Material Design on the GPU: Text Rendering | Hacker News Reader

Material Design on the GPU: Text Rendering

mattdesl.svbtle.com

25 pointsmattdesl10 comments

I thought the reason why the modern "flat" movement existed at all was because text doesn't appear on a "regular" surface; its on a computer screen. The idea was that designers should be honest in their use of computer designs rather than emulate the real world, thus the rejection of skuemorphic design. Putting your button on a brick-like background doesnt make the button any more "real", as the surface exists only in the computer screen and thus doesnt actually have the raised edges, the difference in texture from the mortar, the weathering of the brick work etc.

It has more to do with a harking back to the principles of the swiss international typographic style and the bauhaus principles; honesty in design, modernism.

blah blah blah I don't know what my point is.

That's true as far as it goes, but supermarkets discovered that people feel better about the produce they're buying if the signs look like the handwritten chalk you'd see in e.g. an open-air market. Even if the signs are clearly just printed to look like chalk. "Honesty" may be desirable but it's not everything.

Apple and Google had to add shadows and background blurring to avoid people pointing out that they are following Microsoft's design.

Worth noting, while we're on the topic of design: The inline demo grabs page scrolling, and as such is really annoying.

It doesn't in Safari 8.0.5

Not when you have your mouse over the demo when you start to scroll?

Interesting.

Mildly interesting; mainly bad. If I'm click-wheel scrolling the page, that's what I want. A trap in the middle where suddenly the scrolling stops and an image starts to be resized gives a jarring feeling.

Speaking of material design, what's everyone's opinion on the best JS library? Polymer/webcomponents works spectacularly (i.e. indistinguishable from native) on Chrome on Android, but I'm getting terrible frame rates on the animations in vanilla iOS 7 and iOS 8 Safari.

Polymer/webcomponents/riotjs etc all have an overhead, even if taking/tackling different approaches... the virtual-dom used by Polymer has significant overhead until/unless browsers implement native support and even then optimize render paths, other frameworks will perform far better.

I find that React tends to be about the best compromise today that includes a complementary application flow (flux)... I think that RiotJS and Mercury are also worth considering.

0.8 is already in Alpha[1]. The release claims an improvement in runtime performance. You should give it a shot.

1: https://www.polymer-project.org/0.8/

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