Material 3 Expressive
53 comments
·May 19, 2025greenavocado
How utterly uninspiring and boring compared to the designs of talented Winamp skinners of yore. Look, I get it. Corporate design today "needs" to be safe, consistent, and accessible to a broad audience.
The Winamp skinning era represented something fundamentally different from today's design philosophy. It was about personal expression, creativity, and making your tools reflect your personality rather than conforming to a universal aesthetic. When users could fundamentally alter their software's appearance, they became co-creators rather than passive consumers. That's a very different relationship with technology than what we have now, and I hate it.
monkeyelite
> Corporate design today "needs" to be safe, consistent, and accessible to a broad audience.
I actually wish we emphasized these values more. The psychology of human computer interaction is still ripe for improvement, but instead we are turning figma art into code.
Larrikin
I remember the winamp skins I considered awful that were just a jpeg image of a girl in a bikini or a cartoon character. What lazy design
I also remember trying to make my own after seeing good ones and bad ones. It was tedious and it's shocking that there were actually any good ones ever with how awful it was to create a skin. It was all flat and even more difficult to discern that a The Sims skin.
Material design has setup people so well that you are bored with how good we have it. I would not mind some more creativity in the space, but be aware of how far we have come.
cosmic_cheese
There’s some great Winamp skins, but for me the peak of expressive, creative UI were OS X themes, XP-era msstyle themes, and Vista/7 msstyle themes tied for first place with classic Mac OS Kaleidoscope schemes closely following.
Some of those OS X/XP/7 themes were gorgeous but also very practically usable. Many still hold up well today, and I’d use them over the majority of themes available for Linux desktops if given the option.
bsimpson
I remember being so excited when Apple teased themeable System 8. I think I even found leaked betas of the themes and installed them on my dad's Mac.
http://old.reddit.com/r/90sdesign/comments/1bzb2yp/the_gizmo...
cosmic_cheese
Some of those Appearance Manager themes were great too, even if they weren’t as numerous as Kaleidoscope schemes were. I downloaded plenty from ResExcellence back in the day!
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7
As a winamp skin designer in my youth, I don't see these two things as really comparable.
greenavocado
The sterile design language and impossibility of customizing your own software styles in an accessible way kills me
usrusr
But winamp theming rested not only on the code allowing arbitrary bitmaps, it also rested on a user interface requiring zero discoverability. At some point people just knew where to click. In hindsight it appears almost surprising that there wasn't a fashion of black on black winamp skins (or maybe I just missed it)
caseyy
Hah, that's a good point. When I think of it, the first Android skins, like HTC Sense (~3.0), were quite customizable. Every widget had a few stylistic variants, and I think you could even change the look of many components in the OS. Windows was very customizable until around Vista, too. I suppose people don't buy products for their theming features anymore.
kelseydh
Miss this creative freedom in software so much, it's time to go back.
caseyy
I don't entirely agree with other commenters saying it's uninspired. It is neutral, but many functional considerations go into making a UI framework, and neutrality serves an important purpose.
However, given Material's popularity, I think it's inevitable that poorly designed/unergonomic apps will cheapen M3 a lot in the coming years. Same as it happened with Material 2. It used to be associated with clean, professionally developed apps; then it became associated with the worst of the worst and a lot of mediocre stuff, too. Sturgeon's Law is not kind to these things.
bsimpson
When Matias was in charge of Material, he said the purpose of design guidance isn't to raise the peaks but to fill the valleys. An expert can come up with something that's more appealing/usable than slinging the components together, but someone without that expertise should be able to make something pretty compelling by following the practices set out by people who had it.
caseyy
That's a good point. And it's a noble effort by the Google Design team. Unfortunately good will and good efforts are sometimes abused.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7
It definitely has influenced how people build applications, and has improved the common language people use to refer to many patterns.
bsimpson
> became associated with the worst of the worst
Material 2 may have felt corporate and boring, but I disagree with this accusation.
Before Material, indie apps on Android were big grey buttons and unpadded text on a black background. Not everything that tries to use Material does a good job, but the starting point is better now than it used to be.
afavour
I like it. I’m happy with my iPhone but this is a rare moment where I wish I got to play around with some Android UI components.
permo-w
if you've got a (half-decent) laptop, then just get Android Studio and give it a go
sureglymop
Android studio runs terribly on my PC with a lot of ram and good CPU/GPU. Part of the issues are probably related to running it under GNOME on Wayland. Unrelated to that it fills up my ram as if it was just leaking memory. I was able to make other intellij programs bearable by switching to zgc but android studio won't let me. I like these IDEs but I truly wish they hadn't been implemented in java to their detriment.
permo-w
it's generally pretty terribly optimised, but after a huge amount of fiddling and waiting I did get it running on debian on a true piece of shit of a laptop at one point
lawgimenez
I’m lucky to implement Material 3 in our app. I like it, it’s fun.
InMice
Just when you thought you've seen every variation of a flat roundish bubble...
clippy99
How to spend millions on an incremental change -- looks flat and uninspiring as ever...
zmmmmm
Oh man, squircles are back in fashion big time. They just waste so much space with their large border radiuses, it frustrates me.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7
Material guidelines typically allow for considering "density" and "shape" depending on the device. They don't need to be wasting space, if you don't need touch targets.
egypturnash
I miss skeuomorphism more and more.
cosmic_cheese
I miss skeuomorphism too, but I miss depth, shading, and detail even more. I don’t need my buttons to look exactly like physical buttons, but those things helped so much for distinguishing controls and giving your eyes something more to latch onto without having to resort to garish colors and huge shadows for contrast.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7
I don't think material design guidelines explicitly disallows skeuomorphic representation of components. Although, it might look silly.
tyre
MUI uses cards and elevation well in this respect. It’s not exactly paper, but in places feels better than simple borders
bsimpson
To be clear, MUI is a third-party library inspired by Material Design.
Google itself has shipped various iterations of Material components (first Polymer, then MDC Web, and finally the Material Web Components from the original Polymer team), but has since given up on supporting Material for third party web authors.
spicybright
I really wish there was a good demo section where I could try out the elements.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7
There is not much different from Material 3, and there are a number of places you can try those components out. Use the power of imagination!
berdario
> there are a number of places you can try those components out.
Such as... ?
SeanAnderson
I feel they really missed the mark on this UI design system. I have absolutely no interest in adopting it.
OsrsNeedsf2P
Is anyone excited about this, or are we just reacting to the words "Google" and "Material"? Can someone articulate what they're looking forwards to and with what metric?
lenkite
Wish there was non-emotional UI design system called Material R - Rational.
Closely related discussion from eight days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43975352.