Material You on Android 12 awarded prestigious iF Gold Design Award

Damien Wilde | May 18 2022 - 2:08 am PT

Google has received a prestigious iF Gold Design Award for the implementation of Material You and Dynamic Color within Android 12.

The iF Product Design Award was first introduced back in 1954 and includes honors for a multitude of disciplines that span the automotive industry through to textiles. Over 5,000 entires are made each year with just a handful of Gold Awards bestowed upon those entrants.

Material You was awarded the iF Gold badge alongside the likes of Apple’s AirPods Max, the Galaxy Z Flip 3, the iPhone 13, and many more. Taking one of the top spots in the “Communication” category for 2022, Google’s vision of its own Android 12 operating system relies heavily upon personal color choices to them your entire smartphone experience on Pixel smartphones.

Material You, Android 12, and Pixel 6 is a cohesive software and hardware experience that challenges the persistent one-size-fits-all approach to OS design. Material You is Google’s latest design language, which brings a more personal, accessible, and adaptive experience to both Google and the open-source community. Hardware and software were co-developed as a holistic design experience that puts the user at its center.

As the biggest single overhaul to the mobile operating system since Android Marshmallow, Material You in Android certainly has its detractors but it offers one of the most comprehensive consumer-focused OS upgrades in the mobile space that is all based upon your wallpaper theme.

In the iF Gold Award designation page, they noted Material You’s “consistency” and “flexibility” as core tenets of the everyday experience while praising the “user-centered approach” as a “good example” of efforts to make mobile operating systems more responsive to the needs and wants of the end user:

‘Material you’, Google’s new mobile operating system, allows a high level of flexibility and scalability while maintaining consistency across all product ecosystems. It successfully reflects a human mental model in its visual design language. This user-centered approach to digital design is a good example of how operating systems are becoming more responsive to users’ needs and preferences.

A huge component within Android 12 is the usage of hues and tones to theme various first-party applications and services. This looks set to extend with the upcoming Android 13, as the recent Beta phase has hinted at even greater controls and automated theming elements for Material You and Dynamic Color. You can check all of the core changes that led to the iF Gold Award for Material You and Android 12 our in-depth hands-on in the video below:

Let us know what you think of Material You — and by extension Android 12 — receiving the iF Gold Award for design down in the comments section below.