Android and Material Design

The new Android version, so far called 'L' and most likely winding up being called Lollipop when it will be released, has a new visual style called Material Design.

For Android this change of visual style means that the code base also needs to service both old API deployments (lower than v20) as well as the new ones (v21 and upwards). In effect this means you have to create res/layout-v21 and res/values-v21 directories to customize the layout and modify the styles for the new API.

In your module's build.gradle you have to change the compileSdkVersion to 'android-L' and the targetSdkVersion to 'L'. If you have any dependencies on support-v4 or appcompat-v7 you need to switch those to v21.+ to pick up future updates, such as a different release candidates up to the released version.

On design

Maybe this will reach some people and cause less frustration for other people:

  • No, Microsoft Word is <strong>not</strong> the correct kind of program to design your logo in.
  • When your designer asks for a high resolution copy of your logo, he means something that not 150 x 300 pixels, but rather a logo professionally designed with a vector drawing program, say, Adobe Illustrator.
  • Despite how creative your designer is, he or she need input and ideas about what you want to accomplish in order to give you results in return.
  • Designing a logo that you feel comfortable with can take as little as 1 hour or as long as a few days or even weeks (depending on the amount of people who have to affirm it), you have to pay for such effort, obviously.
  • The primary colours are blue, green, and red (unless we are talking about print, then they are cyan, magenta, and yellow).
  • No, blue is not a warm colour. Subsequently, red is not a cool colour.
  • After you have approved all designs, changing your mind means you will incur additional costs.
  • You cannot just take photos or other images/designs from the Internet and reuse them without clearing proper copyright issues.