Google has already released the developer preview of Android L for Nexus 5 and Nexus 7 now. Android L is a major update in terms of design and interface, and Google also introduced Material Design, the design principles that they’ll be using for Android, Chrome OS and other products.
Here’s Google’s definition of Material design.
We challenged ourselves to create a visual language for our users that synthesizes the classic principles of good design with the innovation and possibility of technology and science. This is material design.
I know it’s a bit hard to understand what Google exactly means with Material design. In simple words, Material design is Google’s approach to a design system for unified and continuous experience. Designers can head over to this thread on Designer News to see what other designers think of Material design.
It is now clear that both Apple and Google are into Flat design but both have completely different approaches. While Apple is using blur, transparency and bright colors in iOS, Google has bold colors, light color texts and minimal interface in Android L. Google also came up with lots of animations in Android L, which looks really nice.
Here are some screenshots of apps in Android L via Droid-Life.
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All the elements in Android L, the sliders, the input boxes, the switches and other elements are now flat and have bold color scheme. In individual apps, we have dark and light variations of same color which makes the overall look pretty good. For example, the music app uses dark and grey version of blue color. For highlighting the shuffle button, violet red is used which can easily be noticed on the blue color scheme.
You can try Android L elements like check boxes, radio buttons, tabs, etc. on this site. They also have a new version of Roboto font which now looks well on both Web and Mobile devices.