We’re excited to announce the launch of Material Dashboard Shadcn, a free, open-source admin dashboard that combines the best of Shadcn/UI components with the clean, scalable design system of Material Design by Creative Tim.

Whether you're building an internal tool, a SaaS product, or a startup admin panel, this dashboard gives you a production-ready foundation beautifully designed, developer-friendly, and built for speed.

What is Material Dashboard Shadcn?

Material Dashboard Shadcn is a fully responsive admin panel template built using:

• 🧩 Shadcn/UI: Accessible, headless components designed for modern React apps.
• 🎨 Material Tailwind: A Material Design system tailored for Tailwind CSS.
• 🚀 Tailwind CSS: The utility-first CSS framework loved by developers.

With a modular structure and scalable architecture, this free dashboard helps developers build polished apps faster without getting lost in boilerplate.

Key Features Developers Will Love

6+ Fully Coded Pages

No more starting from scratch. You’ll get ready-to-use pages like:

• Dashboard Overview
• User Profile
• Tables & Data
• Notifications
• Subscriptions
• Auth Pages: Sign In / Sign Up

Every page follows responsive, accessible, and production-level standards.

Beautiful UI with Shadcn + Material Design

Enjoy the best of both UI systems:

• Shadcn/UI offers accessible components and DX-first development.
• Creative Tim’s Material Tailwind ensures consistent spacing, color, and typography.

The result? A visually appealing and highly functional UI that’s easy to extend.

Component-Driven Architecture

Every element from buttons to inputs, to tables is fully modular and reusable.
Perfect for scaling and maintaining large applications.

Easy Customization with Tailwind CSS

Quickly tweak:

• 🎨 Colors
• 📐 Layouts
• 🔠 Typography
• ⚙️ Tailwind config

Built with Open-Source Power

Material Dashboard Shadcn Free was made possible by some of the best tools in the frontend world:

• ⚡ Tailwind CSS: Utility-first styling
• ⚙️ Shadcn/UI: Headless, accessible components
• 🎨 Material Tailwind: Enterprise-grade UI by Creative Tim
• 📦 Radix UI: Low-level UI primitives for accessibility

Figma Version, Design-First Access

To complement the code-first dashboard, we’re excited to also provide a Figma version of Material Dashboard Shadcn. Designers, product managers, and UI/UX teams can now explore and edit the visual system before any code is written.

What You’ll Find in the Figma File

• All major screens and layouts (Dashboard, Profile, Tables, Notifications, Sign In / Sign Up, etc.)
• Material Design styling tokens (colors, typography, spacing)
• Component library in Figma (buttons, form inputs, cards, navigation elements)
• Symbols & variants that match the modular structure of the coded version
• Easy-to-use design templates for new pages or custom flows

🔗 Access the Figma File

You can browse, duplicate, or embed the Figma design here:
Material Dashboard Shadcn Figma Community File

Note: The Figma file is read‑only by default; please duplicate it into your personal workspace if you want to edit or adapt it for your project.

⚡ Ready to Build Faster?

Skip the boilerplate. Start with something beautiful, scalable, and free.

👉 Download Material Dashboard Shadcn
🔗 Live Preview
📃 View Documentation

Build stunning admin panels, CRM systems, or SaaS dashboards and save hundreds of hours in development and design time.

We are happy to announce that Vue Material is now a part of the Creative Tim family. We are looking to make the development environment easier for developers looking to create a better web. Therefore, our new acquisition will broaden our platform to deliver more high-quality and various products to our users.

What is Vue Material

Vue Material is an open-source, simple, lightweight framework built exactly according to the Google Material Design specs. It helps developers build well-designed apps that can fit on every screen with support to all modern Web Browsers. Using Vue Material you can generate and use themes dynamically, use components on demand, take advantage of UI Elements and Components with an easy-to-use API.
Visit here the official page.

Vue Material framework has already been embraced by millions of developers (1.9M downloads on Github) and we want to keep this open-source product updated and ready to help devs build beautiful apps.

We thank you for being with us and looking forward to your continuous support and active maintainers/contributors ❤️

Curious about the Creative Tim family? Check out our Resources!

Hi there! I feel like I should share my recent experience with design resources. Well, what do I mean? I can see more and more website designers able to create the right product but still looking for a solution to cover some more needs. At this moment I want to tell that sometimes a template should have an extended functionality or a plugin maybe not enough to complete the designing goal. Also, an infographic set may require something more than just symbols and figures combination and so on.

Tired of searching for the best theme or template for your next Angular project? Yes, we know! There is a lot on the market but they do not always fit your needs. Probably because of the design, the components or the code’s quality. Knowing this, we’ve gathered a list of 10+ cool Angular Material Themes which are using or are inspired by Google’s Material Design.

Material is an adaptable system of guidelines, components, and tools that support the best practices of user interface design. Backed by open-source code, Material streamlines collaboration between designers and developers and helps teams quickly build beautiful products.

The Ultimate UI/UX Design Course - Take the UI/UX best practices to the next level with our fully coded examples included! ⏰ 80% OFF Special Offer

Now let’s check out these useful Angular Material themes & template. They are not ordered by preference. Let us know if you can find one to use in your dev project! 🔥

Angular Material Themes Examples

1. Material Dashboard Angular

Material Dashboard Angular is a free Material Bootstrap 4 Admin with a fresh, new design inspired by Google’s Material Design. We are very excited to introduce our take on the material concepts through an easy to use and beautiful set of components. Material Dashboard Angular is built with Angular 9 and makes use of light, surface and movement. The general layout resembles sheets of paper following multiple different layers so that the depth and order are obvious. The navigation stays mainly on the left sidebar and the content is on the right inside the main panel.

This product came as a result of users asking for a material dashboard after we released our successful Material Kit and Material Dashboard. We developed it based on your feedback and it is a powerful bootstrap admin dashboard, which allows you to build products like admin panels, content management systems and CRMs.

