For far too long development and design were close friends that just couldn’t communicate well. Then they fought and never ever did anyone win.

It goes something like this:

“What do developers want?” – Specs and docs.
“What do designers want?” – To design and be left alone.

It’s time for things to change.

Where we are headed, design and development work as one.

Ingredient: Material Design (MD)

An evolving set of design and development principles, code and tools for the best possible web experience, backed by Google.

Not only that, Google aims to make MD a design system to create design systems. Yes, it’s almost for everyone, even on a moderately tight budget. There are many other design systems out there, yet Google is the only one that can make this work for the rest of us.

Why is Google going through all this trouble?

Google makes money from ads.
People search for stuff on the web. Google sells ads on the web. So, the more people find stuff on the web, the more revenue Google gets. The better the web experience the more people will find the what they look for. And so on…

This is a true business incentive for Google to promote, lead and evangelise PWAs, AMP technology and tools for design systems.

Material design is their way of enabling companies to create PWA, AMP or any other designs in a way that is sustainable, easier to implement and maintain. It truly is the golden age of web design/development.

Why Google MD and not something else?

It’s good enough. Can be implemented right away. If we ever want to replace it with something else, we can.

Also, the real incentive for us at Trive are these three recent breakthroughs:

1. Google wants MD fully customisable when it comes to theming – Huge opportunity by reuse of components
2. Google theme editor – A Sketch plugin that solves MANY design issues with the design workflow #truestory
3. Gallery – Google released a tool called Gallery that works with Sketch – Providing SPECS & DOCS for developers and designers to work closely together.
4. Google released a GitHub repo with REACT components and documentation
5. Material-UI.com – React components that implement Google’s Material Design. Far superior than what Google offers right now. Although, Google is catching up.

This is the first time in a ridiculously long time that I feel genuinely excited about the web. I am not alone in this and even more excited to Adobe integrating Magento as their e-commerce offering.