What did you find in Material Design that you wouldn’t find elsewhere?

JU — I love Material Design because as developer that almost doesn’t do any self-designing, the keylines and default values for everything makes it easy to do the small things myself. Without Material Design, I’d probably be completely lost.

AB — I’m old enough to have experienced many digital design trends. I remember in the early 00’s when default Photoshop effects such as bevel and emboss, outer glow and fat strokes ruled the design of websites. Shortly after that gradients got introduced in many application interfaces and set standards for many trends until flat and minimalistic design was found to be very easy to use for basically all the users and visually appealing if done the right way.

I’d say Material Design is flat 2.0 with a little bit of depth (shadows and the feeling of interaction with actual objects). It is by far the strongest design trend ever and even though it has a Bible of guidelines, people can create loads of different interfaces and still keep the same style.

Isotope icon

It’s also the design trend that created communities and tools for people who want to apply it to their ideas. It’s a really solid concept and obviously there is no way it couldn’t get massive since Google applied it to the world’s most common operating system. Designing interfaces and icons for more than 1 billion users where there are some guidelines to follow doesn’t make people less interested in trying it out. It’s a beautiful style that’s gonna live for quite a while.

Do you take liberties from the guidelines or strictly follow them?

AB — I most definitely take liberties from the guidelines. I don’t think you can design a truly unique Material app by only following the guidelines, you need to add your own touch to it. Isotope follows quite a few guidelines but we’ve taken lots of liberties as we want to make it a unique experience.

For example blurring backgrounds is more iOS than Android and we have our own interpolation curves for the animations but as long as we don’t exaggerate those effects it works with Material Design.

The tricky part — how did you collaborate? What was your process?

AB — We created a scrum board using Trello where we placed ideas, mockups and statuses in different columns to easily keep track of them. As we created and dealt with tasks we discussed different ways solving problems which also led to idea generations.

From time to time we had sprints where we did some quality assurance work (finding bugs, trying the builds on different devices, keeping things consistent etc) and Jack focused on fixing them. It’s never healthy to keep on implementing new features without knowing that the most essential ones actually work. So basically it’s nothing special than what should be ordinary UX + developer workflow.

The Isotope Scrum board using Trello

JU — We used Trello for getting stuff done (It was my first time, it’s awesome) and Hangouts for talking more about specific issues and the app itself. Hangouts sucks though, not being able to search is a massive pain for a project that lasts months, I’d definitely recommend not using it for a large project!

And how do you guys keep learning and improving your craft?

AB — For me the best way of learning new stuff is to dare to try them out. Photoshop is a very powerful tool you can create any kind of image with, as long as you are creative.

Basic knowledge about the software is enough to create for example most interfaces and icons, you just need to know how you want it to look when it’s done. There are always workarounds for how things can be achieved and the more you learn about them the more experienced you get, which will make the workflow a lot easier in the future. For me the step from web design to mobile interfaces was like that, as I had never done any serious design for phones but I had knowledge about how they work and how interfaces might look.