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WRT the name, Material design is (very loosely) "Skeuomorphism in behavior, not in look".

The idea is that things should act like their physical counterparts where it makes sense. So when you slide a drawer in from the left, it should cast a shadow on something below it, it should slide over-top of things.

Things should always "come from" somewhere, instead of just fading in and out. They should have a "home", and that home should be consistent (EX: the drawer "lives" on the left of the screen, new items in a list should populate by zooming up from the bottom, etc...).

That doesn't mean you can't violate the "laws of physics" by having stuff change shape and size, but the animations and effects should convey a sense that the dialog box or element you are interacting with is a "physical" thing.

Opening a note in a ToDo app should zoom in from it's position in the list to the full screen, saving it should send it back to it's original location. 2 items at the same "elevation" on the screen should never slide over one another, they should either clearly go over or under one another. Deleting notes should send them offscreen somewhere, not just blink them out of existence. Buttons should ripple with ink from where you pressed them to convey that the click/touch was received. Action elements should stand out from the page like physical buttons with a shape and shadow and consistent positioning.

"Skeuomorphism with sheets of paper".

Material Design, contrary to the one you see in iOS or in Windows phone, isn't totally flat. The difference is that objects, such as popups and buttons, have shadows.

Also my main gripe with other flat designs is that it is now hard to see what things can be clicked, because now all of a sudden things are flat without a 3D hint, never-mind the tactile feel you'd get with real objects. But MD compensates not only with shadows, but also with its usage of animations, which are used to get hints about the objects you can interact with. Hence I disagree with you, as MD's direct opposite is not skeuomorphism ;-)

> it also drives me nuts that Google insists on forcing MD where it doesn't belong. They refuse to follow conventions on iOS

Have you seen Apple's apps on Android? I wouldn't blame you if you didn't, because Apple's only Android app is Apple Music and it's a piece of shit. At the very least Google's Play Music is usable on iOS.

To be fair, Apple Music is a piece of shit on iOS, too.

"my main gripe with other flat designs is that it is now hard to see what things can be clicked"

everything on the screen can be interacted with these days, so adding hints is pointless

I would argue that many apps/sites don't have UIs where everything can be interacted with these days, and therefore hints are very important.

Sample size of one..._but_ I love material design apps.

For me, it is a attempt to give folks simple / functional patterns that work across different screen sizes and encourage good behaviours such as widget reuse.

MD hopefully discourages organisations from making their own (often weird / lower quality) widgets that only work on certain screen sizes, certain platforms yak yak yak. Furthermore, the standard MD patterns, iconography etc. should decrease the time necessary to understand new apps - reducing user frustration.

I also love their color swatches[1] and naming convention as it allows devs to easily switch colors throughout their apps / widgets.

Sure some might view this as “utility” design _but_ it does give the great unwashed access to good design (quickly and at low/no cost). That enables folk to focus on adding some value.

[1]: https://material.google.com/style/color.html

> What do a bunch of geometric, flat-looking, solid colors have anything to do with "materials."

The idea of material design is not to by flat at all, but to use depth as a cue of information hierarchy. The material design spec has some more information on this:

https://material.google.com/material-design/environment.html...

But I think some of your points are valid - in that a lazy implementation of material design is essentially making things look Googley and calling it a day - sometimes resulting in flat design.

I don't get why on HN, every top voted comment in every submission is a negative criticism.

Often it's a tangent, or supplementary information. Either way, all of these add something to the discussion; it's hard to make a positive comment that's actually interesting.

Maybe you're reading HN submissions about things that people think are bad?

Middlebrow dismissal. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920

On the other hand if one reads from the bottom of the page the calibre of comment leaves a lot to be desired.

Ergo, scroll half way down and start reading. Problem solved.

Those who agree with the linked article tend to be less motivated to vote a concurring comment than those who disagree with the article and can't wait to express their disagreement via voting for a contrarian argument.

Things get interesting at the 2nd level; the highest voted reply to the top comment is usually a counter-counter-argument. The roles have been reversed and the yea-sayers are now more motivated to vote than nay-sayers. It's fascinating

I wonder if it's because of ties to academia. The academic origins of the internet, the Google/Stanford thing, the generally high quantity of people with degrees...

Academia is all about criticism. You don't succeed by doing something well, you succeed by situating something new in a context of previous work. That requires you first to understand previous work and its limitations.

Even in the business world, which is quite competitive, you can follow in footsteps. You can see how someone else created a hot dog stand, and just make your own. You don't have to find some flaw in the other hot dog stand, you just have to do it.

Academia demands you to find a flaw in the other hot dog stand and then argue that yours is different.

Coders seem to follow along in that path. We are always needing to find the next thing, so we are constantly finding ways to argue the existing stuff won't do.

I'm sorta indifferent to it, but these are what I've slowly picked up on.

> The name

I think what they are going for is a language agnostic building set of icons/interactions that sorta relate to real physical objects. Without becoming "floppy disk means save" in 2016

> The look

I think they want high contrast, and for it to work on any device aspect/orientation. And somehow take the previous to a pretty far conclusion.

> looks like you ripped off Google's stylesheet

I'm pretty sure this is just Google's site. Owner OrgName : Google Inc.

>I'm pretty sure this is just Google's site. Owner OrgName : Google Inc.

His full sentence was:

    The appeal: sites like this seem to be encouraging general usage, but then your site just looks like you ripped off Google's stylesheet.

I took it to mean:

Google is using sites like this to encourage general adoption of Material Design all over the web. But if you, as a designer, adopt Material Design for your own site, visitors to your site will just assume that you ripped off Google's site design.

>sites like this seem to be encouraging general usage, but then your site just looks like you ripped off Google's stylesheet.

I don't know why you'd use Material Design for a website. I thought that the purpose of Material Design was to provide a common design language for Android Apps, like the Apple Design Guidelines do for iOS apps. Moreover, Material Design, with its simple platonic shapes and solid colors, seems really targeted towards mobile use. Simple shapes and solid colors can be easily implemented with vector graphics, which means that it's easy to render them in a resolution-independent fashion.

My criticisms of material design come from watching inexperienced users (e.g. my parents) attempt to interact with Google's Material Design apps. My dad refuses to upgrade his Android 4.0 HTC phone specifically to avoid the newer versions of Google Maps. He finds the gestures to be undiscoverable and doesn't like the fact that it takes two to three more swipes to access the same functionality. This is especially a problem if you're using the phone one-handed, while walking around or driving.

Why not? It's not that hard and there is nothing special about it. Essentially it's an attempt to introduce consistency into interfaces they design. So people could learn and rely on certain colors, shapes and behaviors for certain things across many apps they use and use them intuitively. Of course there is some evil there too, like branding and being inconsistent with other platforms on purpose, but it's in everything they do these days.

Is there a version without all the ridiculous animations?