Material Theming: Making Material Your Own!

The web's ever-evolving landscape demands both creative flair and efficient, scalable design. Top products now rely on robust design systems to maintain brand coherence while prioritizing accessibility and user experience. Material Design, a Google design system, bridges the gap between creative expression and systematic development.

Initially, Material Design lacked the flexibility to fully express individual brand identities. Feedback highlighted two key areas for improvement: limited stylistic adaptability and insufficient tools for systematic brand implementation.

Introduced at Google I/O 2018, Material Design's theming capabilities address these concerns. Theming empowers designers and developers to leverage Material's strengths while customizing its appearance. This involves adjusting color, typography, and shape to create unique brand experiences.

This post focuses on web theming using CSS (specifically, SCSS). Let's illustrate with a basic login template built with Material Web Components.

Theming Explained

Material Design theming allows for global adjustments to color, typography, and shape, impacting all components. While seemingly limited, these adjustments significantly alter the design's overall feel.

Color Customization

Material.io provides a color picker to assist in color selection and contrast checking. Using SCSS, we can easily modify the login screen's appearance:

$mdc-theme-primary: #26418f;
$mdc-theme-secondary: #d1c4e9;
$mdc-theme-background: #fdf6f9;

Material automatically sets $mdc-theme-on-primary to white for accessibility. You can override text colors with $mdc-theme-on-primary and $mdc-theme-on-secondary.

Typography Adjustments

Material provides a base typography scale customizable through theming. Typography can be adjusted for each headline level using CSS classes or mixins. We'll use Google Fonts for ease:

@import url('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Josefin Sans');
$mdc-typography-font-family: unquote("Josefin Sans, sans-serif");

$mdc-typography-styles-button: (
 font-size: 14px,
 font-weight: 600,
 letter-spacing: 0.05em,
);

Shape Modification

Shape customization alters component corner radii (buttons, cards, sheets). Material allows for different shapes on various corners and component sizes. For example:

$mdc-shape-small-component-radius: 12px 4px;
$mdc-shape-large-component-radius: 8px;

With just a few lines of code, we've dramatically transformed the application.

Unleash Your Creativity

Numerous combinations of color, typography, and shape exist to create distinctive brand identities. The examples below showcase diverse applications of these elements using Material Components.

Real-World Examples

Google itself employs customized Material Components (Google Material Theme) across products like Gmail, Google News, and Google Play. Other companies, such as Lyft and Anchor, also leverage Material Design's flexibility to create unique brand experiences.

Getting Started

Begin building your Material theme using the Material Starter Kit and the "Build a Material Theme" Glitch project. Experiment with SCSS variables to customize components. Simply paste these variables into your my-theme.scss file and begin building.

In short: Material Design's theming capabilities offer unprecedented flexibility. Start exploring today!

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