At Google I/O 2014, Google introduced Material Design, their new design language for the upcoming major release of Android, labeled as “Android L”. The Material Design preview has shown a lot of promise and has been getting rave reviews from designers and developers alike. We at Beautiful Pixels are pretty excited about it too, especially considering all the fantastically designed Android Apps we’d get to see in the coming months.
Andrew Haskin, a designer, was also pretty excited about it and decided to recreate most of the animations from the promotional video that Google released in Keynote, Apple’s fantastic presentation creator app for Mac. The video above shows a (vertical) comparison between Google’s version and what he managed to create in Keynote.
For those of you who don’t know, I’m a huge advocate of using Keynote in my work. I think most people underestimate this what used to be $20 software (now free with Mavericks!). In my work, there’s constant discussion about which is the best and hottest new design tool to use. I’ve tried many of them, but in the end I still keep coming back to Keynote. It’s easy to learn and use, swapping assets is a breeze (using media placeholder), and most complex animations can be tested with Magic Move (the secret sauce to it all). Producing animations can span a range of fidelities; I can produce all the assets in Keynote, or I can copy out of Illustrator or drag and drop from Sketch (how seamless this works puts a smile on my face every time). As an interaction or visual designer, if you’re not using Keynote to test and bring your work to life, then I think you should start now! At least I hope this little experiment inspires you to try.
About the actual process of creation, Andrew adds:
The fidelity of the animation is nothing like what After Effects would do, but it’s pretty close and definitely gets the job done. To be honest, it’s not a raw export from Keynote. I did edit it in FCP X to match Google’s version with the music (I think I actually spent more time matching in FCP X than actually producing the animations in Keynote). The assets you see I just screen grabbed from the original video. I didn’t reproduce them, but you might begin to see how you would copy in assets from another application.
He was kind enough to make the Keynote file available for download here, so you can download it and play around to see what Keynote is capable of.