Features:

• 60 Handcrafted Elements
• 2 Customized Plugins
• 3 Example Pages

Pricing: FREE

Download   Live Preview  Get Hosting

2. Fully – Angular Admin Template

Fully – Angular Admin Template is a premium Material Bootstrap 4 Admin with a fresh and professional design. It is a collection of common features and uses cases, UI screens and components that you can use as a whole like a starter template for your next project or cherry-pick the specific features and components you want to add to your existing Angular.
This template is built 100% with Angular to ensure no bloated dependencies.

Features:

• Angular 8 & Angular Material & Bootstrap 4
• Multiple Layouts
• Lazy loading
• Form Validations, Data tables, Charts
• Image/File uploader
• Notifications & Autocomplete
• and many more!

Pricing: $39

Download   Live Preview  Get Hosting

3. Material Dashboard PRO Angular

Material Dashboard PRO Angular 9 is a Premium Material Bootstrap 4 Admin with a fresh, new design inspired by Google’s Material Design. It is based on the popular Bootstrap framework and comes packed with multiple third-party plugins. All components are built to fit perfectly with each other while aligning to the material concepts.

This dashboard can help you build admin panels, CRMs or content management systems. Material Dashboard PRO Angular has the same line of design as the Material Kit PRO, so they will help you have the presentation pages of your site and the Admin/CMS having the same design trend. If you think you will need more landing and example pages, be sure to check it out. If you love the material design, you’ll probably enjoy using these products! We recommend you to use them separately and not to try to combine their CSS and JS files.

Features:

• 200 Handcrafted Elements
• 15 Customized Plugins
• 6 Example Pages

Pricing: $59

Download   Live Preview  Get Hosting

4. Annular

Annular is a powerful and creative Material Design Admin Template based on Angular 7 and Angular-CLI. Using such a great tool like Angular-Cli, it’s really easy to maintain. The template is fully responsive and clean on every device and on every modern browser. The code is super easy to understand and gives power to any developer to turn this template into the real web application.

Features:

• Angular Material Design
• Lazy Loading Routes
• ngx-datatable
• ngx-charts
• and many more!

Pricing: FREE

Download   Live Preview  Get Hosting

5. Material Dash

Material Dash Angular is an Angular dashboard template featuring Google’s Material Design guidelines. It features a sober color palette and it has multiple layouts and tons of UI elements.

Pricing: starting from $25.

Download   Live Preview  Get Hosting

6. ArchitectUI

ArchitectUI is a modern Angular 7 Bootstrap 4 Material Design Admin Template. ArchitectUI comes packed with elements, components and widgets nicely bundled together for perfect consistency, scalability and modularity.

Features:

• 30+ variations of chart boxes
• 50+ unique elements
• 10+ different chart plugins
• 20+ different form widgets & components
• and many more!

Pricing: $35

Download   Live Preview  Get Hosting

7. Material Angular Dashboard

Material Angular Dashboard is absolutely free for commercial usage and open-source theme, based on Google Material Design guidelines. It is the first dark dashboard with Google’ Material Design and Angular, perfect for 2025′ Web Design trend.

Features:

• Angular & Material Design
• TypeScript
• Responsive dark material design. DARK, Carl!
• User experience focused
• and many more!

Pricing: FREE

Download   Live Preview  Get Hosting

8. Ng-Matero

Ng-Matero is an Angular admin template made with Material components.

Features:

• Schematics support
• Modern design style
• Various layout
• Powerful colour system
• and many more!

Pricing: FREE

Download   Live Preview  Get Hosting

9. Degree Material Design Admin

Degree Material Design Admin Template is based on Angular Material framework. It uses gulp as a task runner, sass for organising CSS files, AngularJS for frontend code. You can use this admin template as a starter for web apps. The template works best in all devices and mobile-friendly. It is also free and open-source.

Pricing: FREE

Download   Live Preview  Get Hosting

10. Angular Material Dashboard

Angular Material Dashboard is an open-source and responsive Angular admin dashboard with Material Design based on Angular Material.

Feature:

• AngularJS
• Angular UI Router
• Angular Material
• Sass styles
• Gulp build
• Stylish, clean, responsive layout with an original design
• BrowserSync for the ease of development

Pricing: FREE

Download   Live Preview  Get Hosting

Additional Information

1. What are Angular Material themes?
   Angular Material themes are pre-designed UI templates that follow Google’s Material Design guidelines. They are built using Angular and Angular Material components, providing a cohesive and modern look to web applications with minimal effort.

2. Why should I use Angular Material themes for my project?
   Using Angular Material themes helps you save time on design and development by providing ready-made components, layouts, and styles. They are customizable, responsive, and follow best practices for user interface design, making them a great choice for creating professional-looking applications quickly.

3. Are these themes free?
   Most of the themes listed in the article are free, but some are premium or have paid versions offering additional features. The pricing for each theme is mentioned alongside its description, so you can choose one that fits your budget.

4. Can I customize these themes?
   Yes, all Angular Material themes are customizable. You can modify components, styles, colors, and layouts to fit your project requirements. Themes often include Sass files or configuration settings that allow you to make adjustments easily.

5. Do I need coding skills to use these themes?
   Yes, basic knowledge of Angular and TypeScript is necessary to use these themes effectively. Familiarity with Angular CLI and Angular Material components will also help in customizing and integrating the themes into your project.

6. Can I use these themes for commercial projects?
   Many of these themes are open-source and can be used for commercial projects. However, it's always advisable to review the license agreements of each theme to ensure compliance, especially for premium versions.

7. What are some popular features of these Angular Material themes?
   Common features include a variety of pre-built UI components, multiple layout options, charts, form validations, dark mode, and various plugins. Themes like Material Dashboard PRO Angular and Fully – Angular Admin Template also offer advanced features like lazy loading, image/file uploaders, and schematics support.

