Google Releases Design Films On ‘Making Material You’, Revealing Wild Process

To complement the complete makeover its website has just undergone, Google Design has unleashed a series of short design films called Making Material You.

Material You, Google’s latest design language which it unveiled in 2021, is the wild, creative spiritual successor to the long-reigning Material Design. The system defies the minimalist card-like tropes traditionally associated with Android with mismatched shapes and color. On mobile devices, this translates as fully customizable themes unique to each user; in brief, they’re Material You.

The four shorts, which run only about eight minutes in total, define Material You in three words: Unexpected, Spiritual, and Personal.

Google shares that the videos explore its experimental process for “imagining an adaptive, personal, and expressive future for design.” As 9to5Google points out, the films also offer a glimpse into some of the early concepts that led to the development of the design system, like a lockscreen with full-screen clocks and oversized buttons.

In one of the videos, the narrator ponders: “Does everything have to be exactly the same? Every door knob isn’t the same, but people still manage to get in and out of all sorts of rooms… Similarly, do apps need to look exactly the same or can a system leave room for something unexpected?”

Google Design explains that everything changed when its team started playing around “big, never-in-a-million-years-will-we-actually-make-these ideas.” For example, one team member proposed color combinations that ordinarily didn’t make sense.

“We loved it,” Google reflects. “There’s a structure, but it’s not rigid.”

“We can go big, and wonky, and wavy, and we don’t have to fit each idea into a formula… That’s the idea with Material You. It’s structure, not a straightjacket,” Google adds.

The company additionally recounts that Google design used to mimic paper—“but it just turned into stacks and stacks of dead paper.” So it subverted the concept of “form follows function” to recognize that “form follows feeling.”

“We had this button prototype that squashed out when you touched it. What material is that even made of? Water, oil, rubber, marshmallow?” the voiceover remarks.

“Our knee-jerk default to minimalism was blocking us from this other world of play.”

You can watch Google’s design films below.

[via 9to5Google and Google Design, video and screenshots via Google Design]