nick butcher: hello, andwelcome back to adia. it's been a littlewhile since we've been giving you designin action advice. but we're back today to talk toyou about the google i/o 2014 conference app andhow we designed it. so as always, i'm yourhost, nick butcher. roman nurik: hey, guys. i'm roman nurik, dialingin here from new york in our fancy new spaceon the 11th floor here.
and also, in this weirdlooking, weird evil doctor laboratory type environment. so yeah, hi, guys. mike denny: and hey, guys. i'm mike denny from mountainview in a phone room. people will be walking by. nick butcher: so as isaid, this week, we're talking about thegoogle i/o application. so for anyone whodoesn't know, google i/o
is our annualdeveloper conference. but well, for more thanthe developers this year. there was a huge focus ondesign content as well. and each year, toaccompany the conference, we put out a companionandroid application, which helps you tofind the sessions, create a personalizedschedule, navigate around the conference, andlots, lots more. but that's almost secondaryto its almost main goal, which
is to be an open sourceapplication, to share the code and best practiceswith a bunch of developers out there. and we'd like to reallydo the same kind of thing and give a peekbehind the curtain into the design process. so the i/o app isbuilt by our team, and roman, mike, and myself werethree of the designers working on the application inclose collaboration
with the core material designteam right here at google. so we want to take thisopportunity to give you, like i say, a peek behindthe curtain of how we went about designing theapp and giving you some advice of problemswe ran into and processes we found to work really well. ok, so without further ado,let's jump into the content. so when we came to wantingto update the application, as always, the first place westarted was with sketching.
and there were afew things we wanted to do with theapplication this year. first off, there was anupdated information model we were trying to workinto the application. there were some big changes. we're going to be pushingto get more imagery into the application toreally bring it to life. and that was finallyarriving this year, so there was a lot wewanted to do with imagery.
and lastly, alwaysmost exciting, we wanted to introduce some ofthe elements of material design into the application. so we have a challenge. and this applicationwas obviously shipping to existingversions of android out there without newapis and new support for all this crazy stufflike real time shadows. so we had to do aconservative approach
of what we could useon earlier devices as well as on newer deviceswhich got the l preview. we wanted to really show offsome of the great new design features. so like many ofyou, we'd seen lots of the exciting output ofthe material design team. they'd shown lots of greatexplorations and videos showcasing theirnew design system and what it could produce.
and we naturally wanted to divein and reproduce some of this. so our first instinct was torush straight to visual design and put togethersome mockups of how we could apply the materialdesign principles to the i/o application. but as you can see from these,some early explorations we're sharing with you here, theseweren't quite satisfying. it wasn't quite hittingthe right notes. and what's more, the workthat we were producing
felt somewhat disjointed. and this is a realtrap you can fall in, the temptation to rushstraight to pixels. so what we actually did wasto take a step back and really work out our informationmodels and our flows before going to do thevisual design stage. mike denny: yeah, sowhat we ended up doing is dropping down a step to whatwe're calling white frames, if you look in thegoogle design spec.
you can download a lot ofadobe illustrator files that give a bunch of blanktemplatey feeling screens that are not quite-- a littlebit more than wireframes, but a little bit less thana visual design mock up. and so in that kindof intermediary step, it allowed us to reallyexplore the challenges that the update tothe app proposed. and the most difficultthing, i think, for us was to figure out howto most simply show and allow
for filtration and selection,the collections of all the different sessionsand sandbox events, and all the different thingsyou could do at the conference. we also had to think abouttwo different groups of users. about 5,000 people at mosconewest in the conference hall would be using the app. and they'll be makinguse of the indoor map to find which room they need togo to watch a certain session. but the vastmajority of our users
are people at home orat i/o extended events who weren't able to attendin person in san francisco. so we wanted to really make agreat app experience for them, as well. the interesting change in 2014from previous years at google i/o was that eachsession, instead of being part of a trackaround a specific product, like the androidsessions, or the glass sessions, or the chromesessions, this year
the conference was separatedaround functional roles, or what we endedup calling themes. and those were design,develop, and distribute. so you had those threebroad categories, those themes that gave structureto the sessions themselves. but we also, of course, hadproduct specific topic tags and business vertical tagslike commerce, retail. we had music, media,games, android, of course, chrome, go, all thesedifferent-- just tons of ways
to dissect andcreate cross-sections of this huge jumble ofsessions and other content. and it really took a lotof time and collaboration and arguing back and forth,should this be a list? should this be a grid? can it be a list on phonesand a grid on tablets? how do we do the filtration? do you jump in and pick a track,say show me only android stuff? or can you be a little bitmore fine grained than that?