8. Can I integrate these themes with backend frameworks?
   Yes, Angular Material themes can be integrated with various backend technologies like Node.js, ASP.NET, or Python frameworks. You will need to connect your backend APIs with the frontend components of the theme.

Final thoughts

Creating your web design from scratch with dedicated designers can be very expensive. Using these solutions you don’t have to worry about design. These Angular Material themes can really help you save time, money and energy!

Did you find your favourite one? ❤️

PS. Here‘s a list of useful Free & Open-Source Angular components and libraries…you should check it out! 😉

Two developers and an entrepreneur walk into a bar. They read a Medium article saying that beer doesn’t make you fat, it makes you Lean. They’re somewhat relieved because they were going to drink lots of it. They`re all starting new projects soon: a news portal, lightweight e-commerce, and a business blog. 

The three of them order the regular and they’re really surprised when the bartender brings them something else. The label reads “Material Blog Laravel”. 

“What’s this?” asks the entrepreneur. “It’s not what we ordered.”

“I can tell you what it’s not. It’s not one of your regular, boring WordPress websites” answered the bartender. “It not only looks better (I mean Material Design, c’mon), but it’s fully Laravel powered. Do you know what this means? This means you get everything you need in a blog already implemented. And you get it implemented in one of the most popular web development frameworks today. No more frontend – backend integration issues. Less time juggling clunky plugins to customize your website and more time to chill at the pub with your friends.”

“We’re not friends” answered one of the developers, failing the “socially acceptable thing to say in a  group” test. 

Friends or no friends, the three of them are now thinking the same thing. This could really help them get the CMS they’re supposed to build off the ground. They all look excited (“mildly interested” in developer terms). Each for their own reasons.  

Source

The first developer is a Laravel buff. He’s the type who browses Laravel collections for fun, follows Taylor Otwell on Twitter and adopted Laravel since version 1.0. He’s really excited to start the new project using his favourite framework. He could have written all this himself, but why bother reinventing the wheel. Material Blog Laravel already has user management, role management, category, tag and article management in place. He’s happy to focus on cool customizations instead and on growing the project even further. Plus, have you seen all those “build a blog with Laravel” tutorials and how the end result looks like? It’s about time we had a Laravel blog that looks as good as the code behind it.

Source

The entrepreneur just hates WordPress. He couldn’t care less about Laravel, but, man, the thought of building just one more WordPress website makes him nauseous. He’s been looking for a better option for some time now. One which doesn`t make all websites look the same, due to cheap themes and misunderstanding the business value of design. Less clunky, less vulnerable to security issues and allowing a lot more flexibility, without having to write everything from scratch or having to ask the Laravel guy to do the entire backend for a lot of money. Plus, something with an actually usable admin panel, not the cluttered mess he has been battling so far.  

Source

The second developer doesn’t love or hate anything. Or at least, he hasn’t worked with WordPress enough to hate it. He considers himself quite pragmatic. He’s interested in what the market has to offer and he likes to carefully consider all his options. Material Blog Laravel sounds like a good fit because it brings to the table just the right amount of boilerplate code and customization options. Plus, it comes with a ton of additional free components he can use in other projects. He not only gets the frontend design and backend, but also hundreds of UI components and example pages which go into Material Kit PRO and Material Dashboard PRO. Pretty good deal for “just” a blog.  

The three of them nod almost at the same time. “Fine, we`ll give it a shot!” 

The bartender nods back, pointing to the back of the label: “You`ll find more useful information here.”

THE LABEL

Material Blog Laravel has all the core features you need in a blog, right out of the box. It comes with a beautifully designed frontend, inspired by Material Design principles, and a fully integrated Laravel backend. It can also be a great starting point for other types of CMS. 

You get all this just by downloading it.  

Role-based authentication

Your users can log in as admins, authors or members and have default privilege levels based on their role. 

• Admins can manage both content and users.
• Authors can manage content. 
• Members can only comment on articles once logged in and they can edit their profile information. 

Fully-implemented content and user management

Content management

• Users can create, edit and delete article categories and add a suggestive image and description for each category.
• Users can manage and color-code tags for better article management.
• This is probably one of the functionalities which will save you the most time, as every article has a picture, belongs to a category and can have multiple tags.

User management

• Each user has a role, which dictates the privilege level. 
• Admins can add, edit or delete users and roles.
• You have the option of editing the logged in user`s profile, including personal details and passwords.

Beautifully functional design

More than some example pages, you get a fully functional design for the entire blog, both frontend, and admin. Click around in the Live Preview to see what it looks like. Then log in as admin, author or member to see what it can do.   

Admin panel design is based on Material Dashboard PRO (which you also get, for free) and includes:

• Dashboard with statistics
• User profile
• Role and user management
• Article, category and tag management

Frontend design includes:

• Blog homepage
• Articles by author or tag page
• Category page
• Article page
• Login page

Additional Material goodies included

The blog`s frontend is built using Material Kit PRO and Material Dashboard PRO, which you also get, for free, in addition to the blog. This means hundreds of handcrafted elements and example pages for your current and upcoming projects.

Ready to get started with Material Blog Pro Laravel?

Right now you’re probably wondering how on earth did so much information fit on a tiny label. It had a QR code, okay?! You can also sample our delicious Material Blog PRO Laravel here.     

A Minimal Viable Product is a bare minimum of features for your product with which you’re expecting to solve a problem.

It’s one of the fastest and most utilized approaches for startups around the world to validate a business idea. Utilizing an MVP to test out the market is additionally a tremendous and quick step to avoid potential disappointment.

You collect feedback and identify user needs and possibly observe something important, which customers might like or not, and which you can share with your already hired mobile app development company, to modify planning way up the front of the full development cycle.

