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Comment by dman | Hacker News Reader

http://www.google.com/design/videos/making-material-design/ - cannot make up my mind if this video is purposely designed to come across as farce. I could easily imagine this being in a satirical comedy film.

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Yes, all these people talking as if there was a UI revolution going on. Nothing in this video convinces me that materials design solves any problem. Heck, they do not even identify a problem that it could solve. All we get is dropshadows (which were already lame in the 90ies) and fluffy designer bla bla.

That's not "designer bla bla". Please don't mistake design for decoration. This is "pixel-pusher bla bla".

I liked that none of them could reliably answer what exactly Material is at the start of the video. So much wankery.

The whole video felt like something Apple would put out.

That's precisely the point: Google is trying to convince everyone that they're as design-driven as Apple.

I can't tell if it's a 'grass is greener' thing, but after buying a Moto G in order to enjoy Lollipop/Material thinking the iOS flat redesign was lame. After a year of usage, I think lollipop isn't an improvement over KitKat, and worse than iOS (I do believe Apple knows some dark magic when it comes to user interfaces desktop or mobile).

More and more I'm thinking there are 3 levels of usage for a mobile device.

  - Fixed and instant: calling/answering/taking a picture
  - Semi instant: finding directions (often less urgent than the previous)
  - Complex: browsing, reading

the ~iPhone displaced the first level, which was the norm of dumbphone, fixed hardware interfaces. More and more OSes are aiming at making everything as the third. I can't get the lollipop phone interface in my mind, I'm even jealous of my mother's Bada based samsung.

It seemed worse to me. At least after watching Jony Ive talk about the "genius" of his design, I feel like I know what problem they're trying to solve and what they're doing to solve it. This video just seemed like a joke and the only real takeaway I have is that drop shadows are back for some reason.

I think there's a major difference:

- When Apple talks about design, they do talk about design; - When Google talks about design, they talk about swishing, swirling, rippling effects and all that jazz. Not design, basically.

Again, this is mistaking design for decoration. And this is something that engineering-driven companies typically do, when they try to say out loud that they care about design (or, in reality, when they try to look cool and fashionable/hip/whatever).

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