Building Stunning UIs with Angular and Material Design: A Comprehensive Guide

If you've ever scrolled through a website and paused just to appreciate its design, you know the impact of a well-crafted User Interface (UI). A great UI is more than just colors and buttons; it’s about creating an experience that’s smooth, intuitive, and pleasant for users. For developers, crafting such an experience can be challenging. But fear not—Angular combined with Material Design can make building stunning UIs easier than you think.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore how Angular and Material Design work together to create modern, responsive, and visually appealing user interfaces. We’ll also dive into various components that Angular Material offers and see how they can be put into practice to build a beautiful UI. Let’s get started.

What is Angular and Why Use It?

Angular is a powerful JavaScript framework maintained by Google, used for building single-page applications (SPAs). Angular simplifies building dynamic web applications with its component-based architecture, where each part of your UI is broken down into manageable, reusable components. This makes scaling and maintaining your UI significantly more straightforward.

Introduction to Material Design

Material Design is Google’s design language that aims to create consistency across web and mobile applications. It’s inspired by the physical world and its textures—like paper and ink—to make the design more intuitive. Material Design brings a level of depth, movement, and interaction that helps users understand how to use an application effortlessly.

Angular Material is a library that provides a wide array of UI components adhering to Material Design principles. With Angular Material, developers can use components that are pre-built, beautiful, and fully responsive—allowing them to focus on building amazing applications instead of worrying about designing each component from scratch.

Components Offered by Angular Material

Angular Material offers a wide range of UI components that help developers create beautiful, functional, and consistent applications. Some of the most popular components include:

• Buttons: Pre-designed buttons that include several options for colors, icons, and functionality.
• Toolbar: A flexible container to create app headers and footers.
• Sidenav: A side navigation drawer that can be toggled open or closed.
• Cards: Containers that hold information like images, titles, and actions in a visually appealing way.
• Forms and Input Fields: Components that make creating forms a breeze, with built-in labels, validation, and more.
• Lists and Grids: Help organize content into clear, logical groupings.
• Dialogs and Pop-ups: Modals and alert boxes to display additional information without leaving the page.
• Tabs: Components to organize content into multiple sections using tabs.
• Chips: Compact elements that represent input, such as tags or selections.
• Snack Bars: Notifications that briefly appear to inform the user.
• Tables: Data tables with sorting, filtering, and pagination functionalities.

These components are just a sample of what Angular Material offers. They make developing a consistent and visually appealing UI straightforward, while also ensuring that the end product meets accessibility and performance standards. Now, let’s put some of these components into practice.

Getting Started with Angular and Material Design

To use Angular Material in your project, you first need to install Angular and Angular Material.

1. Install Angular CLI and Create a New Project:

   npm install -g @angular/cli
   ng new stunning-ui-project

1. Add Angular Material to Your Project:

   ng add @angular/material

This command will guide you through selecting a theme, setting up global typography, and adding animations—all of which are essential parts of Material Design.

Using Angular Material Components in Practice

Angular Material offers a wide range of ready-to-use UI components. Let's walk through some practical examples of using these components to build a stunning user interface.

1. Creating a Navigation Bar with mat-toolbar

The mat-toolbar component provides a simple way to create a navigation bar that’s clean, consistent, and visually appealing.

Example:

<mat-toolbar color="primary">
  <span>Stunning UI App</span>
  <span class="spacer"></span>
  <button mat-button>Home</button>
  <button mat-button>About</button>
  <button mat-button>Contact</button>
</mat-toolbar>

Explanation:

• mat-toolbar is used to create the navigation bar.
• color="primary" sets the primary theme color.
• The buttons (mat-button) are used for easy navigation within the application.

Add styles for .spacer to align buttons to the right:

.spacer {
  flex: 1 1 auto;
}

2. Using Cards for Structured Content with mat-card

Cards are a versatile component that can hold text, images, and action buttons. They’re perfect for showing related pieces of content in a visually appealing manner.

Example: Displaying Product Cards

<mat-card class="example-card">
  <mat-card-header>
    <div mat-card-avatar class="example-header-image"></div>
    <mat-card-title>Product Title</mat-card-title>
    <mat-card-subtitle>Product Subtitle</mat-card-subtitle>
  </mat-card-header>
  <img mat-card-image src="product-image.jpg" alt="Product image">
  <mat-card-content>
    <p>Product description goes here. It provides the user with a short overview of the product.</p>
  </mat-card-content>
  <mat-card-actions>
    <button mat-button color="primary">Buy Now</button>
    <button mat-button>Add to Cart</button>
  </mat-card-actions>
</mat-card>

Explanation:

• mat-card is a container for organizing content, making it visually appealing.
• mat-card-header, mat-card-title, and mat-card-subtitle help structure the card header.
• mat-card-actions provides buttons for user actions, such as buying or adding to a cart.

3. Building Forms with Angular Material

Forms are the backbone of most web applications. Angular Material makes building forms easy and beautiful.