Why Flutter is the ultimate solution for MVP’s

Clients today require the most focus around the development time, which often comes even before the project budget. The primary purpose behind that is, obviously, to have a competitive advantage, reducing time to market and getting to it before another person does. Validating a business idea becomes more comfortable when you have an MVP. A statistic reveals that more than 70% of tech startups fail to thrive, typically around 20 months after they get the first financing, fundamentally because of poor market research.

However, when you run a test using an MVP, the difference can be huge. It can prevent business failures, as you can get feedback and find out the needs of your customers. An MVP serves as a tool to realize the true potential of a given thought. Accordingly, you can plan the right direction for steering your business.

Background about Flutter and hybrid apps

Xamarin, a company which is presently owned by Microsoft, emerged in 2011 to encourage better hybrid app development. This brought about a transformation in the development of hybrid apps. The idea was to simplify the coding and utilize the same code for developing apps on both platforms.

Next, Ionic gained popularity in 2013, and Drift Co. was behind this development. The developers could think of sophisticated apps, using their existing capacities.

React.js was used by Facebook in 2015 for mobile app development. This was the beginning of React Native, a relatively new code base for JavaScript. Other hybrid frameworks were additionally present in the market, which the developers avoided to carry out developments natively on Java.

In December 2018, Flutter 1.0 was released by Google. More than a year and a half, Google had the software in beta. The Dart programming language was utilized in this tool. Dart, developed by Google, is like C. It was easy to be used by developers who knew Java or C. They could flawlessly adapt to the language.

How Can Flutter Help in Building an MVP?

Launched in December 2018, Flutter has attracted several software development companies. It comes with enhanced features, bug fixes, and widgets. Being open-source, it complements MVP development.

The main reasons for the increasing popularity of Flutter include:

• Flutter has got a large community, supporting the users
• Business firms need not spend large amounts as licensing fees during experimentation
• App development becomes simplified, as Flutter speeds up the process

Building an application using Flutter shows that startups and business firms enjoy a dynamic setup. The dedicated widget engine in this cross-platform tool attracts UI components that resemble the native ones.

The UIs that are created using Flutter’s widgets are pleasing and flexible. These can be seamlessly enhanced and improved. By default, these UIs are very well structured. The developers can likewise customize the existing widgets, creating custom ones.

3 Ways in which Flutter can help in developing an MVP

Many mobile app developers and mobile app development companies have found certain unique features in Flutter, which they cannot enjoy somewhere else. The flexible user interface, easy integration, speed, and performance are some of the prime reasons for its popularity.

Let’s have a look at how developers are being benefited by Flutter when they work on MVPs.

1. The attractive design draws many investors

For startups and businesses, it is essential to bring investors with potential ideas that may convert. Flutter comes with an enhanced collection of UI features, interactive designs, and the latest technology. This can attract investors and customers alike.

However, Flutter considers everything to be a widget. The SDK supports Cupertino and Material Design, an assortment of behavioral, visual and motion-oriented widgets. This gives a convincing look to the applications, both on iOS and Android devices. Flutter supports the widgets that are accessible and helps the developers to customize widgets, as and when they need it. 2D GPU accelerated APIs are likewise supported by Flutter.

The developers also have access to an extensive range of themes. They can independently design themes for iOS and Android devices that render the best UI on a particular device.

2. Developing cost-effective apps

In the past, cost limitations used to be one of the critical hindrances for companies willing to launch new applications. However, Flutter has done away with this issue, given that it comes free of cost.

It supports the development of cross-platform apps, where the developers need to write a single code base. This fills the need for both Android and iOS platforms. This has facilitated up the process of working on both the platforms and one can at the same time to develop apps, reducing cost.

3. The speedy app development process

While building a complete product, developers require lesser time, thanks to Flutter. It comes with the hot reload feature, which enables the developers to view changes that have been made to the app coding immediately. When any change is made in the software, the developers can see it right away.

The hot reload feature also helps developers to fix bugs and add new elements within minutes. The experimentation process turns out to be faster, as the original version does not need to be coded entirely.

Flutter – A right choice for building an MVP

Like every piece of software, MVPs have their unique features each. Since the Flutter community enjoys immediate support from Google, it is vast enough to support any sort of product development.

Therefore, Flutter is the best decision for app developers under the following conditions.

• If you need a cost-effective solution to run your application, integrating evolving technology
• App developers looking forward to building apps in a reasonable way, with seamless rendering and features prepared for the market
• In case you need to come up with expressive UIs, Flutter brings you the best platform

Building exceptional and high-performance mobile apps need decent support from SDKs like Flutter. It can fit into the particular needs of the developers and many mobile app development companies, offering a good deal of customization. Ultimately, Flutter can complement businesses to build up their MVPs.

Let’s begin the UX design battle between the flat design and material design in a match to discover which interface design favors more usability by encouraging better user experiences. Since Google released material design, there is an ongoing debate over material design versus flat design to conclude which is the best? If you ask the web designers, come up with multiple answers and different opinions.

Two similar design styles mostly one based on the other to become a passing fad. What are the differences between the two? Is one inherently better than the   Let us begin   – the difference lies in the amount of skeuomorphism in each of them. In this context, the skeuomorphism is a visual design which is meant to imitate the physical world. It takes the form of online tools to look alike in the real world.

In this article, we will discuss which the best UI design is, and we hope that you will get answers to all questions such as – Which is the best mobile design? Should you move from flat design to material design or vice versa? And much more. We shall begin by knowing what flat design and material design is.

Google’s Material Design

This interface design was released by Google as a branded product with clear guidelines and principles. Each individual mobile app designer should follow these ground rules for making things look the same on every Android device.   The design tries to introduce some skeuomorphism in the most simplified design. It looks flat but stays multi-dimensional by making the product feel more intuitive when it comes to navigation by maintaining its simplicity. The thing about material design is that it helps designers to get a complete design language for creating applications that look and feel the same across variant platforms.

