When the Nitty Gritty Was a Big Deal

Philippe Cao is a design lead at Uniswap Labs, which is a contributor to the Uniswap Protocol, a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange. He worked at Google from 2014 to 2021, and on Material as a senior designer from 2016 to 2020.

Here — as part of our celebration of a decade of Material Design — Philippe remembers how a typography meeting at the beginning of his Material journey introduced him to the care that went into the design system, and why focusing on fundamentals made a major difference for designers and users.

I was an intern on the Android design team during the summer of 2013. At the time, design at Google really didn’t exist as a discipline the way that it does today — but even then, there was chatter about a new design system and visual language being developed. As a design student, it was really exciting to be around people who would end up being so formative to Material, and to be part of discussions around UI, digital products, and interaction in a very philosophical way.

I joined the Google Play team full-time in 2014, then moved to a designer role on Material in 2016. I showed up on my first or second day in New York and went to a meeting specifically about typography guidance: how to create a systematic approach to help users develop their type scale, determine line heights, and establish other factors based on font size.

Coming from a traditional graphic design background, it was amazing to get into the nitty gritty like that. I remember telling a friend: “Oh my god, we’re talking about leading — vertical text spacing. That’s crazy!” I felt at home, being able to be extremely nerdy about these tiny details.

When you’re designing design, it becomes kind of meta. As my career has become more entrenched in design systems, I’ve realized how much it means to think about design in this holistic way. How can a design system take away unnecessary burdens and empower designers to make beautiful, functional products?

For example, we thought a lot about accessibility. Accessibility is important for all designers to consider, but it can involve additional considerations, or make ideas more challenging to execute. How can we eliminate those challenges? One way is to offer designers a curated set of options — options that automatically populate an accessible color, type, state, shape, or spacing system — which simplifies the number of decisions. We were focused on making more space for designers to be as stylistically expressive as possible while making sure their products were effective and accessible.

Material was one of the first definitive resources that brought shape, language, and documentation to these ubiquitous — but unwritten — patterns that designers were instinctually using to make design cohesive. It was a luxury to have the space to be super thoughtful about things like corner radii, touch affordances, text contrast, and focus states, so that when other designers used Material, it just worked.

Design systems aren’t flashy. They’re not meant to be flashy. Very few designers are going to be like, “Holy crap, Material just dropped this new component!” Very few users are going to look at their phone and think, “Oh, I see they’re using the Material-recommended type size!” The impact feels more passive, or ambient — but it’s so important. I’m very lucky to have been a part of something that, by default, has influenced millions of designers and even more users. Material taught me to be unselfish about design. When people riff off what you’re doing, in this open-source spirit, it’s really gratifying.