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Google’s New Design Language Will Make Your Phone Personal Again
Android’s next big update will let you change colors, shapes, and more.
At Google’s yearly developer event, I/O, the company provided a peek at the future of its design language, dubbed “Material You.” It’s a groundbreaking shift away from one-size-fits-all design on phones, tablets, and computers, putting you in control of how the software on your device looks and feels.
Material You is the latest update to Material Design, the design language used by Google’s apps as well as third-party developers to provide a consistent experience between different apps on Android devices.
Where Material Design sought to provide consistency, Material You puts users back in the driver’s seat and allows you to customize the colors, shapes, and other elements in your phone’s software. It’s delightful and a breath of fresh air that will change the way we think about design forever.
On Android devices, Material You automatically creates a color palette based on the home screen photo, which is then used to theme the entire operating system — including any apps that use it. That means if you set a background that has a lot of green in it, for example, apps like Calculator and Calendar will adjust the way they look to use green highlights and fit in with your preferences.
The auto-generated color palette is designed to support light, dark, and high contrast themes, ensuring that regardless of the color choice, text and elements are legible, whether the phone is in light or dark mode. While some limited color customization has been available in the past, it’s nothing like this: Material You is designed to help make beautiful theming easy for anyone, applying it across an entire device.
Material You allows customization of other elements as well, such as shapes of buttons, border types, and more. Combined, it’ll allow you to make…
