Google Looks To Spread Android’s Material Design With Material.IO

Google is launching a suite of tools to making it easier for developers to work together on apps and make better use of its Material Design philosophy.

The Material.io site has been designed to give developers an area access to tool that enable them to tap into the Google’s Material Design language as well as an are on which they can work on projects in a collaborative manner.

“Our new tools focus on different aspects of the product design process and streamline the way teams work, design, and build applications together. We’re previewing a few of them today, with more to come in the future,” said Google designer Nickolas Jitkoff.

Opening up Material Design

Currently the main tools on offer include the Gallery, which acts like the GitHub library offering software designers with a suite of designs made from the Material Design language which they can adopt in an open source fashion or add their own designs to the online repository.

The tool also allows designers to work on different iterations of the designs in one place rather than trying to share them via image files and cloud storage services.

The Stage tool allows for developers to quickly create prototype apps and demo how the design works at the early stages as they navigate their apps.

Remixer offers a tool that enables the creation of app prototypes which can be interacted with either on the website or through a mobile device, allowing changes to be made on the fly.

The Icons tool offers a library of over 900 icons sporting the Material Design, and Resizer does as its name suggests; allows for app to be tested to see how they handle being used on devices with different screen sizes.

Other tools include design guidelines for how to use the Material Design philosophy for apps and a comprehensive list of device sizes and screen resolutions.

By creating Material.io, Google appears to keen to push the adoption of its design ethos, spearheaded by the company’s vice president of design Matias Duarte, into other software.

This is timely given it has launched its latest Material Design leaden mobile operating system Android 7.0 Nougat, which can be found on its new Pixel smartphones.

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