What?

Material Design, developed by Google, is an amazing design system. It is basically a library of assets, tools and guides that together create a coherent and consistent visual language. Although the main users of such a system are developers and UX designers, we as learning designers also can benefit from a unified and consistent design language.

Benefits (why?)

Here are some of the interesting ways that you can benefit from this great resource for free:

1. Free, professionally designed assets

Material Design provides libraries of free assets including fonts and icons. It is not only practical because well, it is free but also these are the assets that users are familiar with. Using these components, therefore, will give your design a familiar and universal visual language. This is particularly useful for learning designers who have global target audiences or dealing with a wide range of demographic factors.

2. Useful tools

There are also some free tools for designers/developers to use. It is particularly useful for eLearning designers and developers. For example, there are tools for easily generating a professional colour palette and automatically evaluate colour combinations for accessibility.

3. Writing guides for digital

Material Design has a very helpful text writing guide. It includes some general principles and great tips for how to write for interactions like dialogues, cards and buttons. I found this one very useful to achieve a clear, consistent and universally understandable language.

4. Helps with maintaining consistency

Of course, every learning experience needs its own specific design that is very subjective to the learning outcomes, target audiences, context and other influencing factors. However, consistency can help learners to focus on the main topic rather than being distracted to think about things like how to navigate or where to find stuff. These are what we call extraneous cognitive load which should be minimised. Material Design is being widely used in many apps and websites. So, a large number of learners already are familiar with it. As a result, they don’t need to learn new things or being distracted only to be able to navigate or comprehend a button.

5. Developers will love your work

Using a design system makes your design readier for development. Even if your developers don’t use it directly, it will make your design more understandable, at least.

6. Inclusive design and accessibility

Material design components, assets and tools are developed by professional designers who understand and apply accessibility. By using their design system we can improve our design inclusiveness.

Final note:

Using a universal visual language like Material Design has lots of benefits. It helps target audiences recognise, understand and use your design easily. It will also help us as learning designers to utilise the expertise of a community of professional visual/UX designers. This will leave us to focus on what is essential: the learning experience itself.