A lot of people don’t quite understand material design, some people think they understand material design and probably only a few truly know what material design is and is not. While I don’t consider myself to be a part of the experts group.. I thought I’d share some thoughts of what Material Design means to me.

By definition, Material Design is a design language to uniformly communicate the visual design, animations, interactions and various other properties for elements being used to build Web and Mobile apps.

The term material design is probably derived from the world of 3D Software, where you compose a 3D mesh and apply materials to it. Once a material has been applied to the mesh, all the characteristics of that object, like the shadow it casts, the way it reflects light and even the amount of elasticity or bounce it has are all properties of the material being applied.

3 identical spheres with different materials applied look and behave completely different.

The same holds true for Google’s Material design. Along with the Material Design concept, Google introduced it’s first material called paper and associated a set of properties, animations and interactions to it. This means that when you are building a component for your Android app or your Web App on Angular or Polymer and you decide to use the Paper material, everybody in the team knows exactly how that component would look like and behave.

During my interactions with various folks, I realized a lot of people are confused between characteristics of the material paper and material design itself. I’ve heard conversations where someone is saying that the index card can’t be translucent or the page can’t fold because Material Design guidelines don’t allow that, when in actual they are guidelines for the material Paper.

As a part of Material Design I could very well create my own new material, call it ‘Kryptonite’ and define a set of characteristics that define this material and these characteristics would be very different or even go against the guidelines set for Paper. For example I could say that components with the materiel Kryptonite can pass through each other or such components could have variable thickness. From the Material Design paradigm standpoint these would be perfectly ok to do.

What is unfortunate is that even Google’s Material Design guidelines are blurring the lines between characteristics of a material and the paradigm of Material Design. For example some the properties mentioned here ( things like thickness of the material, folding or bending of the material or passing of one material through another) should ideally be guidelines for the material Paper and not Material Design itself. This I believe diminishes the scope of Material Design and is also the main reason for the confusion amongst most of the designers and developers.

At the recent Google I/O 2015, Google announced Polymer 1.0 and along with it a new reorganized catalog of elements and used material like names to group these elements. The question of whether these names like Iron Elements, Neon Elements, Gold & Platinum Elements etc. are new materials or just names for grouping of these elements would be debatable. In my opinion they aren’t new materials in the true sense, but are names for groups of elements with similar properties.

Material Design as a concept is great and universally applicable, but I think its important for people to understand what it truly means and the differences between a material and material design itself.

The good thing is Google already realizes it and has launched a whole bunch of videos explaining more on material design.