where's the lineof filtering down to really present theamount of information that the user is looking for? so it definitely helpedus to take a step back into the wireframe,the white frame stage, and look more structurallyat the interactions of the different screensand how the users were going to be movingthroughout the app and through thedifferent stages.
nick butcher: just one quicknote on the white frames, we've put a littlelink in the corner here to download theseadobe illustrator files. but there's also somecommunity members that really alreadystepped up and produced sketch versions of these. so if you'regetting into sketch, which i have beenenjoying a lot lately, i can add a link in the shownotes to find that, as well.
mike denny: yeah, so tohelp facilitate the fact that three designersworking across three time zones on thisreally complex app, we ended up justusing google slides and drawing out shapesin really rough ways, because it allowed us tomake comments directly on specific areasand have a discussion in an asynchronous way. roman nurik: i want toadd something on that.
i think that's really,really critical. something i always talkabout in development is your iteration loop,how fast you can iterate. and i feel likethere are great tools for iterating in development. you make a change tosome code, you push it, and it shows up on your phone. on the web, it's even faster. you make a change, andyou refresh the page.
here, when you dodesign work, design is an inherentlycollaborative thing. design is a conversation. it's a conversation betweenvarious people working on a product. and so i feel like theintegration loop here was critical. to be able to build out thesenew features pretty quickly, we really needed to beable to have three people,
again, across threedifferent time zones working on one thing in asingle, shared space. mike would puttogether a screen. i would make a quick comment. i would select the itemin google slides, the box or whatever it was,make a comment on it. mike would make some tweaks. later on, i'd just pushsomething down a few pixels so that there was some alignmentacross different slides.
but the overall environmentfor google drive, basically using google slidesto collaborate on wireframes, worked out really well for us. obviously, it's super,super low fidelity. but just to getthe point across, the information on the screen,the general macro level layout was super useful. nick butcher: andi feel like forcing us to work in lowfidelity really helped us
to focus the conversationon the zoomed out, rather than getting bogged downin the minutia of the pixels. it helped us to thinkabout the larger problems, like how are we goingto do filtering? how are we going todisplay collections? rather than getting toobogged down too early. mike denny: yeah, definitely. it's super interestingto go back and look at that slides deck becauseeverything at the bottom
is like slide purgatory,all of our rejected ideas. old slides, we just draggedthem to the bottom of the stack and forget about them forever. nick butcher: oh, whatit could have been! so after we really had workeda lot on the wireframes, we wanted to stepup and introduce a lot of the materialdesign elements that we were hugelyexcited about working so we're going to go throughnow some of our interpretations
of what we feltwas most critical and how we interpretedthem into the application. this isn't going tobe like a thou shalt, this is the only way youcan apply material design to your application. in fact, we were actuallykind of working on this while the material designspec was somewhat in flux and changing a littlebit, as these things are wont to do beforethey get launched.
so if some things we did don'tquite work for your application or have evolved sincethen, that's fine. this is part of theevolving design process. but some of the key things thatwe definitely wanted to use was the key linesand layout metrics which materialdesign introduced. the idea of using theseprint style layouts-- roman, do you want to talkabout the key lines some? roman nurik: yeah, yeah.
well, the first thingis that the key lines are kind of like ahallmark or a signature characteristic of amaterial design app. when you see some of that text,some of the body copy aligned to that 72-bit key line,that second key line, it is very much a signatureaspects of material design. it evokes material design, thepersonality of the framework. and another thing ijust wanted to mention is that when i first saw this,i was like, this looks great.
this makes a lot of sense,too, gestalt principles. when things are aligned,they kind of naturally group together so you canunderstand that these are part of asingle, whole thing. it also makes itmuch easier to scan. your eyes don't haveto bounce around between different startingpoints [inaudible]. but besides that, itkind of reminds me, one of the thingsthat i allude to when
i talk about this withfolks is this kind of reminds me of textbooks. when you look at printdesign, print and designing for magazines or textbooksand things like that, you kind of have yourprimary columns-- and i'm probably usingall the wrong language here because i'm nota print designer. you have your primarybody copy columns. and then, you havestuff on the outside.
