Material Design for your product. Yay or Nay?
I am not a designer and I take lots of inspiration from Dribbble and Material Design, of which I am quite fond of.
Also, as there are lots of components already built using Material Design (ex. Angular Material), it's pretty easy to build good looking designs fast and well.
The problem is, (whilst I am loving how it looks) my product is ending up looking like a Google one. I am trying to diverge whenever I can, of course, but it's hard without making it look worse.
I do recall some kinda popular who use Material Design AND and are not Google Products.
What's your view? Would you say a product ends up looking soulless if it uses an already popular design language?
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Yes, you start with Material and evolve into your own unique design overtime. Your new design may end up similar to Material but it may also turn out to be drastically different. Either way, it's a great guideline to have a cohesive experience in your app when you start.
We use Material UI for our site ReactLibraries.com. Similar to you we've take some out of the box Material components but combined it with a little bit of customization :)
My view is that Material is a fantastic way to give your product some extra polish, especially if you are not a designer. If you think that your site looks too cookie cutter then perhaps engage a designer to give you some quick ways you can make changes to the CSS to get a more custom look.
I used to think the same thing about Material looking too generic, we use it in our company. Then we hired a designer and our product looks great and still uses Material. It just all depends on your creative skills and how much you can make it your own.
I think, it actually doesn't matter, which exactly design it uses. The product itself should bring value.
I think it ultimately depends what you're looking for. I think Material Design is great if you don't want to spend a ton of time thinking about theming and design and want your product out the door quickly (while looking fairly polished) since they provide a ton of guidelines for you and there are a number of libraries out there that even implement the Material Design spec, like Material-UI for React. The flip-side is your product starts to look a bit like a Google product as you mentioned (which may or may not be a bad thing) and sometimes it can be a bit of a hassle to customize to your exact needs.
I always start with Material and put minimal effort into making it pretty. Don't make it pretty until it works, because you'll waste a ton of time making stuff pretty before you know it works.
Once everything works well, hire a designer. You can give the designer the actual, working MVP, which makes the designer's work much easier.
Material Design is a blank slate for bootstrapping an MVP with minimal waste.
NO NO NO.
Material Design was creating for Google products )))