| HN Mirror

Edit: You edited your comment, but I'll leave the stuff below for posterity. As a response to your new edit: a selectively applied metaphor boils down to stylization. That's fine by me, I would just prefer that they admit that no design abstraction is airtight. What you call "magic" here can also be called "arbitrary stylization."

To be fair, putting something like this together is obscenely difficult and kudos to the Goog for sharing it with everyone. I just wish it were a little less word-of-god-y. The fact is that the material metaphor is not a "unifying theory of a rationalized space and a system of motion." It's inspiration, at best.

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Response to your pre-edit:

Really?

> Material is the metaphor

> The material is grounded in tactile reality, inspired by the study of paper and ink, yet technologically advanced and open to imagination and magic.

"It's grounded in reality... but not!"

> Surfaces and edges of the material provide visual cues that are grounded in reality... Yet the flexibility of the material creates new affordances that supercede those in the physical world, without breaking the rules of physics.

"Except for rules of physics like things moving against the force applied to them, or shadows changing without the light source, object, or perspective changing."

> The fundamentals of light, surface, and movement are key to conveying how objects move, interact, and exist in space and in relation to each other. Realistic lighting shows seams, divides space, and indicates moving parts.

"Except where we decide we don't want to be realistic."

This is all fine. Stylistic choices do have a place in design, of course. I just really hate the language you see all over design systems that essentially resolves to "p and not p." "Physically accurate and totally physically inaccurate."

Not everything needs a manifesto to prove that it's not just arbitrary stylization, especially when the manifesto itself, in describing said design justifications, is leaky.