Apple’s Flat Design

The flat icons are more uninitiated as they use simple images to deliver your message quickly as compared to detailed illustrations. This directs the user attention towards valuable content as people are less likely to examine digital art instead of content reading.

Flat design is escaped from the multi-dimensional element by making feel like all objects are laying on a single interface. It does not have any stylistic elements like gradients, textures, and shadows which makes the flat design elements look smaller by speeding up the page load time.

Material design Vs. Flat design

It is vital to understand how Google and Apple are fierce competitors with its attractive features and user expectations. Google released the material design which has become a standard for Android app design whereas Apple does not have any official name by focusing more on clarity and depth. Let us see what makes it different from one another.

                                                                                         Image Source: evopedia.org

• Depth

The movement of the objects move in space and interact with each other while depending on light and surface. Both Google and Apple have various opinions when it comes to interaction with apps and devices. Apple believes that mobile devices are seen as a window into another world by embracing infinite depth in their apps whereas google supports that humans should interact with the components like they are stacked over one another. It believes that users should feel that they are holding the screen on the palm of their hand.

• Clarity

This feature can be platform specific and depends on what you are familiar with. Android users may recognize iOS icons instantly as Apple promotes gradients and blurred design while Google gives importance to drop shadows. Both the platforms replicate in real life in different ways as the center principle is simplicity for achieving perfect results indeed.

• Navigation

When it comes to a better UI one cannot afford to ignore the navigation as your app structure should be organized according to the contents and tasks the user wants to see. Google has made a fewer rule for navigation to give a significant level of flexibility for the designer by keeping a variety of action buttons and components that reveal various options. On the other side, Apple utilized a variant navigation system which is easy to understand and use.

When it comes to web development, both Google and Apple have an extensive belief system, as Google’s material design leans more on the human side of design while Apple’s flat design makes the users go straight into the facts. But still, both the companies believe in creating a tactile OS experience which makes the user feel unique in the arena of user interface design.

Summing up!

In current times, Apple’s flat design and Google’s material design are trendier with their own unique features. It actually sounds stupid to debate over the pros and cons for both the platforms. Material design was just a response to the radical flat approach, and flat design was evolved over the years which is already not flat. Nothing hinders you from combining these two designs to create your own excellent design version and reminds of the real-time world to make the intuitive interface. Keep Learning!

Needless to say St. Valentine’s Day is a marvelous occasion to celebrate something beautiful. For many decades, people have been treating this day as the most romantic time of the year. And what should you do if you still haven’t found the love of your life? In this case, don’t be upset! All in all, in 2019, this day is not for lovers only. Actually, St. Valentine’s Day is a happy time for sellers as well! For these simple reasons, in this post, we will show you how to get your website ready for Valentine’s Day!

You should not even consider developing any app until you are done with these 5 key things!

If I am to guess I would say you are here because you are looking forward to developing an app and probably a digital business. You are possibly feeling a combination of nervousness and excitement. Possibly you are green on where to begin, and that is alright. 

The tech world today may look discouraging especially for startups who are building their digital business for the first time. One of the key queries we are usually asked by our is what kind of strategies and planning are required to be designed prior to concept development. And rightfully so, this is a huge commitment. You need to ensure you are developing something that will provide value to end users.

If you are not going to add value to users, then why would you expect end users to use your product? And provide value to you in turn? Whether it is generating advertising income from sponsors or paying subscription cost, the value will remain two-way traffic.

This basically covers the vital “initial must do’s” before taking the plunge into any product development.

Product development is demanding and requires proper data backup plan during and after developing an app. It is crucial that you also employ the right recovery techniques should you lose your data without any backup. SDD data recovery techniques will help you recover any data lost in any form during and after app development.

Here are the 5 key things you need to accomplish before you commercialize any innovative app idea into a business.

1. Choosing the right platform

The discussion on choosing the right platform for your app can prove confusing entirely. However,  when choosing on between iOS and Android applications, think of a holistic User Interface (UI) that you can deliver explicit to your app.

This selection will not just influence developers; it also affects the flexibility and scope of the application. The type of coding needed for the development of a mobile app will furthermore decide the adaptability and utility of your app’s offering.

2. Conduct proper market research

Before performing any task, it is advisable that you do R&D. Developing an application is no different. You need to develop in-depth market research to help you obtain a valuable understanding of your competitors and the current market scenario.

The proper market research will also help you understand the various strategies used and the mistakes made by your competitors. You can easily learn from these mistakes and develop a better plan from it. Always ensure you involve users’ reviews in your research analysis. Query your target audience their need, evaluate real demands and take all the essential decisions to meet them.

3. Understand your users

Developing an app without understanding your target audience is similar to firing a shot plain in the dark. It is important that you know the needs of your customers as the success of your app squarely depends on understanding their needs. Your apps will never make its way to users if it does not add value or solve their problems.

Taking customer feedback always help a great deal. Take opinions and feedback from your targeted customers and know their needs. Align your objectives with user’s demands, and believe it nothing will stop your app.

4. Choose the correct app development company

The App’s idea is solely yours however, its execution is squarely depended on the App Development Company. Its execution depends on the development company you choose to work with. The development company plays a key role in ensuring that your App is aesthetic, intuitive, and user-friendly.

You must check and spell-out all the vital points listed below before selecting a development company:

• Read the company’s case studies
• Keep in mind the company’s time zone for effective communication
• Check the technologies used
• Contact other companies they have earlier worked with.

It is vital that your developer commands sound designing knowledge in order to provide the exceptional user experience. The developer must put into consideration the app usability, by building the application is a way that users can perform their designated functions without getting assistance.

5. Justify your reason for developing an app

This may look like the least demanding inquiry you should answer. However, being a requirement that you brief your developers about your app, you must first articulate the exact purpose for developing the app.

Defining variations between the website and the app offerings is critical. A strategic clarity on how uniquely you will offer the services to your customers through the app than the website must stand out.

