When Material Made Its Global Debut

Zach Gibson is a designer and creative director at Google, where he’s worked since 2012. He spent six years helping to create the Material system, then had a role in refining the Google Lens and AR experiences. From there he shifted to the Google Home app redesign, and is now focusing on Google Workspace.

Here — as part of our celebration of a decade of Material Design — Zach takes us back to the tactile start of Material, and the big moment the design system was given the spotlight at a Google engineering conference.

When I started at Google in 2012, I joined what was called the Art Department — a six-person team, supporting about 200 products across a company of over 35,000 people.

I was hired to make product icons and logos that fit within a then-recent design refresh called Kennedy. At the time, design systems weren't really a thing, so Kennedy was a big deal — it had a clear typographic hierarchy and consistency in buttons and iconography, and it introduced white space across products — but it only focused on top-tier Google web products.

After making a set of brand guidelines, we joined up with a team called UXA. They were doing for UI what we were doing for graphics, and together we started working on bringing this visual language across desktop and mobile. That was the beginning of the Material Design project.

The concept of Material Design focused on a material we’ve been familiar with for thousands of years: paper. We wanted to root our logic in how paper acts in the physical world, so it was a really tactile experience. We built iconography out of real paper to get different lighting and shadow effects. We explored how a piece of paper might move — like how it would maybe slide into the frame, rather than twirl. That helped us come up with rules around how our system might work.

We would also print things out on huge sheets of paper and hang them up on the wall at the beginning of every day to review the work, but also rip things down and crumple them up and throw them at each other at the end of every day. We spent a lot of time filling up ink cartridges, and waiting in line for the printers. Ultimately, being in a room together and being able to point and grunt at things is a very human way to design and create. Everyone who was working on it was so stoked. It really felt like a moment.

Then we found out that Material Design would debut at Google I/O. At the time, I/O was an engineering conference that focused on product launches and code labs. They didn’t talk about design. But Matías Duarte, VP of design, was going to be a keynote speaker.

I remember sitting outside on a late night after a long day before I/O, and we were just, like: “Holy crap. We’re redesigning Google.” In that moment it hit that we were working on the biggest design project happening in the world.

Looking back on it now, I still think that’s right. Within a year, over a million products in the Android store used parts of the Material Design system; it’s probably much more than that now. The way it’s proliferated, and impacted everything that we touch on an Android phone, and every button we click in a Google product, from Gmail, to Calendar, to Contacts, to Calculator, to Music — it’s just wild.

I’ve always loved Google's mission statement to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. The idea that we were out not just to improve Google, but also to build all these components, and then just give it all away. To democratize design, on that scale — that was new.