Example: A Simple Login Form

<mat-card class="login-card">
  <mat-card-title>Login</mat-card-title>
  <mat-card-content>
    <form>
      <mat-form-field appearance="outline">
        <mat-label>Username</mat-label>
        <input matInput placeholder="Enter your username">
      </mat-form-field>

      <mat-form-field appearance="outline">
        <mat-label>Password</mat-label>
        <input matInput type="password" placeholder="Enter your password">
      </mat-form-field>

      <button mat-raised-button color="primary">Login</button>
    </form>
  </mat-card-content>
</mat-card>

Explanation:

• mat-form-field provides an input wrapper with built-in validation and clear labeling.
• matInput is used to create an input field styled according to Material Design guidelines.
• mat-raised-button adds a button with a shadow for visual depth.

Advantages of Using Angular Material

Angular Material offers numerous benefits, including:

1. Pre-built, Ready-to-Use Components: With Angular Material, you get access to a wide range of ready-made UI components that are both visually appealing and fully functional.

2. Consistency Across Applications: Material Design is known for creating consistent interfaces, which is important for user experience. By using Angular Material, you ensure your application follows established design standards.

3. Accessibility: Angular Material components are built with accessibility in mind, making it easier for users with disabilities to interact with your application.

4. Responsive Design: All Angular Material components are designed to work well on a variety of devices, from desktop screens to mobile phones. Using Angular Flex Layout alongside Angular Material further enhances responsiveness.

5. Customizable Themes: Angular Material allows you to customize themes to match your brand’s colors, ensuring a cohesive visual identity across your application.

6. Productivity Boost: With pre-built components, you spend less time on UI development and more time building the functionality of your application.

Putting It All Together: Building a Dashboard

Let’s take what we’ve learned and build a simple yet beautiful dashboard.

<mat-sidenav-container class="example-container" fxFlexFill>
  <mat-sidenav #sidenav mode="side" opened>Sidenav content</mat-sidenav>

  <mat-sidenav-content>
    <mat-toolbar color="primary">
      <button mat-icon-button (click)="sidenav.toggle()">
        <mat-icon>menu</mat-icon>
      </button>
      <span>Dashboard</span>
    </mat-toolbar>

    <div fxLayout="row wrap" fxLayoutGap="20px">
      <mat-card fxFlex="30">Card 1</mat-card>
      <mat-card fxFlex="30">Card 2</mat-card>
      <mat-card fxFlex="30">Card 3</mat-card>
    </div>
  </mat-sidenav-content>
</mat-sidenav-container>

Explanation:

• mat-sidenav creates a side navigation panel that can be toggled on and off.
• mat-toolbar serves as the top bar of the dashboard, providing branding and navigation options.
• mat-card components are arranged in a responsive grid layout using Angular Flex Layout.

Advanced Tips for Building Stunning UIs

• Customize Themes: To create a unique UI that matches your brand, make sure to use Angular Material's built-in theming capabilities. You can define primary, accent, and warning colors
  and use the predefined palettes or create your own. This way, you can keep your application visually consistent while giving it a personalized touch.

• Use Animations: Angular provides built-in animation support, which works well with Angular Material components. Adding animations, such as fade-ins or slide transitions, makes the UI more interactive and engaging for users.

• Responsive Grids: Use Angular Flex Layout in combination with Angular Material to create responsive, adaptive grids. This ensures that your content looks great on different screen sizes, improving the user experience on mobile devices.

• Accessibility First: Angular Material components come with many accessibility attributes, but it’s still important to use additional ARIA tags and manage the tab order properly. Ensuring that your app is accessible is a big win for user inclusivity.

• Testing: Angular Material components support testing with tools like Jasmine and Karma. Testing helps catch bugs or unexpected behaviors in your UI components, leading to a more reliable product.

Getting Creative with Angular Material

Angular Material components are not just easy to use; they’re flexible enough to create custom, engaging user experiences. Let’s explore some ideas:

• Custom Dialogs: The mat-dialog component can be customized to create pop-ups that provide extra information or guide users through a multi-step process. For example, you could create a product tutorial using a series of dialogs.

• Dynamic Forms: Using Angular Reactive Forms in combination with Material components like mat-form-field, you can create dynamic forms that adapt based on user input, making your application more interactive.

• Data Tables: The mat-table component can be used to build feature-rich data tables with sorting, filtering, and pagination—all necessary when displaying large sets of data. You could further enhance it with custom cell templates to make the table even more engaging.

• Beautiful Layouts: Combining mat-sidenav, mat-toolbar, and mat-list can help you build a sleek and organized navigation system for your app. For example, a dashboard could feature a sidenav for easy navigation between different features, a toolbar for important actions, and cards for highlighting specific data points.

Conclusion

Angular Material is an excellent toolkit for developers who want to create visually stunning, modern, and accessible user interfaces. By offering a wide array of components that align with Material Design guidelines, Angular Material simplifies the process of building UIs, allowing you to focus more on functionality and less on design intricacies.

With the wide range of pre-built components—like cards, toolbars, sidenav, tables, dialogs, and more—you can rapidly develop user interfaces that are clean, intuitive, and responsive.

Moreover, Angular Material helps you maintain accessibility and consistency across your application, enhancing the overall user experience. We’ve explored practical examples like navigation bars, product cards, and data tables, all of which show the power and versatility of Angular Material.

Remember, the beauty of a great UI lies not just in colors and aesthetics but in the experience it provides for the user. Angular, combined with Material Design, is the perfect blend of functionality and aesthetics to create a truly exceptional experience. Now, go ahead and start building something amazing.

Thank's for your time, see you soon in another one :)