imagine a textbook, right? you have your primaryprose in the middle. and then, you have little asidesor other accompanying items along the sides in thegutters in those margins. and so i look at thisas these key lines help establishthat middle column. and then, you have thingson the outsides like the add to schedule floatingaction button here. or when you're lookingat speaker details,
the speaker avatars, thephotos of the speakers, are in those margins. so i kind of lookat it that way. and it does, again,help for scanning. it's very easy to, once youlay that one piece of text on the screen, just look allthe way down and very quickly scan the rest ofthe text related to that first piece of text. in this case, the title,description, and so on,
and the metadata aswell for the session. nick butcher: andanother thing i really liked about using the keylines in our design process, it was a very easy way tobake in some responsive design principles into layouts. so in these screenshots here,you can see, for example, we've called out whatthe key lines should be on a smaller device. but then, you canvery easily just
increase these keylines on larger devices and build in thiskind of responsiveness from upfrontthinking about where the differentblocks of text are. you're designingthe use of content and the use of whitespace deliberately. and then, you can thenvary those amounts, the way they scale up as youhave more space on a device. roman nurik: the other thingi wanted to mention here,
and yeah, thattotally makes sense to me, the responsive nature,we bump things up on tablets, right? but if you look at the actualnumbers, 16 and 24, 72 and 80, one thing we haven'treally mentioned is grids. and this has been aroundon android for a while using a 4 dip or an 8 dip grid. in this case, everythingin material design, all the suggested values,they fall on that grid.
it makes it reallyeasy to i guess diverge from the guidelineswhen you feel it's necessary, when you need to. so these 16 dips,the 72 dips, these are just suggested guidelines. but if you need a bit morespace in that left margin, it's really easy to say,let me try to add 8 dips. let me try to add 16dips to that key line and see if that kind ofbetter communicates my content
or gives my content more spaceto breathe or whatever it is. and so i kind of lookat material design and these key lines specificallyas they're suggestions. but there's, at the lowerlevel parts of the framework, this grid system helps youdeviate from those suggestions very easily and ina very standard way. so that's one of thethings that i really loved about this process. we ended up choosingthe 80 dip key line.
but we could have done96 or 104 on tablets if we felt it was necessary. so let's talk aboutsurfaces for a bit. and this is actually one ofthe biggest components actually looking at material design ascomposed of four basic things. surfaces and shadows are oneof the biggest things to me. and actually, there's adesign byte either out now or coming out fromrich fulcher where he talks about specificallysurfaces and shadows
and how those effect theuniverse, if you will, of apps followingthis framework. and for surfaces,he kind of alludes to surfaces as pieces of paper. and when a surface isfloating over another surface in the z space, it casts ashadow on the surface below it or the piece of paper below it. and so we thoughta lot about this because this is one of the keycomponents of material design.
we thought a lot about this. and so that influencedsome of our decisions. nick butcher: so one techniquewhich we've not shown here in our mocks is ways to,in your design stage, show which level on the z accessa particular surface lives. so we didn't use it at thetime of designing the i/o app. i've been using it inmy design since then. it's actually a call out,so when you're specing up a screen, as well as when you'recalling out the color or size
or shape, whatever,it's to say that this lives in a particular plane. so the way we'vebeen doing that is it helps to think about it in--if you might have, say, three, four, maybe fivedifferent z levels, you can call it z0, z1,z2, z3, and call those out so that you can then usethose levels consistently throughout your application. so you might say that,in your application,
in the primarycontent, there's a z0. whereas in this examplehere, the bottom bar, the bottom sectionlives at z level one and the floatingaction button is on top of that at z level two. and then, whatyou can then do is when you hand thatover to developers, is decide what levels,what dimensions and dips those levels of z work at.
and then, transfer thoseinto actual dimensions. it's kind of like thinkingabout an air traffic controller, where you'rethinking each of your ui surfaces is actually a differentplane, a different level. so you're trying to work out howthey stack on top of each other without colliding so they canmove underneath each other and give you that natural motionyou're trying to design for. roman nurik: so one of thethings that we came across, one of the decisions we had tomake was how we present tabs.
