Erik Farmer
Programmer
Programmer
As part of my effort start more side projects I realized that I should probably start to deviate from vanilla Twitter Bootstrap. Don't get me wrong I love how easy it is to have a mobile ready site with little to no effort but with all my work at Google transitioning to use Material Design I wanted to shift to something more modern.
When I first heard of Material Design I thought it looked clean and simple and figured there must have been an official CSS repo ready to plug and play (ala Bootstrap) but as you can imagine I was less than thrilled to see that Material Design was more of a theory or set of guidelines than an actual framework. What is a programmer to do when you want something that hasn't been built? You build it yourself! Fortunately since I wanted to make my own MD library there have been a handful of frameworks to come out including Surface, Materialize, and even a Boostrap mod. However, because Material Design is a style and not a framework you can see that each has their own interpretation on certain elements. After an afternoon of extracting the particular elements I liked from each to create my own franken-framework I was feeling pretty please with myself.
Then this happened...
On one hand I am thrilled. I will no longer get into discussions with my tech lead over 18px vs 24px padding on our card elements or exactly how an MD button should look because we will have an official Google framework to use in our internal applications. The other part of me is curious about the future of Material Design. Bootstrap has been around for ~4 years and while you still see sites sporting the original look there is no shortage of people that extended the framework to create something different (such as Flatstrap or any of the Bootswatch themes). What will happen in 4 years when tastes change or Google comes out with a newer idea for web design that takes off? The beauty of bootstrap and its variants is that all of the elements use the same classes. Switching designs is as easy as swapping your stylesheet link.
I will without a doubt implement the official Google framework in an upcoming project. I am by no means an expert level designer and love tools that make that part of my work easier. Hopefully this new framework has solid class names and inspires front end devs with better taste than myself to continue to keep it fresh and exciting.
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