi primary density buckets. For the Nexus 6, the platform will scale down xxxhdpi assets, but if those aren’t available, then it will scale up xxhdpi assets.

Provide at least an xxxhdpi app icon because devices can display large app icons on the launcher. It’s best practice to place your app icons in mipmap- folders (not the drawable- folders) because they are used at resolutions different from the device’s current density. For example, an xxxhdpi app icon can be used on the launcher for an xxhdpi device.

res/
   mipmap-mdpi/
      ic_launcher.png
   mipmap-hdpi/
      ic_launcher.png
   mipmap-xhdpi/
      ic_launcher.png  
   mipmap-xxhdpi/
      ic_launcher.png
   mipmap-xxxhdpi/   
      ic_launcher.png  # App icon used on Nexus 6 device launcher

Choosing to add xxxhdpi versions for the rest of your assets will provide a sharper visual experience on the Nexus 6, but does increase apk size, so you should make an appropriate decision for your app.

res/
   drawable-mdpi/
      ic_sunny.png
   drawable-hdpi/
      ic_sunny.png
   drawable-xhdpi/   
      ic_sunny.png
   drawable-xxhdpi/  # Fall back to these if xxxhdpi versions aren’t available
      ic_sunny.png 
   drawable-xxxhdpi/ # Higher resolution assets for Nexus 6
      ic_sunny.png

Make sure you are not filtered on Google Play

If you are using the <compatible-screens> element in the AndroidManifest.xml file, you should stop using it because it’s not scalable to re-compile and publish your app each time new devices come out. However, if you must use it, make sure to update the manifest to add the configuration for these devices (by screen size and density). Otherwise your app may be excluded from Google Play search results on these devices.

Nexus 9

Screen

The Nexus 9 is a premium 8.9” tablet with a screen size of 2048 x 1536 pixels (288 ppi), which translates to 1024 x 768 dip. This is a 4:3 aspect ratio, which is unique compared to earlier tablets. The Nexus 9 falls into the xhdpi density bucket, and you should already have assets in the drawable-xhdpi folder.

Updated Material Design Wall Street Journal app on Nexus 9.

Enable NDK apps for 64-bit

The Nexus 9 runs on a 64-bit Dual Core processor, which makes it the first Android device to ship with a 64-bit ARM instruction set. Support for 64-bit processors was just added in Android 5.0, so if you have an NDK app, enable it by updating the APP_ABI value in your Application.mk file:

APP_ABI := armeabi armeabi-v7a arm64-v8a x86 x86_64 mips mips64

More detailed instructions are provided in the developer site. You can test your 64-bit enabled app on a physical device with a 64-bit processor running Android 5.0, or take advantage of the recently announced 64-bit emulator in Android Studio.

Update your hardware keyboard support

The Nexus 9 Keyboard Folio will be available as an accessory in Google Play. It’s very important that you don’t lock your app to a single orientation. The Nexus 9’s natural orientation is portrait mode, while it’s used in landscape mode with the keyboard. If you lock to the device’s natural orientation, the app may appear sideways for devices with keyboards.

Users should be able to navigate around the main content of the app with the keyboard, while relying on touch input or keyboard shortcuts for toolbar actions and button bars. Therefore, ensure that your app has proper keyboard navigation and shortcuts for primary actions. Keyboard shortcuts that are invoked with Ctrl + [shortcut] combo can be defined via menu items using:

<menu xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
    <item
        android:id="@+id/menu_create"
        android:title="@string/menu_create"
        android:alphabeticShortcut="c” />
</menu/>

Alternatively, shortcuts can be defined using Activity#onKeyShortcut or View#onKeyShortcut. Learn more about keyboard actions here.

In MainActivity.java:

@Override
public boolean onKeyShortcut(int keyCode, KeyEvent event) {
    switch (keyCode) {
        case KeyEvent.KEYCODE_R:
            Toast.makeText(this, "Reply", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();
            return true;
        default:
            return super.onKeyShortcut(keyCode, event);
    }
}

Responsive layouts with w- and sw- qualifiers

In order to take advantage of the screen real estate on the Nexus 6 and Nexus 9, we emphasize the importance of responsive design. In the past, if you assumed that landscape mode is significantly wider than portrait mode, you may run into problems on a device like the Nexus 9, which has an aspect ratio of 4:3. Instead of declaring layouts using the layout-land or layout-port resource folder qualifiers, we strongly recommend switching to the w<N>dp width resource folder qualifier so that content is laid out based on available screen width.

Think about content first and foremost. Decide on min and max screen real estate that your content requires, and determine cutoff points at different screen widths where you can modify the layout composition for your app (# of grid columns, multi-pane layout, etc…).

For example, a single pane layout for your main activity on phones can be defined in:

res/layout/activity_main.xml

On larger screen devices, where the current orientation is at least 600dp in width, a new two-pane layout with a list alongside a detail pane could be declared in:

res/layout-w600dp/activity_main.xml

On even larger screen devices, where the current orientation is at least 720dp in width, a new multi-pane layout where the detail pane requires even more horizontal space could be declared in:

res/layout-w720dp/activity_main.xml

As for attributes based on form factor, instead of declaring them in values-large or values-xlarge resource directories, use the sw<N>dp smallest width qualifier. For example, you could style your TextViews to have a medium font size on phones.

In res/values/styles.xml:

<style name="DescriptionTextStyle">
  <item name="android:textAppearance">?android:attr/textAppearanceMedium</item>
</style>

Meanwhile, TextViews could have a large font size when the smallest width of the device (taking the minimum of the landscape and portrait widths) is 600dp or wider. This ensures the font size of your app doesn’t change when you rotate this large screen device.

In res/values-sw600dp/styles.xml:

<style name="DescriptionTextStyle">
  <item name="android:textAppearance">?android:attr/textAppearanceLarge</item>
</style> 

Take advantage of 5.0 and Material

Set your android:targetSdkVersion to "21". Take note of the important behavior changes in Android 5.0 Lollipop including ART, the new Android runtime, to ensure that your app continues to run well. You can also leverage new platform APIs like richer notifications.

Nexus 6 and Nexus 9 users will be immersed in the new world of material design, and they’ll expect the same seamless transitions, bold colors, and delightful details from your app. As you invest time in bringing your app up to date with our latest design language, there’s a whole host of resources to help you make the leap, including important new updates to the support library, videos, and a getting started guide. Good luck and we can’t wait to see your apps!

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