and specifically, we have thiscase in the schedule screen where you have anapp bar at the top, and you have tabs fortoday or tomorrow, or june 25 and june26, and then you have content belowthat, basically the schedule foreach day below that. and there are obviously a numberof ways you can present that. and the final decisionthat we made here had a lot to do with howsurfaces are described
and presented inmaterial design. and so in our firstiteration, we kind of had these two surfaces,one for the app bar and a second just for thetabs and the content below it. one of the interestingthings here is that, well firstof all, there's a lot of ink on thesesurfaces, the stuff that's printed on the piece of paperor printed on the surface. there was a lot ofink here, and we
felt like it wasdoing a lot of work. nick butcher: for me,this feels kind of funky because the second, the angledscreen shot, the content will scroll underneaththe tab, right? if you scroll the surface,breakfast, it'll go under it. so you're almost makinganother seam at that point because you'reexpecting it to split into another middle surface,while the app bar itself casts a shadow while you look at it.
so it's like you havethree surfaces almost. roman nurik: at the same time,an even more important point, as nick pointed outearlier, was that what happens when theother content scrolls? what happens when you scrollthe schedule up and down? it'd be weird ifthe ink scrolled along the surface,and the surface itself didn't just move. it's a much more naturalthing for a surface
to slide up and down than forink to slide along a surface. it's a weird wayof explaining it, but it's how we perceived it. and so in this case wherethere's a single surface where the tabs and the tabcontents were printed along the same surface, itdidn't really make sense to us. and so we moved it onto the second iteration where we actually mergedthe tabs with the app bar. this also betterfollowed the spec anyway,
so it was kind of a win-win. but here, a lot of thingsworked out really well here. first of all, allthe, quote unquote, "chrome" became part of onephysical entity, one surface. and all the actual contentwas on a surface below it. and so it alsosolved the problem where as you startscrolling the content, it slides underneathall of the chrome. it also was a much simplervisual presentation.
it was just, ingeneral, cleaner. so that's why wewent with this route. nick butcher: the nextelement of material design that we definitely wentinto to utilize was motion. so i'd say we didn't have enoughtime to work on as much motion as we'd like, butsome areas, we did craft some kind of keydetails which i feel really do add to bringing lifeto the application. so one of roman'sfavorite, which
he uses multiple timesa day, was the use of the floating action button. roman nurik: so yeah, thefloating action button is probably one ofmy favorite elements not just because the floatingaction button itself, especially when it straddlesthe seam between two surfaces, not only because it'sjust so characteristic, it's such a signatureelement of material design, but also because there'sso much you can do with it.
it's such an expressive element. so in our case, we hadthis floating action button that when you press it onthe session detail screen, when you press it, it addsthe session to your schedule and it goes from a plussign to a check mark. and when you pressthe check mark, it goes back into a plus sign. and so there's a couple ofinteresting tidbits here. it's a floating actionbutton that has two states.
it has to have an onstate and an off state. and also, this is acase where there's a transition betweenthe two icons, between a plus and a check mark. and in material design,basically any time you have an iconwith multiple states, for example a refresh buttonthat turns into a loading spinner, or a plus thatturns into a check mark, or something like that,that's a great opportunity
for a delightful animation. and so we used thisopportunity to introduce some kind of characterinto our app. we also used thisopportunity to transition the state of the backgroundcoloring from blue to white, which we'll talk about in a bit. we used that opportunityto actually make that transition, a backgroundcolor, even more interesting, to also kind of use stufffrom material design
to make it feel like, as a user,you're pressing on this button, and the backgroundcolor is changing right under your fingertip. it's like you're initiatingthis change of background color. and this kind of rippleeffect that we use helps show that, helpsdemonstrate that. nick butcher: ilove the idea of you as a user imparting energy intothe interface that radiates out from your touch point.
