Material Design is getting revamped with a new Material Theming tool

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Along with the many changes that have been announced today at Google I/O, the company has revealed some major changes to Material Design through the use of a new tool appropriately dubbed “Material Theming”. Material Theming will make use of the prototyping application known as Sketch as a plugin, allowing you to design material design interfaces while introducing a huge amount of variety into your creations. You can do lots of different things simply through the use of different tools and sliders within the program, such as creating new buttons and applying custom colors to any UI element that you wish.

The tool isn’t just great for creating new elements and designing your own user interface, but it also aligns everything for you with ease. Material Theming will allow for further flexibility and personalization in Android apps, allowing developers to avoid monotony. When following material design, applications can often look the same due to following the same device language. Now it can look like just about anything, while also maintaining a level of consistency throughout the device. That was always the goal of material design, and Material Theming will help to bring it to life. It also will allow “Google to look different from developers,” according to Matías Duarte, VP of Material Design at Google.

And that’s not to mention the ease of use. One of the biggest deterrents to using material design was its difficulty to implement – it’s hard to remain consistent when many different developers will all have their own take on how they want to design their application. It’s no longer a set of rules that developers have to follow, but a flexible set of guidelines that will allow developers to design their applications how they want, while also avoiding the monotonous nature of how Android has become. “We’ve been working on this for two years”, Duarte tells us. There is one downside though, and that’s that according to the release page, Material Theming tool requires MacOS High Sierra or higher. Yes, that means no Linux or no Windows.