Unveiling Material You

Today at I/O we unveiled Material You, a radical new way to think about design. Material You will transform design for Android, for Google, and for the entire tech industry. Over the coming months, we plan to share more details about Material You, and how it is shaping everything we do at Google. Let’s start with the vision.

Material You embraces emotion and expressiveness

When we introduced Material Design in 2014, our vision was to help make technology simple and beautiful for everyone, and to rationalize experiences across mobile and the web. The challenge today has broadened. Computing continues to grow with more screens appearing in more areas of our lives. Also, users are demanding more expressiveness and control over their personal devices. They’re seeking experiences that are more than just practical and functional—experiences that also evoke emotion.

Designers across Google from Hardware, Android, and App teams came together to respond to this challenge, asking themselves, “What if form did not just follow function, but also followed feeling?” Material You explores a more humanistic approach to design. One that celebrates the tension between design sensibility and personal preference, and does not shy away from emotion. Without compromising the functional foundations of our apps, Material You seeks to create designs that are personal for every style, accessible for every need, alive and adaptive for every screen.

Personal for every style

Users customize their desktops in the physical and digital worlds with images that are personal and provide comfort and joy. We built upon this insight to generate unique Material palettes for everyone, derived from a personal signal—wallpaper—that can be applied to their entire experience.

We mix color science with years of investment in the disciplines of interaction design and engineering to make it possible to tailor any app—not just Google’s—to the user’s unique Material palette in real time. Material You includes users as co-creators, delivering a mode for every mood.

Alive & Adaptive for every screen

As technology has moved into different aspects of people’s lives, apps have been challenged to adapt to new screen sizes, device types, input modalities, and context. The ways in which technology responds to this challenge will determine how it is perceived by people.

In addition to making it easy to adapt to different screen sizes and types, Material You uses motion to help understand space, convey brand, and elicit trust. The UI reacts to screen changes, context changes, and input in a way that is consistent but also human. Little surprises and playful quirkiness augment basic storytelling—making technology approachable and comfortable.

Accessible for every need

Accessibility is core to Google’s mission. We recognize that some people have ongoing accessibility needs, and others have situational needs that require UIs to adapt. Our ambition is to solve this universally—for all people, in all places. By sharing control of contrast, size, and line width, with a contextually aware system that can customize UIs in more ways than previously possible, we can tailor a UI for every user.

Material You, Pixel and Android 12

Our ambitious vision for Material You is a multiyear journey that will evolve all of Google’s products and ecosystems. Material You comes first to Google Pixel this fall; developers get a preview today, with Android 12.

We’ll be sharing more about Material You and what it means for designers and developers over the summer, with components and guidance coming this fall. Follow along on material.io, our YouTube channel, and Twitter for conversations with design leadership, the making of Material You, and more.

Learn more about Material You @ Google I/O 2021

We are excited for you to join the conversation. Meet the Material team and learn more about Material You during the following Tech Sessions, AMAs, and Meetups at I/O.

Wednesday, May 19

10:00 AM PT

What’s new in Material Design

Speakers: Bethany Fong and Christian Robertson

Learn about the latest design improvements to help you build personal, dynamic experiences with Material Design.

11:00 AM PT

AMA: #AskMaterial

Speakers: Yasmine Evjen, Bethany Fong, Jay Kothari, and Connie Shi

Why is the baseline Material Design primary color purple? How do I apply shape theming to images on Android? How does a new component—like the navigation rail—come to life? Tune into our Ask Me Anything session to ask questions on all things Material Design!

11:30 AM PT

Workshop: Material's communication principles: Intro to UX Writing

Speaker: Alex Hays

This workshop will show you how to write clear, compelling user-facing content – because better writing leads to better experiences. Create your own content matrix while learning best practices for common UI patterns such as onboarding, notifications, labels, errors, and localization. Lessons focus on English writing, and can be applied across many contexts. Advanced topics (testing content; conversation design; machine learning feature writing) are covered briefly.

Thursday, May 20

8:30 AM PT

Material Design Meetup [EMEA]

A time to gather with the Material Design community. Join members of the Material Design team to chat and connect. (Europe, Middle East, Africa friendly time.)

4:30 PM PT

Material Design Meetup [Americas]

A time to gather with the Material Design community. Join members of the Material Design team to chat and connect. (Americas friendly time.)

On-demand content

5 things you can do to prepare your app for large screens

Speakers: Liam Spradlin and Rody Davis

Learn how Material Design can help you get your app ready for large devices when time and resources are constrained. From prioritizing design characteristics to implementation details, this session will give developers and designers a picture of what’s possible without undergoing a complete redesign or a comprehensive investment in responsive design.

Build beautiful Material Design apps with Jetpack Compose

Speakers: Nick Rout and Louise Macfadyen

Jetpack Compose can help you build beautifully and easily with Material Design. In this Session, you'll learn how you can take advantage of what it offers—Material theming, components, and dark theme guidance—and how it can help improve your workflow on Android.

Designing A11y with Material Design

Speakers: Michael Gilbert and Shabi Kashani

Learn how Material Design integrates Accessibility directly into their design system, and how you can do the same with your tools and frameworks. In this session, we’ll show you how you can make your products more usable for everyone – especially those with disabilities.