Isn't material design basically re-invented skeuomorphism?
From Google's Material Design guide:
"...visual cues that are grounded in our experience of reality. The use of familiar tactile attributes speaks to primal parts of our brains and helps us quickly understand affordances."
Skeuomorphism is adopting the style of physical incantation of an object for its digital display. Material design dictates a single physical incantation for the UI- everything should feel like paper.
A contrived example of this is a skeuomorphic car dashboard display would have photo-realistic guages with lighting reflections from the cover glass, detailed bezel, etc. My read of a Material design implementation is that it should have a flat design with lighting and depth effects for contrast and shape recognition.
I don't see the ultimate difference between the skeuomorphism of Apple (which was extreme) and this. It's applying "physical" properties to the digital.
I'm gonna pass, and slag this "material design" every time it comes up. Clownshoes design philosophy, though I suppose I'm not surprised. Look how many steps it takes to "logout/login from a different account" now.
The icons on your desktop do not have any physical existence or properties beyond what we assign them. It's not even a desktop. If you really want to experience the true self of your files, you'll see a visual representation of the zeroes and ones that represent them, for even then they are nothing more than ghosts frozen in electrical charges.
What visual cue that is grounded in our experience of reality does an app with a metallic texture background give you?
I'm half joking, of course there's elements of skeuomorphism that work this way, like designing a note taking app that looks like a lined pocket notebook. But the recent trend is to approach this very minimalistically, only taking the "primal parts" and leaving out the leather textures.
Just because the first time you ever heard the word "skeuomorphism" was when it was being trashed within the context of apple's previous UI designs doesn't mean that the concept is complete rubbish in its entirety.
I don't think so. I'd pin it as more of an evolutionary state. Skeuomorphism is the the 1:1 direct relation of digital items to items in the physical world. Material Design seems to be geared toward the behaviors and intent of solely digital items.
Kinda. Skeuomorphism includes learned cues from everyday life (button positions on a calculator), while material design technically doesn't (only stuff relating to the physical nature of reality - shadows for depth, motion for reaction, etc).
From Google's Material Design guide:
"...visual cues that are grounded in our experience of reality. The use of familiar tactile attributes speaks to primal parts of our brains and helps us quickly understand affordances."