The Android UI team has begun developing guidelines for the interaction and
visual design of Android applications. Look here for articles that describe
these guidelines as we release them.
- Icon
Design Guidelines and Android Icon Templates Pack
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- Your applications need a wide variety of icons, from a launcher icon to
icons in menus, dialogs, tabs, the status bar, and lists. The Icon Guidelines
describe each kind of icon in detail, with specifications for the size, color,
shading, and other details for making all your icons fit in the Android system.
The Icon Templates Pack is an archive of Photoshop and Illustrator templates and
filters that make it much simpler to create conforming icons.
- Widget Design Guidelines
- A widget displays an application's most important or timely information
at a glance, on a user's Home screen. These design guidelines describe how to
design widgets that fit with others on the Home screen. They include links to
graphics files and templates that will make your designer's life easier.
- Activity and Task Design Guidelines
- Activities are the basic, independent building blocks of applications.
As you design your application's UI and feature set, you are free to
re-use activities from other applications as if they were yours,
to enrich and extend your application. These guidelines
describe how activities work, illustrates them with examples, and
describes important underlying principles and mechanisms, such as
multitasking, activity reuse, intents, the activity stack, and
tasks. It covers this all from a high-level design perspective.
- Menu Design Guidelines
- Android applications make use of Option menus and Context menus
that enable users to perform operations and navigate to other parts
of your application or to other applications. These guidelines describe
the difference between Options and Context menus, how to arrange
menu items, when to put commands on-screen, and other details about
menu design.
