Drew Ink The year

Material Design

Google's system, built on the fiction that the interface is made of sheets of paper at measured heights, lit by one key light and one ambient light.

Material Design: an Android screen at 720 by 1280, a blue grey status bar and app bar over a scrolling list of cards, each card a generated picture of a carrier above a title and two text actions in orange, with a round orange button floating over the list.
Material Design, a Drew Ink screen, Drew Ink. Drawn 2026-09-10.

Near it

Flat designFlat 2.0Fluent DesignElevation

What it is made of

elevationa height in dp, which determines the shadow rather than the other way roundthe shadow is computed from the height, so two things at the same height cannot disagree
the grid8dp, with a 4dp step for small components
motionasymmetric easing: things accelerate faster than they decelerate

Where it came from

Announced at Google I/O in June 2014, and revised substantially since.

Sources