Choosing a Look and Feel: My Dive into Material, Fluent, and UI5

When I started my Human–Computer Interaction project, I thought “design system” just meant consistent buttons and margins.
Then I began exploring Google’s Material Design, Microsoft’s Fluent Design, and SAP’s UI5 — and it became clear that each isn’t merely a toolkit, but a worldview.

They don’t just define how software looks; they reveal how different companies imagine how people should work, think, and move through digital space.

1. Material Design: The Grammar of the Everyday

Material Design was my first stop — and it felt instantly familiar, almost invisible in its ubiquity.
The MUI library for React made it effortless to produce something coherent, polished, and immediately usable.

The brilliance of Material lies in its democratization of design.
It gives structure to chaos, making consistency achievable even for small teams. Every elevation, ripple, and corner radius feels pre-decided, as though the interface has already been rehearsed for you.

Yet, that’s also its paradox.
Material’s visual language is so pervasive that it begins to erase identity. You can customize the color palette, but the soul of Material — its geometry, spacing, and motion logic — always remains distinctly Google.

It’s a design system optimized for familiarity, not distinctiveness.
Perfect for consumer apps; less so for systems that need to speak in their own voice.

2. Fluent Design: The Aesthetics of Motion and Light

If Material is functionalist modernism, Fluent Design is its more poetic cousin — the Bauhaus student who discovered translucency and rhythm.

Fluent feels like it breathes.
Its use of acrylic textures, subtle motion, and light gradients brings a kind of atmospheric calm. Where Material defines order through grids, Fluent defines it through space — the gaps between things, the transparency of context.

For applications that are complex but need emotional polish — dashboards, file managers, authoring tools — Fluent shines.
It feels personal, yet structured; soft, yet precise.

Still, it carries Microsoft’s signature restraint. Its ecosystem is less sprawling, and its design DNA remains deeply anchored in the Windows aesthetic.
Used well, it’s graceful; used thoughtlessly, it feels transplanted.

3. SAP UI5: The Geometry of Clarity

SAP UI5 was the unexpected revelation.
I had assumed it would be rigid, corporate, even dated — the kind of framework that sacrifices aesthetics for control.
But the more I studied it, the more I saw something else: a philosophy of clarity.

UI5 is not trying to charm users. It’s trying to protect their attention.
Every line, icon, and margin is engineered to convey information density without chaos.
Where Material and Fluent design for interaction, UI5 designs for decision-making.

The principles are unapologetically utilitarian:

Tables, forms, and filters are treated as first-class citizens, not accessories.
Components are deeply semantically aware — a “smart table” knows its hierarchy, a “smart field” knows its data type.
Consistency isn’t aesthetic dogma; it’s a way to prevent cognitive fatigue across large enterprise suites.

The more I worked with it, the more I understood:
UI5 isn’t a “freight train.” It’s a rail network — precise, interconnected, and built for scale.

It represents a design language for systems that don’t just look coherent, but think coherently.

4. What I Chose — and What I Learned

For my prototype — a complex enterprise dashboard — I chose to follow UI5’s design principles, even though I implemented them using a lighter tech stack.
Its disciplined grid, emphasis on hierarchy, and clarity of interaction provided the mental scaffolding I needed.

But this experience changed how I see all design systems.
Material taught me how to make interfaces approachable.
Fluent showed me that aesthetics can breathe life into function.
UI5 taught me something deeper: design is governance.

It’s not just how users feel — it’s how systems communicate their internal logic to the people who rely on them.

5. Closing Reflection: Systems as Cultures

Choosing between Material, Fluent, and UI5 is like choosing between cultures of thought.

Material assumes a universal user — predictable, guided, optimized for flow.
Fluent assumes a human presence — emotive, expressive, contextual.
UI5 assumes an organization — layered, data-driven, procedural, and precise.

As a student, this exploration changed the way I think about “look and feel.”
It’s not a matter of taste, but of philosophy.
A design system is a mirror of its environment — Google’s openness, Microsoft’s polish, SAP’s clarity of structure.

Each speaks a different truth about how technology should serve human complexity.
And learning to listen to those truths — without bias or condescension — is, I think, the first step to designing systems that truly endure.

💡

If you’re working under with enterprise software:
Never underestimate UI5.
Its beauty isn’t loud — it’s architectural. It’s the kind of beauty that lives in things that must work flawlessly for years.
The longer you look, the more it rewards precision, patience, and respect for systems that have to last longer than trends.