it makes you feel verymuch like you're in control and you're very powerful,which is kind of cool. so another place wherewe used this kind of the same animatedtouch feedback is the use of theripples in order to communicate touchstates as well as to have that same kind of feelinglike the user is in control. so you can see here that we usedsome customized touch ripples in both the bounded andunbounded states, which
you can see in this video,to give that sense of control to the user. as i alluded earlier,we ran out of time with implementingeverything that we wanted to do inthis year's update. but one thingwhich is definitely on the books for thenext time we look at it is to add some more motionto the major scene changes. material design definitelytalks about helping
to give the users moreconsistency by explaining scene changes rather than doing ajump cut, as you might call it. so one place which wefelt was a natural fit for this was when jumpingfrom a collection view, kind of like thehome screen, which shows a whole groupof different sessions, into one of thesession's details. we felt this would belike a natural place where we could nicelyanimate up the image,
maybe move the title inline,ease that transition, keep the user inthe sense of things rather than doing this jump cut. so maybe next year,we'll get to that. roman nurik: yeah, and anotherthing we had to think about is for these herotransitions, obviously there's a place in our app whereit makes a lot of sense. when you're exploringa list of sessions or that grid ofsessions, after you've
chosen some filters and so on,when you press a grid tile, it can expand up and showthe session detail screen. so the image inthe grid tile can expand into the bannerimage for the detail screen. the only issuewith that, though, is we had a lot of overlays. we had color overlaysin some cases. we had text overlays. and we really had to thinkhard about how exactly each
of these elements transitions. and like nick said, wejust didn't have the time to really solidify this, toreally play around with it and get it just right. and so we decided basicallyto take a shortcut and just use the standardnon-hero transitions, but definitely something wewant to look for in the future, and definitely somethingthat, for simpler cases, where you have just a gridof basic images,
it makes the mostsense to include these types of hero transitions. nick butcher: nextup, we're going to talk about our use ofcolor in the application, and here with the correctspelling of the word "color." so these are someearly explorations we threw together,really playing around with different layers,the different treatments for images.
as mike mentioned earlier, wehad a lot of different ways to organize the itemsand [inaudible] model. so a particular sessioncould belong to both a track, like android, aswell as a theme, like design, ordevelop, or distribute. so we were trying to play withways that we could represent that to the user sothey could navigate between related sessionsas well as recognize a schedule from a glance.
so here's someearly explorations where we were tryingdifferent color overlays, different coloredaction bars, and so forth. and at the same time, wewere working-- obviously, this android app doesn'tlive in isolation. we were working withthe team building the website and the rest ofthe branding for their site on the overall color palette. do you want to talk abouthow that developed, roman?
roman nurik: yeah, so interms of the color palette, definitely knowthat the i/o team-- we started working on this rightaround the time the i/o core team was workingwith their folks to figure out what theoverall brand is, kind of evolving thebrand from last year. and they're definitelyincluding or incorporating material designelements early on. and so their first set ofcore colors, or actually i
guess the finalset of core colors, were taken straight out of thesecondary material design color palette. so they chose beautifulcolors actually, like indigo, pink, the light blue. and we actually foundthat this works really well in the context of the appwhere the indigo 500 served to be the primary actionbar color in cases where the current screenis not branded,
or doesn't have a colorassociated with it, a session color. and then, we used the lightblue and pink versions as accent colors. and so i actually talk aboutthis a bit more in the design byte on the io appand material design. but it worked really, reallywell in the context of our app and the context ofmaterial design, where basically you want aslightly more muted yet still
colorful primary color, and thena very strong, very bold accent and we chose two accent colorsfor different situations. nick butcher: i think this isan interesting point, actually. even though thematerial guidelines come with a setof color palettes which you can usein your application, it really isn't prescriptive. you should really beusing color to reflect the brand, the personality,of your application.
and so like here, we'veused two accent colors rather than just using asingle accent color throughout, because that gave usthe range we needed to express a bunch ofdifferent key concepts in the application. so really don't feel constrainedby the color guidelines. use them for inspirationand learn from them. but don't ever feel likethey're holding you back. mike denny: could it be thatthe light blue was a reminiscent
throwback to the [inaudible]blue of yesteryear? roman nurik:potentialy, possibly. no, probably not. nick butcher: just no, no-go. no-go, mike. roman nurik: one otherthing i wanted to show, or i guess talkabout really briefly, is color is importantfor-- color, we also took it asa piece of content.
our sessions are coloredbased on their topic. so for example, androidsessions are green. we tried to make this makeas much sense as possible. sometimes, you havepretty vague or there aren't natural mappingsfor certain topics, like for example, ux. how do you color the wordux, or the concept ux? nick butcher: we actuallytried to be [inaudible]. roman nurik: plaid-patterned,that's right.
so we tried to make it makesense as much as possible. but we ran into alot of situations where we really needed tomake some tough decisions on, do we use the sessioncolor here or not? because of all the othercomponents of the app, for example, thefloating action button, we had to makesome tough choices as to how and whenwe incorporate color. nick butcher: and stayingon the topic of color,
i went into a deepdive on a little piece of the work we did when wewere thinking about using these different colors persession to reflect its topic or track or so forth. and we were really investigatinghow to then contrast that with the featured actionbutton, floating action button. so one of ourfirst instincts was to pick an accent shade togo with each of these theming colors.
