Material Design for Bootstrap 4

Learn more about Bootstrap and Material Design

Bootstrap

In 2011, a group of Twitter engineers decided to create Bootstrap as an internal solution for their programming problems. Technically, their plan was to create a tool without of certain code structure.

Each coder may have their own way of creating their artworks. This usually leads to some uncertainties when another programmer, let's say a beginner, tries to read through the code. Because of that, Mark Otto and Jacob Thorton from Twitter designed Bootstrap -- a way of convincing programmers to unify their patterns of writing the code, and avoid creating differences in the process. The benefits that Bootstrap brought to their daily work were simply invaluable.

When guys from Twitter realized its true potential, they have decided to release it as an open-source project. With the help of Github and thousands of other programmers, it took only a few months to brand Bootstrap as the most popular front-end development tool for creating responsive, mobile web projects.

So what exactly is Bootstrap?

Imagine it as a toolbox containing a series of useful functions and elements that might be helpful in the process of creating your website.
It makes you able to choose whatever tool you like, plus you can be sure that none of these elements will collide with each other. It is like fitting puzzle pieces together, but in this case, every puzzle fits with another.

The tools you have imagined in our Bootstrap toolbox are HTML, CSS, and JS all combined. Material Design for Bootstrap is the best example of how Bootstrap is constantly under development and how much you can add to it with the help of design and functionality patterns from Google Material Design.

Material Design

Material Design is a design language, originated from Google, which is intensively used in interface projects for the Android system. You may ask why it is used. The answer is simple -– it is already a mature and organized tool which corresponds to the usability and legibility. Moreover, it is developing and changing dynamically. The result is a tool that may be a perfect match for screens, as well as the starting point for inexperienced people in UI/UX designing.

The basis of MD is already well-established by website and UI/UX designers who have worked on it for a long time. What distinguishes it from other tools, is the fact you may use it in every kind of project you are currently working on because it is easy to find recommended practices in each project set. The conventions place emphasis on:

Materials as a metaphor -- in this context, it is a metaphor of space for sheet and ink. The real things that are used in this tool are light and space, supported by unique space attributes that are distinguished in the digital forms field. The characteristics of MD are the shadows which are widespread. It reflects the behavior of real things that exist in reality

Meaning -- an incentive of MD is design printing, which reflects in a very well designed grid, the importance of typography and colors.

Movement & Animation -- MD not only supports a static form of printing design but also includes the digital media, based on the laws of physics. It gives us the possibility of reconciling utility with aesthetics, which is very important nowadays.

One of the most important metaphors in MD is a material which has its position in space on the Z-axis, so we can tell if it is closer or farther from a user. The metaphor refers to the so-called Elevation value. What is interesting, is the fact this value simulates higher and lower positions in space by appropriately selected shading.

What else is important in Material Design attributes?

- Distinctive and well-chosen colors

- Simple and easy-to-use icons

- Graphics and images that are an additional benchmark for the content

- Simple, but at the same time elegant typography based on the Roboto font