Angular Material is a framework that enables web projects to incorporate Angular design and user experience principles, inspired by Google’s standards.
Angular Material provides a variety of tools that help create a modern, cohesive, and minimalist design that adheres to robust principles.
Let’s explore the features of this library that are specifically tailored for Angular projects.
The Beginnings of Google’s Material Design
Before delving into Angular Material, let’s first discuss Material design in general.
In 2014, Google first launched the Material Design guidelines as an effort to establish a cohesive visual language across all of their products and services.
By doing so, the Material Design team hoped to enhance the user experience by promoting the use of effective design concepts throughout their products. To accomplish this, they created digital representations of physical attributes, such as edges, surfaces, and shadows, for users to interact with digital information in a more natural way. The entire visual language was initially developed on paper.
As programs and products have become more intricate, the materials used to create them have become more complex as well. To preserve its founding principles, designers were given the opportunity to tailor apps to meet the needs of a specific user group or align with a brand’s design aesthetic.
Material Design principles cover various elements of an app.
- The environment pertains to the way in which UI components interact among themselves and with the UI’s environment to create a sense of depth and space.
- Layout: determining how related components and their relationships should be arranged to achieve visual harmony.
- Placing components in such a way as to signify movement between different regions of the app.
- The use of color to communicate both the app’s functionality and significance to the user, and the app’s brand identity.
- Typography involves distinguishing sections of text or an app by utilizing various typefaces. It is critical to consider the need to support a broad range of written languages, which might have differing character sizes and orientations.
- The use of sound to effectively communicate to the user the outcome of their actions within your program, in a way that feels natural and intuitive.
- Iconography refers to the art and science of creating visually pleasing and user-friendly icons for your app.
- Form: determining how components can assume various shapes to communicate their intended hierarchy to neighbouring forms.
- The significance of motion in improving app feedback, establishing character, and expressing a brand’s design aesthetic.
- How the user’s actions, such as gestures and selections, impact the operation of your app’s components.
- How the app imparts information to the user to educate and prevent them from making mistakes.
To effectively convey the sense of cohesion that this vocabulary fosters, these guidelines outline the distinct attributes linked to each heading.
What are the uses of Angular Material?
Angular Material is a library that equips Angular developers with the tools required to integrate Material Design into the user interface of their Angular project.
1. Standard Angular Material Components
Angular Material provides a set of predefined web application building blocks that work across major browsers and are capable of responsive design. This simplifies the creation of applications that can run seamlessly on various platforms, such as desktop, mobile, and web-based.
In line with the Material Guidelines, elements must incorporate animations, interactive feedback, and accessibility settings. Key components may be modified in terms of shape, layout, or even personalised to match a brand’s visual identity.
As an illustration of these components:
- Text utility components comprise of input boxes, Autocomplete Panels, Selection Panels, and Password Fields.
- Various interaction points such as buttons, toggles, radio buttons, checkboxes, sliders, and toggle sliders are available.
- Progress indicators utilising bars and spinners
- Components for displaying content, which includes headings, subheadings, dividers, expandable panels, and grid lists.
- Navigation aids consist of menus, tabs, lists, sidebars, steppers, toolbars, and hierarchical trees.
Should the pre-existing Angular Material components fail to fulfil your needs, the framework also offers resources to design your own.
2. Angular Material’s Component Dev Kit (CDK)
The Component Dev Kit (CDK) in Angular Material empowers developers to personalise the library’s core components and elements to build unique functionalities and applications.
CDK is made up of a set of behavioural building blocks that can be linked together to create complex UI components. These include:
- Visual components such as Menus, Data Tables, Input Fields, and Tree Views.
Tools for Accessibility
, Collection Management, and Observers are among the resources that may aid in the creation of responsive layouts.
Should your project necessitate a custom component not currently offered by Angular Material, the CDK streamlines the process of creating one.
Conclusion
For anyone building a website seeking to utilise Google’s Material design language or requiring access to a comprehensive and meticulously tested UI component library, Angular Material is the ideal choice. Angular Material offers the necessary tools to bring your application’s design to life.
Works can provide you with top-tier developers to assist you in creating the UI and UX of your web project with Angular Material.