It is important that you have a clear vision for building the mobile app. Also, the vision must be in alignment with your business objectives and how the app will achieve the same.

Conclusion

Keeping these five key things in mind before developing an app will make your app less crumbly. Therefore, mobile applications development is basically a strategic call instead of a technical call, hence must be nurtured inherently in the company’s objectives and values. While developing your app, it is also important that you consider putting in place data recovery plans in an event that you lose your data. SSD data recovery techniques are very helpful for all types of data recovery you may need.

Ever found yourself looking for stock photos online with zero results? Or maybe, you once needed artistic Photoshop brushes and patterns? Or a set of Illustrator templates? If you’re a professional web designer, advertiser, or blogger, you often need to have quality resources in one place.

In this respect, MasterBundles is literally a magic vault holding a gazillion of high-quality resources created by professionals working in design! At that, the pricing policies are so affordable, one can purchase resources having a very limited budget. Full-stack professionals involved in various aspects of design and marketing often need to optimize their workflow to meet the deadlines. Graphics Bundles can become a wise investment in your further work.

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Material design has gained a significant hype not only because it has been integrated into the Android-based projects, but for the web-based projects as well.

As a gentle reminder for you, the concept of material design was coined by Google with its Google I/O 2014 keynote. The presentation has already been viewed 1.8 million times up to now and is considered a great resource for gaining insights about the material design and what should be our approach towards it.

Do you really need the ‘Material Design’?

So first of all, you need to decide whether the concept of material design is something you should be well-versed about and consider using in your work.

However, like the usual scenario with such questions, there isn’t any specific solution that works for all.

Let’s look at this a bit differently.

One thing that you’ll surely agree upon is that great designs are defined by their uniqueness and functionality. It’s getting quite obvious these days that functionality is the most important parameter. To cut it short, the beauty of the design just for its own sake doesn’t make any sense.

Hence, whenever you think about integrating the principles of material design, you should first try to find their relevance with the goals that you want to meet through your design.

Basically, answer the below question for your own self:

“Are the guidelines and principles of material design workable for the achievements that I want to accomplish?”

Moving forward, let’s dig deeper into what the material design principles convey:

1) Get acquainted with the Key Resource

If you want to gain specific knowledge about material design, the best point to start with is the Google’s official resource.

It is continuously updated and contains all the comprehensive details required to build material designs.

The best thing about this resource is that it doesn’t only focus on the Android-specific aspects of material design, but covers the entire aspect of material design in regards to any project – be it the app or web-based.

It is highly preferable to at least go through the initial chapters of this resource for getting acquainted with the fundamental principles.

2) Know What’s ‘Material’ in Material Design

The term material design is nowhere near to being coincidental. Basically, the core idea of material design principles is focused on making designs that impersonate the real world, but only to a certain extent of generalisation.

You don’t want a design that looks overwhelming up to a particular level where it looks like the real world resembling the given element. What you want is to express the idea of ‘material’ to your users.

Here’s the catch. We all understand what ‘material’ is. We can easily describe how a metal thing feels like; we know how a typical wooden desk looks like. We are also capable of understanding the difference between the multiple pieces of stuff layered on each other. For instance, we can easily recognise a pin lying on a piece of paper placed on the table.

So basically you need to learn the best tactics to narrate the same hierarchy of elements for building a material design. The only thing to keep in mind is – you have to use bare minimum design tools like shadows, shades etc.

3) Make Use of Shadows to Define Hierarchies

The prominent tools for material design are edges, surfaces, lighting and realistic shadows. Adding weight to your designs is important, but you have to be precise with the amount of elements you use.

For example, shadows serve you as the best tool to convey the hierarchy of different elements that contribute to a complete design. By making a decision on how to cast the realistic shadows over each other, you’re reflecting the visual hierarchy of those elements and their base layers.

What’s important here is the overall design structure and if the shadow structure makes any sense to the human eye – is it demonstrating the real material?

4) Make Use of Bold Colours

The three main principles of the material design are being bold, depictive and purposefulness.

Material design is undoubtedly a design made with a minimalistic approach. In simple words, you aren’t required to employ numerous designing tools and style preferences. However, designers have to respect this limit and find an alternative to creating something meaningful without moving out of focus.

One of the few material things you can use is colour. Precisely, bold colour often shouts louder.

Bold colours play a key role in highlighting the material design, they help to make things more interesting. They compel the users to interact with the design in an enjoyable manner.

Here’s an example for you:

5) Don’t Overlook the Primary and the Accent Colour

The best way to adapt this principle to any type of design is – choose three hues that will serve as the primary palette, with one colour that will be serving the accent.

The primary colours you choose can be used in key elements of the interface including fields, boxes, backgrounds, fonts etc. And, the accent colour is exactly what its name suggests – it offers you an additional advantage when you want the main element to be displayed on a particular screen.

Needless to mention, the accent colour chosen should be of higher contrast than that of primary hues.

6) Make Good Use of Whitespace

Material design is highly influenced by the traditional print design including the principles of it.

Like, whitespace that serves as an integral component of any material design. It helps in improving the layout of text and the typography immensely.

In reality, whitespace is the most powerful tool to create focus, stealing the user’s attention and driving the focus to a particular element.

So, to cut the story short, make use of some large-sized typography for the main headings, add plenty of whitespaces, and don’t hesitate to keep enough blank spaces in your overall design.

7) Follow the Newest Trend of Edge-to-Edge Images

Material designs are completely image-friendly. This implies that if you have decided to add some images to your design, you have to assign them a leading role.

Images included in material design possess an edge-to-edge fashion i.e. there aren’t any margins separating the edge of the image from the edge of the window or the screen.

When done appropriately, this creates an exciting experience for the user, leveraging designers with some extra designing tools apart from per-approved sets of colour palettes, shadows and layers.

