Material Design is Google’s design system for creating intuitive, beautiful user interfaces. It provides guidelines for visual, motion, and interaction design across platforms and devices. React is a popular JavaScript library for building user interfaces. So can you use Material Design concepts and components with React? The short answer is yes!
What is Material Design?
Material Design is a design language developed by Google in 2014. The goal of Material Design is to create visual consistency across platforms like Android, iOS, web, and desktop. Material Design uses grid-based layouts, responsive animations, padding, and depth effects like lighting and shadows to make the UI feel tangible. The system consists of guidelines, components, and tools for implementing the design system.
Some of the main principles of Material Design include:
- Grid-based layout – Using columns, rows, and grids to lay out content
- Responsive design – Adapting to any screen size
- Component design – UI made of stackable, reusable components
- Meaningful motion – Animations and transitions that are delightful yet functional
- Meaningful transitions – Smooth transitions between states
The Material Design spec provides guidance on content like typography, icons, imagery, color, elevation, and writing style. It also includes a comprehensive component library with UI elements like buttons, cards, chips, dialogs, lists, menus, and more.
What is React?
React is an open-source JavaScript library created by Facebook in 2013. It is used for building user interfaces and web applications. React allows developers to build UI components that manage their own state and compose them to make complex UIs.
Here are some key features of React:
- Component-based – UI built from reusable, composable components
- Declarative – Design simple views for each state
- Efficient – Minimal DOM manipulation using a virtual DOM
- Flexible – Can be used on client, server, and native platforms
- Scalable – Good for complex apps with constantly changing data
- Fast – High performance with the virtual DOM
React focuses exclusively on the view layer of the app. Because of this, it can integrate with other libraries to handle routing, state management, and API calls. It has become very popular for building web and mobile apps due to its speed, scalability, flexibility, and simplicity.
Using Material Design in React
The modular and component-based nature of Material Design makes it work very well with React. There are a few ways to bring Material Design into a React app:
1. Material Design Component Libraries
There are several React component libraries that implement the Material Design system. These provide pre-built components like buttons, menus, cards, and forms that conform to Material Design guidelines. Some popular options are:
- Material UI – The most comprehensive Material Design component library for React with over 60 components.
- React Toolbox – Components featuring Material Design for React using custom CSS and styles.
- React MD – Uses Sass stylesheets and React components for Material Design.
- Material Kit React – UI kit featuring over 1000 Material UI components.
These libraries handle all the JavaScript and CSS needed to render UI elements following Material Design principles. We can install them and then call the components in our app.
2. Use Material Design Guidelines
For more custom components, we can follow Material Design principles and guidance in our React code. This involves:
- Using the Material Design color palette and typography in CSS
- Applying elevation, shadows, and depth for realism
- Creating responsive page layouts using the grid system
- Making hover, focus, press, and transition animations
- Designing components and view hierarchies
- Using interface elements like cards, buttons, lists, menus
Although this requires more work, it allows full control over components tailored to our app’s needs.
3. Hybrid Approach
We can use a hybrid approach by getting the building blocks from a component kit but customizing parts of the UI and adding our own components. The library handles the basics while we override styles and implement custom interfaces.
For example, we can use Material UI for layout and structure but design custom buttons, cards, animations, and colors. Or use a library for generic components but make app-specific views and screens.
Example App
Here is an example React app using Material Design:
App Bar
The top app bar uses Material’s extended flexible header. It adapts based on scroll position and has a collapsible title and action buttons.
Cards
The content uses Material Design’s card component to display content items in a clean, organized way.
Lists
Lists organize content vertically. Related items can be grouped under subheaders in lists.
Buttons
The call-to-action buttons use Material’s contained button style with bold colors.
Icons
Material icons help convey meaning at a glance and enhance the visual design.
Responsiveness
Flexible layouts and components adapt nicely across devices and screen sizes. Content reflows responsively based on screen width.
Animations
Interface elements incorporate subtle animations guided by Material’s motion principles. This enhances usability without being distracting.
Theming
Material theming tools like color and typography customization help the app brand and style fit our theme.
Benefits of Using Material Design in React
Some benefits of combining Material Design with React include:
- Consistent design system – Material Design’s pre-defined design system saves time and makes UIs consistent.
- Reusable components – Material UI libraries provide reusable, configurable React components.
- Familiar interface – Users understand Material Design patterns found in Google’s products.
- Responsive – Material Design and React both embrace responsive design principles.
- Active development – Material Design and React both have strong open source communities maintaining them.
- Customizable – Override Material styles and components for app-specific needs.
- Interactivity – Material motion and React interactivity create engaging user experiences.
- Cross-platform – Material React apps work across web, mobile, desktop.
Conclusion
React and Material Design work extremely well together. Material Design’s visual language, motion principles, and UI components integrate seamlessly with React’s component architecture and declarative approach. There are excellent Material Design component libraries for React that handle much of the work out of the box. Developers can also customize Material Design to work with their own React components and styles. The result is consistent, intuitive UIs that align with user expectations and provide delightful interactions.