Material Design introduced by Google has become one of the fundamental visual languages in a digital design. You should implement this visual style to create good application for Android. To prepare your design in a more efficient way do not to start from the ground. This article will lead you through useful resources for your mobile solution.
Official Documentation
Material.io is recently launched site that is the center of official Material Design documentation. It contains the most useful articles, design guidelines, icons and other tools created by team of Googlers to help you discover this visual language.
Detailed design documentation is recommended to read for everyone who would like to deliver outstanding UX in their apps. Basic resources are available to download from: https://material.google.com/resources/sticker-sheets-icons.html#sticker-sheets-icons-system-icons. However, official website is not the only source of great design resources. Below you can find most useful ones organized in categories.
UI Kits
Every UI Designer loves to kickstart project with basic UI Kits. These resources are very useful and save lots of time which would be spend on creating from scratch each UI Control of Android platform.
Official UI Template from Google (Sketch)
Sepia Material UI Kit (Photoshop)
Icons
Material Design introduces specific icon style for two purposes. The first, product icons are very colorful ones with shades and delightful details are dedicated for app’s launcher icon symbols. The other, in-app system icons that are usually monocolor flat pictograms.
Product Icons
Icon template by Yalantis (Photoshop)
App Icon Template Android & iOS (Sketch)
System icons
Official Material Icons (Multiple file types)
MaterialDesignIcons.com (Multiple file types)
Inspiration
With new UI Kits and Icon templates you can start to create your outstanding UI Designs. However, you can read a little bit more and get inspired to create even better ideas.
Material Up
https://material.uplabs.com Showcase for all Material Design lovers. You will find there plenty of application UI design, product icons, animated interactions presented in a clear way.
Pttrns
Screenshots from high quality real apps. Site http://pttrns.com is great for the initial market research. It contains not only Material Design app screenshots, but also UIs from other platforms. Moreover authors have recently added section with inspiring articles from web.
Bonus!
UXPin is known for its impressive prototyping tools. They also prepares free e-books with useful content. There is also one that may be worth-reading after downloading mentioned design resources. It includes tips, trends and examples needed to succeed with Android application. You can get “Material Design for Mobile” from this link: https://www.uxpin.com/studio/ebooks/mobile-material-design-trends-2016/ .
To sum up.
There are hundreds of graphical resources for designers to start creating mobile products. Material Design is constantly evolving with every Android version release. It’s important to stay up to date with this changes and align our designs to it’s guidelines. I hope this handpicked ones will help you to design your successful app. If you are also interested in iOS Design check out the best free resources for this platform here.
