Nick Butcher and Roman Nurik on design consistency

In yesterday's Android Design in Action video podcast Nick Butcher and Roman Nurik talked about design consistency on Android. This is a topic that keeps popping up in many design discussions and seems to be often misunderstood. What does it mean to follow the Holo guidelines when building an app? Does it mean that every app must look the same? What if you are publishing your app on multiple platforms? How do you make sure that your brand is consistent throughout the different app versions but still make your app feel like an Android app?

Nick and Roman explain how to approach different parts of your app design to achieve all these goals.

You can find the video from here (direct link to the design consistency part of the video) and the presentation slides are available here.

In a related G+ post Nick gives some tips about choosing colours for your app:

"The Holo visual language does not dictate a strict colour palette. While it does provide some base colours as a starting point [0], it is not prescriptive. You should use colour to bring your own brand’s personality to your app.

One technique that works particularly well is to use a single strong accent colour to marry Holo’s visual style with your brand. By default, Holo widgets use a blue accent colour—but they don’t have to! By theming the standard widgets with your own accent colour they will appear both distinctly Android and completely branded."

Read the full post here.