Preliminary notes: When I started writing this article, I didn’t know how much detail I wanted to put into it. As it turns out, it is quite lengthy and since I didn’t want to omit things that I judge important, I decided to split it in half to make it more readable.

In this first part, I talk about the reasons of this redesign in sync with Material Design as well as Chrome interaction and visual philosophy. I then start scratching the technical surface to talk about new styling, color scheme and iconography.

Introduction

October 2014 marked the release of the new version of Android: Lollipop. Lots of changes under the hood and a pretty big redesign brought to users under the name “Material design”. Not solely an Android guideline and best practice guide, Material design (will be referred as MD from there) represents where Google stands and communicate its values in design and tech.

Additionally, MD extends not only to Google properties but to anyone, on any platform (with the Polymer-project.org for the web for example) for anybody willing to embrace and iterate upon it to make their own product better.

As part of this effort to bring our apps up to date an consistent with the new visual language, the redesigned version of Chrome was shipped in Lollipop for its 40th update (M40) or as we call it: Chrome Material Design.

Content, not Chrome

Throughout the years, Chrome stood a little bit apart from its other Google product counterparts when it comes to its visual choices and directions. This is mostly due to the fact that Chrome aspired to be the “shell” that contains both Google products and well… everything else. As such, branding was always a balance or a mix between the Google brand, its own Chrome branding and platform consistency. This often led to the question: “Where do we stand?”

Other factors come into play when taking UX and UI product decisions and they can be grouped under the three key Chrome principles: Speed, Simplicity and Security.