8) For Image-centered Design, Extract colours used in Images

Coming onto the images, Google fosters us to take out colours from the images that are used in the designs, and include them in the colour palette.

It’s tough to argue against this reasoning. Adapting such a method will definitely create a consistent experience for the user, creating an impressive stance that everything is in the right order and makes a perfect fit.

9) Embrace Motion

According to the Google, motion offers meaning to a design.

When working with material design, motion is a component that has to be included. After all, we are used to experiencing motion in our everyday life. It helps us get a better understanding about the functionality of things and where should we drive our focus.

Material design works on the same principle and makes use of motion for interacting with users, effectively helping them to understand the usability of the design.

What are the elements that can be used in motion? Just give the user some flashback about the action they just performed. For example, did they just confirm something? Animate that the system has received the input.

10) Motion should be Authentic

‘Authentic’ is the thing here. Gone are the days of fake motion when things used to move around the screen. In the modern day scenario, if you want to include motion, you will have to make it real, complying with the laws of physics and the functionality of things in the real world.

Google has reserved a separate section of material design guidelines for detailing the concept of authentic motion.

Those guidelines explain the process of introducing weight and mass, acceleration and deceleration and how making things easy work.

For the material design, motion comes as an ability to mirror the motion the user experience in real-life things. It’s the only way through which motion can enhance the interface and make it easy-to-understand for the users.

11) Everything should be Responsive

Making the things accessible and usable on every device regardless of its screen size is one of the salient principles of material design. Keeping everything else at a bay, the objective is to deliver a consistent experience. This way, the user won’t feel confused on switching between the devices, as they won’t be getting a new interface every time they change the device.

With a great material design, they can transit without any much hindrance and will continue to use the website or app right from the edge they left it off.

Basically, this implies that the design must be responsive. Fortunately, due to advanced frameworks, half of your work is already done, so building up a responsive design won’t be a challenging task for you.

12) Don’t Forget, Success lies in the details

The element that can make building a material design a tough task to accomplish without any flaws is the restriction that you should keep everything simplified.

The best instance here could be the skeuomorphic design. Its guideline is quite simple – make every single element of your design resemble the real-life things as closely as possible.

So material design is simple yet happens to be most complicated at the same time.

To put it in simple terms, material design is all about details. All you need is a bit realism to express the functionality and objective of the thing you design. But at the same moment, don’t try to make things too simplified.

So what you think is the purpose of introducing the material design? Hope this post has cleared up this aspect to some extent.

Up until just a few years ago, Apple reigned supreme in the high-tech design world. Nobody else could touch the company or compete on the same level. High quality, well-planned design was at the core of who Apple was as a company. Conversely, Google and Microsoft were founded by intelligent engineers that focused on simplicity and efficiency.

That all changed just a few years ago however. Both Google and Microsoft woke up to the reality that great design is a competitive advantage – and they had a lot of catching up to do. Google released their Material design, and although they themselves are not the best at implementing, it’s nevertheless a huge improvement over what they had in the past. While still catching up to the pedigree of Apple, Google seems to be making more of an effort to spread their language far and wide.

Microsoft as well has been making leaps and bounds in their own design. Even though they can both be considered flops, both Zune and the Windows 8 products pushed the idea of a new design language. Initially their design was called Metro, but is now called Microsoft Design. Microsoft seeks to unify its wide range of devices and platforms into one cohesive design language, which is starting to show.

The infographic below from Coastal Creative shows the differences and similarities between these three tech giants, and who’s winning the design wars in 2015:

Image source: Coastal Creative

You are a so-called „real man”. You wear black and white. And once you finish your work, you come back to your home. Wearing a dress or a pair of jeans, you don’t even bother to wonder which colors you are wearing now. Colors don’t mean that much to you until you decide that you want to have your own webpage. Suddenly you realize that pink doesn’t work well with yellow and black doesn’t always suit everything…

How do you deal with the situation in which your designer asks you what kind of colors you would like to use? Especially if you have no clue what to use to make sure that your visitors don’t close your website after 3 seconds due to colors that are too bright.

No worries, today we will show you a few color generators which will take care of colors for you, let’s start!

Paletton – Color Generator

Front page screenshot of Palleton Color Generator

Everything is extremely easy here. What you have to do is choose your baseline color, play around with round buttons and… voila! Palleton has just chosen the right colors for you, which will match perfectly to rose, magnolia or any other color which you have chosen as a baseline.

This color generator will give you a detailed color name, RGB characteristic as well as a report which will let you see how this combination will look on real webpages, animations or artworks.

Striped Backgrounds

Parallel straps seem to be passé? The first thing which comes to your mind when you see them is the flag of some strange countries? You will quickly change your mind once you will have tried Striped Backgrounds. The generator will automatically choose 5 color strips that will look great together and you will be able to use them as a background on your social media profiles.

Stripe Color Generator

Front page screenshot of Stripe Color Generator

But if for some reason, you don’t like parallel strips, you can always check the combination of oblique straps. Stripe Generator offers you the possibility to generate a really nice striped background, where you can define the size of the straps, the background color or the tint of the stripe. This color generator also offers you the possibility to use predefined combinations created by other users.

StripeMania – Color Generator

If for some reason you didn’t like Stripe Generator, you can try StripeMania. It has similar functionality as Stripe Color Generator.

BgPatterns

BgPatterns proposes another interesting approach. Everything is based on repeating elements. BgPatterns let you choose a base symbol, which will be set in the background. It allows adjusting location, size, and opacity.

Backgroud Dotter

Front page screenshot of Backgroud Dotter

If you are fed up with straps already, you can always use Background Dotter. It starts creating the background in dots and adds a nice gradient towards the bottom. You can choose the background and the dot color yourself, as well as its size. Piece of cake!

