Google announce Android Design style guide for apps

Google's director of Android user experience says Ice Cream Sandwich is "Android getting serious about design"

The new style guidelines for Android - which Google has released on its new Android Design website - are supposed to help developers working on apps for Ice Cream Sandwich create software with a common Google look. With summaries of Google's design principles, user interface capabilities and overarching creative vision available for perusal, Google looks to be tightening the reins a little on the previously free-from Android Market, at least where aesthetics are concerned.

Speaking to The Verge at CES, director of Android user experience Matias Duarte said that Google's mission with Ice Cream Sandwich was "to make it beautiful, to make it powerful" and that the framework of ICS made it "much easier for people to create beautiful, simple apps". In that spirit, the new Android Design site covers topics from themes to colour matching to typography to touch feedback - every visual element an app developer could care to name. "If you want to be serious about design, you have to do this stuff." Says Duarte. "Ice Cream Sandwich is Android getting serious about design."
The Android Design site is now live, and while some of the claims it makes about the design of Ice Cream Sandwich might raise a few eyebrows ("app icons are works of art in their own right" - yeah, we're sure your installation in the Tate will open any day now), pretty-fying and streamlining a mobile OS that has in the past been seen as something of a geeky younger brother to Apple's iOS is no bad thing in our books. Check out the full 35 minute interview at the link below.

Source:http://www.t3.com/news/google-announce-android-style-guide-for-apps