What’s the use of a beautiful design paradigm if no one uses it? As part of their multi-faceted approach to promoting and encouraging developers to adopt the Material Design principles, Google started the Material Design Awards last year. This year they have continued that trend and have today’s announced the winners from the 5 different categories.
Winners were selected for highlighting specific elements of Material Design in the development of their apps. The Five winners will be honored at Google Annual design Conference SPAN to be held Los Angeles on October 27, and the winners are…
- Brand Infusion: Asana: Team Tasks & Projects
- Charming Engagement: Fabulous – Motivate Me!
- Creative Navigation: C Channel (available in Japanese and Thai)
- Expressive Layouts: Kitchen Stories
- Focused Efficiency: Airbnb
Asana
Asana is a team/ project management app designed around managing complex teams and projects. I’ve actually used it before and it’s very powerful. But you don’t win a design award for having a useful and powerful app, although I bet that doesn’t hurt, Asana’s award was for adapting Material Design to reflect and enhance their brand. As Google puts it “Asana deftly infuses its brand’s visual identity without distracting from the product’s core functionality.”
You can grab Asana below.
Fabulous – Motivate Me!
Fabulous is your life coach in your pocket, the app is designed to train you into long lasting health habits that will hopefully last you a lifetime. The app developers focused heavily on the use of powerful illustrations, crisp transitions and ‘pleasing’ animations. According to Google “Fabulous entices the user along the path to self-improvement through illustration, animation, and playful voice.”
Check out Fabulous – Motivate Me below.
C Channel (Japan and Thailand only)
Unfortunately, the 3rsd winner is not available in Australia, or outside Japan and Thailand. The video curating app provides access to an array of ‘studio’ and user generated content. The app was awarded the Creative Navigation award for providing users with an intuitive tab based content curation menu that allows for easier content discovery and quick swipe-based navigation between tabs. In Google’s words “C Channel makes browsing a large collection of lifestyle advice videos simple, fluid, and engaging.”
Kitchen Stories
Kitchen Stories takes the basic recipe app and dials the design up to 11. Awarded the Expressive Layouts award the app provides a beautiful and responsive interactive layout for browsing the multitude of recipes on the app. In summarising the app Google said “Kitchen Stories’ recipe layouts work seamlessly across a variety of devices”.
You can download Kitchen Stories below.
Airbnb
Airbnb almost needs no introduction, the popular accommodation matching app is well known, we use it extensively when needing to find affordable accommodation near events. The Airbnb was recognised for its intuitive flow and user interactions for all of its functions. It’s obvious that the developers have pout careful consideration into all of the apps functions and ensured a clean, fast and easy interaction experience.
If don’t already have it you can install Airbnb below.
That’s the 2016 Material Design Award winners. WE congratulate all of the winners and in fact all developers who invest valuable time and effort into the thoughtful design of their apps, especially the materially ones!