so you can see on thistop row of screens here that everysingle color, we're trying to pick out somethingthat would represent the two states the button had, addto schedule and reflecting it was in your schedule. but in doing so, it endedup just getting too noisy. it ended up being, thisis a really key action that we want to call out. but it'll end uplooking different
on a bunch of differentscreens you're going into and just not really working. and also, it caused us alot of work to think about, is this button goingto do the same thing? and so forth. so then, we started tryingto find single colors that would work across all of them,which started off being quite hard, but we ended up going witha white fab for sessions which were already in your schedule,and this hot blue fab
for sessions whichweren't, which ended up contrasting reallywell with our palette. roman nurik: andthis is something that we talked aboutbefore, where we also had a really niceway of transitioning between these stateswhere, when you press the blue plus or the plussign on a blue background, there's this littlewhite ripple. the background changesto white in a ripple,
and it kind of fillsthe space, almost like a paint bucketeffect in photoshop. and so on we were decidinghow and when to use color. and as nick pointed out,the fab, the floating action button, played abig role in that. and so one of the toolsthat we used here, to decide actually which colorsto use for sessions which had a brand, quoteunquote, for each session, we actually used thislittle exploration
file where we started with thematerial design color palette. we threw those colorsinto these square blocks. and we used the accent, ourlight blue accent color fab, and we just dropped thatin adjacent to all these items just to see what thejuxtaposition looked like. was there enough contrast? were there color clashes, thingsthat just didn't look right? and so we used thiskind of temporary file to start messing withthose color values
to make sure thatthey contrasted well. at the same time, wealso wanted to make sure that all these sessioncolors contrasted well with each other. actually, not necessarilycontrasted well, but they weren't too different. when you looked at one sessiondetail page versus another, there weren't glaringbrightness differences. so one of the wayswe did that, kind
of stabilize theoverall kind of contrast profile of our screens, was thatwe took this exploration file and desaturated it, and thenwe made a bunch of changes here and there tothese color values to make sure that the actualbrightness, overall brightness, of the session colors waswithin an acceptable, well defined range, that we didn'thave anything that was way too bright or anythingthat was way too dark. and so that was one of the waysin which we ensured that this
would be both usable,would be legible, but also would justlook good overall. nick butcher: i think the laststep we went through, then, was then this exampleof the specing work that we did in order to documentthe layout sizes and so on. one thing i very muchenjoyed about using this was referring to thematerial typographic scale. i found that by utilizingthe typographic scale, using things like youcan see on the left here,
when you're setting thetitle of the session details page, the title scale, itreally gave a great structure to the application. i hope that as more andmore applications converge on this materialtypographic scale and then deviate whenneeded, it will really help with thescalability of the app. you'll be able to instantlypick out, oh, that's the title, i recognize.
at some subconscious level,i recognize the way it's set, that it's [inaudible] forexample, that's a title, and i can scan that. i can jump to thaton the screen. so i find that ireally enjoy working with the typographic scale. mike denny: in general, we'vebeen talking about material spec and materialguidelines and how we feel they're not asprescriptive as before.
hollow had a verydistinct personality. in the same vein,material does, as well. and google's productsexpressing themselves using material design systemwill feel very googley. and you, and all ofyour apps, should be able to express their ownbrands using similar elements, like sticking to the 4 or 8 dipgrid using primary key lines. even if you deviatein meaningful ways, it'll still feel at home onandroid devices and on the web.
in addition to that,the typographic scale that nick was justtalking about, if you don't usethe material spec recommended typographicscale, create your own. don't have a milliondifferent font sizes and weightsand attributes. be consistent and bepurposeful in your deviations from the spec. roman nurik: i guessone thing to add
there is while we're onthe topic of typography, a big part of yourbrand is typography. and so in material design,we talk a lot about roboto and we have very specific stylesfor headline text and body text, and they're allbasically using roboto. it doesn't mean thatroboto is the only way to design an android app. a lot of great, really welldesigned android apps today use different typefaces.
and material design is the same. you don't necessarilyhave to use roboto. you should probablyuse pretty good looking sans serif typefaces. you probably should avoid usingtoo many serifs in your apps. but it's definitelysomething where that is an area where youshould be true to your brand. you shouldn't try to force yourbrand into roboto unless you feel like it is harmoniouswith your brand.
