By Material design is a well-known visual design framework developed by Google. It aims to facilitate developers and designers to build applications that have a uniform look on all platforms. Mobile apps that comply with material design principles look professional and beautiful on all devices and operating systems. Google’s official material design toolkit provides you several things like guidelines, color palettes, components, icons, and themes.
A material design is an open-source project; hence, third-party developers have also built their own tools complying with material design principles. This article will cover the best material design UI components to help you with your next mobile or web project.
Table of Contents
Material Design Principles
These are the following material design principles
- Material color schemes usually use a primary and a secondary color,
- Colors need to display a state of elements and the relationship between them.
- Icons and text should meet legibility standards.
- Screen motion always needs to have meaning.
- Components should be reusable.
- Icons must have an immaculate fold and crisp edges.
- And much more.
Google conducts detailed research to develop the material design framework, and it takes some time to go through the guidelines. This is where the best UI components libraries for the material design comes into the picture.
7 Best UI Component Libraries for Material Design
Materialize
This is a responsive CSS system that follows material design principles. It renders multiple ready-to-use elements like badges, buttons, cards, icons, breadcrumbs, bars, navigation, and more. Apart from elements typical to the website, Materialize includes mobile app components like non-conspicuous mobile alerts and a cool drag-out menu.
All components of this framework come with code examples that simply need to get added to the HTML page. Apart from CSS and HTML components, you even get access to several customizable JavaScript elements like modals, parallax effects, carousel, and others. The Materialize team also offers themes that have been designed with the component library, but they charge $19 to $49 per theme.
Material Design For Bootstrap
This framework is a versatile component library that enables you to create responsive, mobile-first websites and apps. It has been developed for the Bootstrap 4 framework to help you use both front-end technologies simultaneously. The default configuration leverages jQuery for interactivity, but the library has setups for the 3 most popular JS frameworks: React, Angular, and Vue.
It has a free and premium version both. You can install the free material UI kit from GitHub. At present, it includes 600+ material icons, 400+ material UI elements, tutorials, 744 CSS animations, and ready templates. Even though the free library is adequate for most apps, the pro version comprises 50+ premium sections, 4500+ premium components, plugins, and JS modularity.
Material UI (React)
Material UI is a famous UI component library for the React system. If you want to develop any sort of React app with a material look and feel, the components of material UI will perfectly fit the frame, and they don’t need any extra configuration. The library includes layout components, all sorts of input elements, surfaces, utilities, navigation bars, and more.
Besides having access to multiple ready-to-use components, material UI also renders you with a substantial Component API. It allows you to tailor all the components with the help of CSS and props customization points. Material UI’s docs are easy to comply with and are fantastic, with plenty of examples, demos, and code snippets, so you can quickly begin with prototyping.
VUE Material
This is a lightweight UI component library for the Vue.js system. Its creators are proud of developing all the components precisely as per Google’s material design specifications. This framework comes with many ready-made UI elements like buttons, cards, avatars, icons, lists, toolbars, forms, dialogs, and more.
Since Vue Material is quite documented, it’s easy, to begin with, it if you worked with CSS, HTML, and Vue before. Each component is published inside a live sandbox to allow you to change the code online and see the outcomes in real-time.
Angular Material
Angular Material can be the right solution for you if you are looking for a material design UI component library for your Angular app. It has been developed by Google for the Angular 2 framework and is under active development. Apart from multiple UI components, Angular Material also comprises Angular Component Development Kit (CDK). This toolkit implements common interaction patterns like accessibility, drag-and-drop functionality, bi-directionality, scrolling, and others.
Angular Material enables you to quickly prototype any Angular app’s user interface by rendering you with professionally designed components designed by Google.
The components are divided into 6 groups:
- Navigation
- Form controls
- Layout
- Buttons and indicators
- Popups and modals
- Data table for tabular data
MUI CSS
This is a lightweight material design UI component library, and it comprises the essential components you need in an app or website. You only need to add a JavaScript and a minified CSS file to your HTML page. Since MUI CSS doesn’t have any external dependencies, even amateurs can set it up with ease.
Apart from components written in regular JS and CSS, MUI CSS has pre-designed UI elements for Angular and React apps. The MUI CSS team has even started to develop the beta version of a Web Components library, with 3 types of components: buttons, forms, and an HTML boilerplate.
With MUI CSS’s cool email UI library, you can create email templates too.
Material Components for the Web
This framework is the successor of MDL – Material Design Lite, both created by Google’s in-house team. Google’s documentation refers to the Material Components for the Web library as MDL v2. Hence, it is better to use this for your project instead of MDL because it is in limited support mode.
The web library renders you with several UI components like cards, buttons, menus, grids, tabs, surfaces, and much more. To create a mobile or web app that resembles Google’s own apps, the Material Components is the best solution for the web library.
Conclusion
Material design can give a pro look and feel to any mobile app or Web. It’s a good choice if you want to develop apps for the same brand for various platforms. Creating a visually appealing UI can be challenging, but the best Material design UI component libraries can help you through it.
Author Bio:
Harnil Oza is CEO of Hyperlink InfoSystem, one of the leading app development companies in New York and India, having a team of the best app developers who deliver the best mobile solutions mainly on Android and iOS platforms. He regularly contributes his knowledge on leading blogging sites.
