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.
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.