Almost every website on the internet is on the “flat design” bandwagon. It started out with Microsoft’s Metro UI (now called Microsoft design language) featuring flat designed tiles. Everyone followed the steps, and it became a design trend. Google didn’t want to be left behind, so they made their own library of design tools and conventions.
What is Material Design
At first, you could say that Material Design is similar to flat design. Material Design is basically layers of flat objects aligned onto the z-axis to create a 3D flat design illusion. Material Design is built not only for aesthetics, but for functionality. As they say, they aren’t just beautifully designed, they are also functional.
Material Design unites Google’s expansive product line under a rich set of design styles and principles.
Google Design Revolution
From the advent of using Photoshop, web designing has been very easy. Inserting different elements and putting color onto a page is a piece of cake. As rich UI experiences evolved, designers have evolved their skill sets to meet this need. The way users interacted with an interface was always as important as the way it looked. There are still ways to keep designs exciting while retaining high quality UI experiences.
Following Material Design is relatively easy, and if you want to be more “Googley” and sublime, you could use Polymer.
What is Polymer?
Polymer is designed to make it easier and faster for developer to create reusable web components for the modern web.
Built for Speed
Polymer replaces the shadow DOM polyfill with a lightweight shim, uses a new, faster data-binding system, and significantly reduces codes size.
For Modern Browsers
Polymer is built from ground up to support modern browsers, using the latest platform APIs.
Using Web Components
Polymer leverages web components, a new set of web standards designed to provide reusable components for the web.
Custom elements extends the web
With custom elements, you can extend the vocabulary of HTML with your elements. Elements that provide sophisticated UI. Elements that is easy to use.
Is Polymer Web Components? Is it elements?
Polymer is neither. Polymer enables you to build your own custom elements and is built on top of web components.
Against prejudice, Polymer is not a framework and should not be compared to other web frameworks.
Polymer allows you to easily create a modern website following the modern web standards. You just have to select the elements you need from the Polymer Catalog, they even grouped the elements according to their use for easy selection.
Polymer still has limited browser support particularly with old browsers because it is still in its infancy. Eventually, developers will create a way that will support these browsers in the future Another good thing is that Polymer is open-source. Developers around the world can contribute to the development of this project.
Getting started on Polymer requires you to have prior knowledge of Javascript DOM. It is recommended to use Bower package manager to download the components necessary for the project. Polymer provides a complete guide and resources for you to get started with your web development process. You can find them at Polymer-Project.
No more reading a whole book about modern web development, using Polymer covers it all.
At Project Assistant, we always stay with the trend of Web Development. As apparent with our extensive portfolio, we have created websites that follow the modern web design standards to make our clients satisfied. We make sure that the website is viewable on all devices, will it be desktop, tablet or mobile.
Now we’re done with the introduction to Polymer and Material Design, next time I’ll do a quick tutorial on getting started with Polymer.