so yeah, that's just anotherthing that we thought about. obviously, roboto makes a lotof sense for google products. but a lot of otherapps, it's not a necessity you have to use it. we think it looks great, though. one other thing i guesson the concept of type, and i guess we may have talkedabout some previous [inaudible] or maybe not, but whenyou do choose a typeface, it's important to testit on android devices.
some typefaces justdon't render too well. there's all sortsof weird hinting and weird stuff that happens,especially at smaller sizes. so just do make sure to test. and if you do test andyou find that there's some rendering issues, then tryto work with the original type foundry or whatever, see ifthey have a more optimized type face for different use cases. in a lot of cases,there's different variants
of a type face for usein different situations, some print design, some forui design, things like that. nick butcher: wow, so thank you. that was a whistle stoptour of the updated design of the google i/o application. there's tons morefeatures in there which we didn't get to cover. so do go and checkout the application. download the l preview version.
we'll put a link to itin the bottom notes here. and take a look atsome of these features. we didn't even coverdesigning for wearables and other such features. so there's lots inthere to go check out. so finish up. let's just talk aboutour one favorite feature of designing the google i/o app. i'll go first, and i'll say thatmy absolute favorite thing was
working with the baselinegrids and the key lines. i felt that gave you really,really great structure to the application,which was really kind of a joy to work with. mike? mike denny: i reallyended up liking the way we presented theschedule in columns based on the two daysof the conference. previous years at google hadbeen three days or two days.
this year, it wastwo days, and we were able to presentthat in swipeable tabs on smaller screens, andthen just straight up two columns on larger screens. and it ended up being areally nice experience to be very glanceable whilei was at the conference. roman nurik: yeah, ithink my favorite thing, and before i jumpinto that, i'm going to quickly plug a coupleof things that we released,
the design byte episode,the eight minute or nine minute design byte on ourdesign process for this app. i talk about this, and alsoin a medium post, a blog post i posted on medium. i talk about this. but one of my favorite thingsis really the use of color, specifically the primaryand the accent colors, and the way we introducethose into the apps. you can't really see it in thevignette screenshot shown here.
but it's basically awesome. we got to use a strongaccent color, a really bold, bright,beautiful accent color in a number of situations. and on l, it'ssuper, super easy. we basically saidhey, android system, here is the pink we wantto use for our accents. and it just kindof automatically colored a lot of stufffor us in the ui,
which was just automaticallycolored based on that. so i just really enjoyedworking with that color palette. one of my favorite things nowis when we design new apps, just try to pick out what's a goodcombination of a slightly muted but colorfulprimary color, and a really bright,bold accent color. choosing those colors isactually part of the fun part. it's pretty subjective. it's something whereyou get to think
about the artistic aspectsof designing an app. and that's just definitelyone of my favorite things going forward, pickingout those colors. nick butcher: so it's notthe animated floating action button? i was sure that was goingto be your favorite. roman nurik: well, that too. but i feel like i'vetalked quite at length about how much i love thatlittle component of it we
put together. mike denny: i definitelywant to call out before we wrap up justhow key the use of imagery and photography wasthroughout the app. this year, ourteam really pushed to have providedfor each session a photographic representationof the speaker or the team presenting. and i don't know we got 100%coverage for every session
or event, but wegot a lot of photos. and it definitely helped theapp feel a lot more human. and gives a lot ofjust beautiful variance throughout the app. roman nurik: yeah, i agree. we could have gonewith just text, right? in previous years, we justhave a text representation. and some may argue that it'sactually easier to scan text, just looking throughtext to see key words.
but that's whatthe search is for. if you're looking for something,search for the piece of text you want. but yeah, i totally agree. the images made itfeel more human. i love the way you explain that. it feels like-- going toi/o, it's all about speakers. you're going there tolisten to people talk. you're going thereto meet people.
and having these people'sfaces in a nice, larger size than just a littleavatar makes it feel like you're actually goingsomewhere, going to the session to listen to that person talk. it's a stronger connection. so yeah, i'm really glad wewere able to get that through. it was a tough process toget approval and get people to be on board withtaking all these photos. but i'm really gladthat went through.
it was really kind of a big, bighelp for the visual character and the emotionalcharacter of the app. nick butcher: that was morethan one thing each, guys, but that's ok. ok, so thank you very muchfor joining us for adia. we'll be back withmore content soon. adios! roman nurik: peace out! mike denny: thanks.
see you.
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