Repper

If you don’t know how to spend 43 dollars and you would like to have a nice background, Repper is a good candidate. It can really do miracles. The only thing which you have to do is send your picture and Repper will create a kaleidoscope where our original image will get new shapes and forms. If you are a sceptic you should use the free demo version and check it yourself!

There is a new design for Android and it is called ‘Material’. It has been introduced at the Google IO developer week and has been regarded as a breakthrough ever since. The new design language is looking to blur out the difference between the web and apps and make for an unified experience.

The philosophy behind the design

Although the guidelines have been released fairly recently, it’s been said that the idea came years before. It’s more than likely a ‘need’ than a revolutionary ‘idea’. Google products have always had inconsistent design and lacked rules that make sense.

The new design has elements that have been the result of research regarding ink and paper and the way objects and materials interact in real life. The result is a strategy description and a few resources that they give away. This first step was definitely necessary as development moves into a wider area. Design across wearables, mobile, desktop and TV need to be consistent and leave the impression of visually similar elements. But it is surely not enough to make a difference to current products. The Google ‘Material’ redesign is expected to happen late this year and we are curious to see the actual result and how it will propagate to developers.

What you Should take from Material Design

After in-depth reading and research of the material design, we made a short summary of great concepts that can be integrated in your current work and produce better results. The need for more documents that cite general guidelines is huge. People that create technology products need to go back to the roots and find out what information makes sense in a world full of endless possibilities of visual organization.

So, let’s go through the general design guidelines of Material Design and how you can recreate it in your project. The detailed explanations are very well described in the Google Manifesto you can find at Google Guidelines.

Principles

The main idea of the Material Design is having an underlying structure spanning across devices. It makes use of light, surface, and movement. It uses a deliberate color choice, edge-to-edge imagery, and large scale typography. It promotes core functionalities, so they become apparent instantly.

Layout

The general layout resembles sheets of paper. You should try to imagine how you would arrange different layers so that the depth and order are obvious. Try to keep navigation on the left and actions on the right. Toolbars look the best as an extra layer in the top section. Don’t forget to ‘pull the furniture off the wall!’, that means you should give your containers padding and try to keep a clear view of the content.

Don’t forget that depth is not ornament and the larger screen doesn’t mean larger capacity of the brain, so think mobile first!

Shadows on the top are for depth and below for definition of the element. Put the content forward and define dividers where necessary. Avoid L-shaped containers at all costs!

Style

Use bold shadows and highlights. Go overboard with vibrant colors and place attention on an accent color!

Animation

Make sense of gentle acceleration and don’t surprise the user with elements coming out of the blue. Enter and exit at peak velocity, let the paper have both a surface and a material reaction. Introduce the elements in the order of importance with consistent movements!

Typography & Icons

Use Roboto, you can find it here: Google Roboto Free Resource and mainly go with simple, rounded and consistent icons.

Pictures

Combine illustrations with images where possible, but don’t go overboard. And don’t use nasty stock photos that don’t say much about anything.

Buttons

There are 3 types of buttons you need: floating action buttons(like the infamous ‘+’) that describe a promoted action, the raised buttons that denote actions that should not get lost and flat buttons, mainly used in overlayers.

Use them carefully and with taste!

Cards

Represent single object and the actions associated with them. Don’t use cards when the content is not heavy or in homogeneous displays of information.

Failed Attempts so Far

The general guidelines have been fairly well explained and the examples are clear, but the design itself still doesn’t make sense. We took a look at first at the presentation page for the Material Design, and it doesn’t seem like it applies the principles.

There a detailed description of how animation needs to make the user feel comfortable and go smoothly inside the application, yet this is not implemented in the header, that goes from this:

Google Material Header 1

to this:

Google Material Design Header 2

in an instant and without animations.

The typography is said to have an ideal length of 60 characters, and yet, on long portions of the description Google has chosen to use at least 120 characters per line.

Google Material Design Typography

Google Material Design Description

It is unclear of whether this is because Google chose a font that is too small to read comfortably or because they forgot the rule they reinforce.

It is still unclear what the table of contents is doing after the small description for each chapter, since it can’t be used as navigation and does not describe where you are:

Google Material Design Table of Contents

And please, please Google try and use a sticky footer because when the page doesn’t have enough content it looks something like this:

Google Material Design Sticky Footer

Thoughts on how to create a sticky footer can be found in this great tutorial: https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/sticky-footer/

The burger icon in the top left opens a navigation and then leaves the page:

Google Material Design Navigation 1

Google Material Design Navigation 2

The basic principles talk about how to turn it into a back arrow or, at least keep it in the page as a shared elements between transitions.

The negative examples are numerous regarding the Google tutorial page, but we should move on to another bad example of the Material Design, the Google Drive. After switching to the new design, the situation looks like this:

Google Drive Overview

This might be better or worse than the previous version. That’s not completely clear. And by clear, we are suggesting that you cannot easily understand how the elements are arranged, what every item is representing and what is the interaction you can have with them.

The ‘Call to Action’ Button get easily overlooked by the big, red thumbnail images for files.

‘My drive’ opens a selection of actions, so why isn’t it called ‘Actions’ instead?

Google Drive My Drive Dropdown

The dialog regarding a file seems non-material design at all, it features the raised button on the left, when it theory it should be a flat button on the right:

Google Drive Dialog Window

What is up with this tooltip triggered by a second after the click action, coming out of the blue, aligned to the right?

{<13>}

Google Drive Tooltip

The examples could go on, but the general idea just points to the fact that there needs to be something seriously wrong between theory and practice in this particular case. We are fans of the philosophy of the material design and the possibilities that can come with it, but we are yet to see anything consistent implemented with it.

To sum up, reading the Material Design manifesto isn’t a waste of time, but if you want to understand the basics of design, we suggest going back to the roots and learning the essentials steps. Have a look at Don’t Make Me Think, it can teach you a lot. And try to make the most of the Material Design yourself, we are surely going to come up with something special regarding this subject. Stay tuned!