[magicalist]

And here we see the middle-brow dismissal in its natural habitat...

Of course it's marketing; they're doing a huge marketing push on this. Even writing "Material" makes me feel like I'm helping some marketing team somewhere.

But saying that this is made up out of whole cloth completely ignores the fact that not only does it engage with the existing design language of other mobile platforms, it also flows quite nicely from "holo" and cards from previous Android versions. Moreover, it's fairly loose as design guidelines go, providing recommendations but not forcing you into a particular unified design.

The designer in that article from yesterday got it quite right: this is post-rationalization, taking what already existed and trying to find the unifying aspects of what gave clarity and discarding what was confusing. That is not the same thing as a dictated UI.

Your response is generic and could be copy-pasted on any article claiming to be about common aspects of a design language. This is exactly why it's voted up (and why it fits "middle-brow" to the t), because if you actually brought up any actual specifics about the article or "Material" it would be immediately obvious that claims of ignoring a relationship with what the user knows or with how the software is actually written are overblown and theatrical.