The Lollipop OTA for the N7 LTE is a long time coming, now. So in order to pass the time, I started getting into the whole Material design universe from the designer’s perspective.

As a user I’ve come to like the new desgin quite a bit. Even tough, some animations are pretty laggy (at least on KitKat).

First draft

The application I am currently developing for doesn’t contain any visible user interface of its own, except for the launcher icon, of course. So I started by sketching that. The idea and rough outline comes from this USB Plug icon vector graphic.

Drive Mount Material icon draft Drive Mount Material icon draft

The designer community seems to have settled with 45° for the long shadow. Because in the original version the plug is already positioned at an 45° angle, I rotated the icon a little more, for the shadow to properly separate the plug from the background.

There are yet a few minor kinks to iron out, e.g. irregular shadow lines or the occasional crack where the underlying layer shines through. Still, I’m pretty much satisfied with the outcome.

On a side note

Another nuisance, is that the icons the Gradle Android SVG Plugin renders out, during the build are all a bit blurry. Even the xxhdpi one!