It’s not just the font choice for me but the entirety of Material UI. Something about it seems void.
I don’t mean that to seem unkind or critical of the people behind the design; they’re clearly very talented and far more than I am where design is concerned. It isn’t meant to be disparaging. People clearly like it, but for me personally it has always felt like it lacks any kind of soul or energy.
I think this is the point. Material is the perfect "default" UI. It's boring, unoffensive, consistent, easy to use/implement, compatible with both mobile & desktop use-patterns, and low enough complexity that it should be able to run everywhere.
Material UI is the safe choice that you can pick up and implement while assuming users will be able to figure it out and won't really have ground to complain too much about it. Material is becoming the universal "good-enough" UI and work like that being discussed in this post are efforts to fill in those last few gaps where you have to break out of the standard Material UI model because your use case isn't covered.
MD1 told designers to embrace unconventional, bright, saturated colors and contrasting pairings. They even had a blog article reassuring that, yes, your brand can survive the material redesign.
MD2 embraced brand specific designs with custom fonts, button shapes and, again, waay too many colors. There where "Material Studies" [1], in which they show how a brand could adopt the design system. For the Google flavor of MD2 they threw away all of that and went with white.
MD3 shifts again, to pastel colors and user customization. It corrects many mistakes, but I believe third party apps won't like having to account for all the possible background colors.
To me, the first two versions are a failure [2]. They were amazing to read, but the real world turned out different.
Compare this to the Human Interface Guidelines which have stayed far more stable and neutral.
[1]: https://material.io/design/introduction#theming
[2]: In the sense that what they set out to achieve led to completely different results in the real world. I'm not saying that all Android design since Lollipop is terrible.
Most UI design templates feel void to me by default. I take it that's intentional, such that people making apps using them can add personality without going into conflict with the core design.
I work in UX and I always wonder what the 'end goal' is to these UI systems... in a perfect world where every 1st and 3rd party developer on a platform builds with the same UI system, won't we eventually have every app looking nearly indistinguishable from one another? Is that really what folks want? Where is the creativity? People laughed off Apple's attempts at skeumorphism, but I predict in a few years people will be craving unique looking apps.
I don’t mean that to seem unkind or critical of the people behind the design; they’re clearly very talented and far more than I am where design is concerned. It isn’t meant to be disparaging. People clearly like it, but for me personally it has always felt like it lacks any kind of soul or energy.