When M3 Made Us Question Our Assumptions

Ayan Daniels is a visual designer. In her decade at Google she worked on Messages, Android, Pixel, and the second and third iterations of Material. She recently started at Airbnb, where she leads the interface design team.

Here, as part of our celebration of a decade of Material Design, Ayan shares some of the major transitions that marked the shift from Material 2 to Material 3 — and explains how Material 3 challenged designers across the company to question their assumptions.

I started at Google in 2015 right after college, and was there for almost ten years. I joined Material about five years in. I was working on Google Messages at the time, and did a redesign that got the attention of Bethany Fong, who was then one of Material’s design leads. I’m always finding female leaders I can learn from, and she was one of them. When she said she needed a new systems designer on Material, I couldn’t join quickly enough!

When I began in summer 2019 we were working on the Material 2 theme for Google products, which was about “build-from-white” with a few meaningful moments of color. It was a breath of fresh air, and it gave me a unique appreciation of color going forward. The other shift with Material 2 was that we reinserted the Google brand into our products: There was no mistaking that these were Google products.

Material 3 flipped everything on its head. When I first heard some of the concepts, I thought, Oh my. Designers were trying to do something they had never done before, and nothing was off the table. We were generating tons of ideas, and we didn’t have build-from-white anymore — it was build-from-whatever-the-user-wants, based on colors they chose. We put a lot of power in users’ hands.

These ideas were new and radical. Material 3 was a wild child. It asked us to check our assumptions and throw everything out the window except for what really matters. So we had to do a mental exercise: What does really matter?

As Google designers, we’ve learned a lot about what users expect since Material launched in 2014; there’s a careful balance between giving users what they expect while also surprising them. With Material 3 we thought, Let's see how far we can go! But we didn’t want to push things so far that our products weren’t usable anymore.

Real-world metaphors are typically how we understand virtual materials and Z-space. Elements on screen have a certain amount of depth, which shows how close they are to the screen and therefore how important they are. When someone taps their phone, they need to understand that their touch was registered by the phone through a visual, sonic, or haptic cue.

That input piece is so important: It’s where the product touches the person. This moment was something that I previously thought needed to be grounded in the real world. But Material 3 has a lot of these spirited moments that don’t necessarily map to real-world metaphors, and the touch input was one of them. It could change from a touch ripple into a magical sparkle — and it still worked. I grew to understand that in today’s digital space, things don’t always need to have the grounding that Material was initially known for.

The touch input is a nice way of looking at the differences between Material 2 and 3. The action still needs to be noticeable enough for the user to understand that they’ve been heard, but as long as the design is checking that box, we don’t have to take ourselves so seriously all the time. There should be room to show personality and humanity.

For many years, when I’d see someone on the subway using the Messages app, I knew it was exactly what I built. Now when I see people with Pixel phones, the phones look a lot of different ways. I think that’s a beautiful thing. I love that with this system you are your own art director — and that Google teams have made sure that it’s always going to be accessible and understandable, and that you have an innate sense of wayfinding.

I’ve been a student of Material from the very beginning. Throughout the iterations, I was also maturing as a designer. When I think back on the evolution of the system, I’m reminded of that Maya Angelou quote: “At the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.” It’s the same with me and Material.