Material design style coolness?

[morgunder]

Request: Please have a look at Vuetify and bring their level of polish to Shoelace.

I have a large Vue project that is built on Vue Bootstrap and frankly i'm getting tired of the boring look of bootstrap especially compared to Material design. When i compare Vue Bootstrap to Vuetify, there is a polish in Vuetify that grabs me. The built in animation effects like ripple on button hover and click and the placeholder text flying up to become a label. the standard elevation property and other aspects from material design that just give a lot of flexibility in a constrained manner.

when i look at migrating to a new framework, i love the idea of moving to Shoelace mostly because of all the good work you have done with Font Awesome to make it simple to do excellent UI with it. I'm trying to convince myself to move to Shoelace instead of Vuetify, but i'm looking for eye grabbing UI that is easy to build and manage. not just cleaner code.

what do you think? are you headed in this direction?

[claviska]

I'll preface this by saying I'm not at all a fan of Material UI's design and effects such as the infamous ripple. To me, it feels outdated and clunky. Sure, there's a lot of detail and justification for why they do things the way they do, but it's not my groove.

That said, we do understand that users have varying needs and we're actively working to improve Shoelace's design token API, which will allow for faster and easier customizations. In addition, most components already ship parts that allow more granular customizations. The work we're doing here will pave the way for more theme-independent components. It will also allow us, as well as third parties, to build new themes, potentially including one inspired by Material UI.

We also announced just yesterday that we're adding a designer to the team to help with this effort.

While we're not heading in the direction of Material, we are heading in a direction that will more easily support such a theme. It's just going to take us some time to get there.

[morgunder]

i appreciate the thoughful response. as i look at the landscape i see two directions: either an opinionated design based on material or an unopinionated design that allows themes to approximate the opinionated output. in my current project we are stuck with one opinionated design and are feeling locked in. so i could be easily convinced to head toward an unopinionated framework. knowing that you are headed in this direction is reassuring. i have the utmost respect for the Font Awesome team and how they have kept things simple and flexible over they years and trust that together you will head in the right direction.

that being said, having an out of the box theme that closes some of the gap with vuetify / material looks like low hanging fruit to get people on board + making theme development an obvious discipline if not even rolling out a paid theme model aka bootstrap themes back in the day may bring additional resources to the table and move the ball faster

[masi]

Lion by ING bank is even less styled by default than Shoelace. Personally I like Lion for that better. The less default styling I have to override the better for me.

If I understand it the the direction of Shoelace is to make "plain" Shoelace like Lion and ship a default theme as an add-on, right?