Welcome to the Doubleshot newsletter! Every two weeks (or so), I send out a bit of practical advice and a bit of theory. This time, I’m focusing on the launch of the Material 3 Expressive updates from Material Design.
It’s been a couple of weeks since the update went out (coinciding with Google I/O), but there’s a new Design Notes ep to break down with Product, Research, and Creative Direction from the Material Design team at Google.
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📚 Theory: Design Notes with Material Research, Product, and Creative Direction
This week, I published a new episode of Design Notes with Product Manager Aneesha Kommineni, UX Researcher Michael Gilbert, and Creative Director Andy Stewart, going over the M3 Expressive updates.
It should be no surprise I was excited for this conversation. Not just because I got to bring some of my colleagues on the show to talk about the updates we (and dozens of others) have been working on over the past 1–2 years, but because engaging with the subjectivity of the interface is at the core of my writing and design practice. Here are a few highlights from the episode:
The earliest expressive research…
“It was solidifying that concept of expressive design as design that inspires an emotional response that's aligned with a particular pattern of use. So it’s expression as usability, it’s expression as accessibility, and ultimately it’s expression as beauty — for a purpose.”
– Michael Gilbert
The creative process…
“We don't really do the classic design sprint that you might think that Google does. It's literally like, go draw and come and talk about it at the end of the day and get excited about it.”
– Andy Stewart
What happens next…
“I'm actually right now writing the strategy and vision for where we go next. That's what I spend almost every day now on.… We want feedback from all Android developers, not just Google developers. I'm going to be looking at that feedback and our team will be too, because, you know, we’re trying to offer more flexibility. We're trying to meet developer demands better, but, like Andy said before, we're never finished.”
– Aneesha Kommineni
Check out the episode wherever you listen. (And check out the new show logo and art!)
Stay tuned for a bunch of new episodes (released monthly) with practitioners from other disciplines like type design, graphic design, architecture and design education.
I’ve been spending a lot of time recording recently (which is why you haven’t received a Doubleshot in a while 😛) and I’m really excited for you all to hear these conversations!
🧑💻 Practice: Check Out A *Co–* Program for Graphic Design
David Reinfurt, who I’ve had on Design Notes in the past, recently released a new book. It’s a follow-up to his A *New* Program for Graphic Design that builds on the thesis of design education he laid out there by emphasizing the importance of including more voices, more practices, and more perspectives in the teaching—and learning—of design. It was developed during the beginning of the COVID pandemic as classes moved online.
A stand-out chapter for me covered a lecture developed alongside mathematician and writer Philip Ording called MULTIPLICITY. It opens with a series of slides looking at snowflakes captured on film by Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley.
Ording suggests looking at the snowflakes as a system and visualizing it along two potential axes: pointedness and featheredness. He calls this organization a “possibility space,” like the concept of design space I outlined earlier this spring.
What’s interesting to me here is that Ording suggests not just creating a possibility space, but allowing one to emerge naturally from an existing assemblage of objects. Rather than working toward the middle from start and end points of an axis, you can work outward from the middle to encompass all the possibilities that exist.
Taking the new expressive Material buttons for example, there are already five size variants. They can be organized into a single-axis possibility space, from which you can then establish new starts and ends based on extrapolating from the existing collection.
That’s it for now. Stay tuned for new episodes of Design Notes, and—if you like Doubleshot—sign up! Subscribers get the newsletter first, direct to their inbox, and with exclusive content.
