The UX/UI design landscape has witnessed a seismic shift in 2025. Google’s latest innovations—Material 3 Expressive and the groundbreaking AI-powered tool Stitch—are redefining how designers create, iterate, and implement digital experiences. For years, Material Design served as the trusted foundation behind countless Android apps and web interfaces, offering structure, consistency, and clarity like a reliable blueprint. But 2025 marks a bold evolutionary leap that’s changing everything.
What Is Expressive Material?
Expressive Material is about designing with feeling. It invites designers to move beyond the purely functional and step into a space where brand identity, emotional resonance, and visual storytelling take center stage.
This evolution doesn’t discard the original Material principles—it builds on them. You still get the structure and accessibility, but now with powerful new tools for crafting emotionally engaging and brand-rich experiences.
What Is Google Stitch?
Google Stitch, launched at Google I/O 2025, is a revolutionary AI-powered tool that transforms simple text prompts or image inputs into complex UI designs and frontend code in minutes. This Google Labs experiment represents the biggest leap forward in design-to-development workflow in recent history.
Stitch is Google’s answer to the evolving needs of designers and developers who build for multiple devices and environments. It offers:
- Cross-platform adaptability
- Unified component architecture
- Simplified code handoffs
- Better design-developer collaboration
Why Material 3 Expressive Matters to UX/UI Designers:
Material 3 Expressive is a philosophical shift that puts emotion, brand identity, and storytelling at the forefront of design. It provides the language and principles for creating truly impactful user experiences.
1. Enables Deeper Emotional Connection and Brand Identity
Beyond Generic: Designers are no longer constrained by a “one-size-fits-all” Material look. Expressive elements like dynamic color, enhanced typography, and refined shapes allow brands to inject their unique personality and evoke specific emotions (e.g., warmth, trust, excitement). This fosters a deeper, more memorable connection with users.
Stronger Brand Recall: When every interaction feels distinctly “on-brand,” it strengthens brand identity and makes products more recognizable and desirable in a competitive market.
2. Improves User Engagement and Desirability
Visually Rich and Resonant: Expressive interfaces are inherently more engaging. Users are more likely to spend time, explore features, and return to products that feel visually appealing and emotionally resonant.
User Preference: Extensive research by Google has shown that users across all age groups strongly prefer expressive designs, finding them more appealing, intuitive, and easier to use. This translates directly to better user satisfaction and potentially higher retention rates.
3. Enhances Usability and Accessibility (with Flair)
Purposeful Emotion: While expressive, the new Material 3 guidelines are backed by robust research. Elements like strategic use of color, size, and motion are designed to guide user attention and improve task completion rates. For example, prominent, well-placed “Send” buttons can be spotted much faster in expressive designs.
Accessibility by Design: Expressive elements like increased contrast, flexible typography, and purposeful motion also contribute to better accessibility for users with varying abilities, even bridging age gaps in usability tests. This means designers can create visually rich experiences without compromising inclusivity.
4. Offers Creative Freedom within a Structure:
Guidelines, Not Rules: Expressive Material provides a flexible system. Designers gain more creative wiggle room to experiment with visual elements and motion, while still benefiting from a well-defined, consistent, and research-backed framework that ensures usability and accessibility.
Why Google Stitch Matters to UX/UI Designers:
Google Stitch is an AI-powered assistant that revolutionizes the process of design, building on the expressive capabilities of Material 3 and streamlining the workflow from idea to code. It provides the tools for efficiently realizing expressive visions.
1. Accelerates Idea to Prototype
Instant UI Generation: Stitch can transform natural language prompts, sketches, or images into fully formed UI designs and functional frontend code (HTML, CSS, React, Flutter components) in minutes. This drastically reduces the time spent on initial prototyping and wireframing, freeing up designers for more strategic tasks
Rapid Iteration: Designers can quickly generate and compare multiple design variants, accelerating the exploration phase and allowing for faster feedback loops and refinements.
2. Bridges the Design-Development Gap
Seamless Handoff: By generating clean, production-ready code directly from designs, Stitch minimizes miscommunication and friction between design and development teams. This ensures that the design vision is accurately and efficiently translated into a functional product.
Figma Integration: The ability to paste generated designs directly into Figma, complete with editable layers and auto-layout, ensures continuity within existing design workflows and allows for further collaborative refinement.
3. Enhances Efficiency and Productivity
Automation of Repetitive Tasks: Stitch handles the grunt work of laying out components and writing basic code, allowing designers to focus on higher-level problems like user flows, complex interactions, and refining the emotional impact of the design.
Built-in Optimization: AI-powered features for accessibility checks, real-time A/B testing suggestions, and performance optimization mean designers can deliver high-quality, user-centric interfaces with less manual effort.
4. Democratizes and Elevates Design Capabilities
Accessibility for Non-Coders: Stitch lowers the barrier to entry for app design, enabling individuals without extensive coding or design tool expertise to bring their ideas to life.
Focus on Vision: For experienced designers, Stitch acts as a powerful co-creator, allowing them to concentrate on the strategic and creative aspects of their work, knowing that the technical execution is being handled efficiently.
Where Expressive Meets Efficiency
The true power for UX/UI designers lies in the synergy between Material 3 Expressive and Google Stitch:
- Material 3 Expressive provides the “soul” of the design: It gives designers the principles and components to create interfaces that are emotionally resonant, brand-aligned, and deeply engaging. It’s about designing with feeling and purpose.
- Google Stitch provides the “engine” for production: It enables designers to rapidly prototype, iterate, and translate those expressive visions into functional code with unprecedented speed and precision, automating the technical heavy lifting.
The Future of UX/UI Design is Here
This combined evolution of Material 3 Expressive and Google Stitch represents a paradigm shift that every UX/UI designer should understand:
Democratized Design Excellence: Advanced design capabilities are no longer limited to large teams with extensive resources. Solo designers and small startups can now create professional, branded experiences that compete with industry giants.
Stronger Brand Identity Integration: You’re no longer constrained by generic design systems. Every element—from color palettes to micro-interactions—can embody your brand’s unique personality, creating memorable experiences that users associate specifically with your product.
Accelerated Design-to-Market Timeline: Professional designers with decades of experience are already testing how this AI-powered approach stacks up against traditional workflows, with many reporting significant time savings in initial design phases.
Enhanced Emotional Connection: Design is fundamentally about human psychology and emotion. Expressive elements allow you to trigger specific feelings—trust, excitement, comfort—making your digital products more relatable and memorable.
Creative Freedom Within Structure: For designers who found previous Material systems restrictive, this new ecosystem provides creative flexibility without compromising usability, accessibility, or development feasibility.
Built-in Storytelling Capabilities: Every shape, motion, and color becomes part of a cohesive narrative. Modern expressive design transforms your product into a character with personality—telling stories that users want to engage with repeatedly.
Conclusion: The Future of Digital Experience Design
Material 3 Expressive and Google Stitch signal a transformative moment in digital design—inviting designers to move beyond uniformity toward emotion-driven, brand-aligned storytelling powered by artificial intelligence. With dynamic color systems, nuanced typography, meaningful motion, flexible theming, and AI-assisted development, Google is fundamentally reimagining what design systems can achieve.
This isn’t just about making interfaces look better—it’s about creating digital experiences that feel genuinely human, distinctly branded, and emotionally memorable.
At Bombe.design, we’re embracing this evolution head-on. Our team is exploring how expressive design can be seamlessly integrated into real-world products—blending usability with creativity to deliver interfaces that connect on a deeper level. And as Google Stitch matures, we’re keenly watching its potential to further streamline our processes and unlock new levels of design innovation.
Book a free UX audit and let’s shape interfaces which resonate.