Widget Design Guidelines

Since the beginning of the year, the Android UI team has been hard at work on the Android 1.5 release. Starting today with widgets, we would like to share some of our evolving Android design principles with you.

Widgets are a new feature that application developers can use to promote a small sample of the most relevant dynamic data from their applications on the Home screen. We've designed widgets to fit within our Home screen grid framework, which means you and your designer can create a widget within a 4x1, 3x3, or 2x2 grid cell, depending on the space you need for an at-a-glance summary of information from your application. To illustrate the preferred ways to design widgets for the home screen, we've assembled Widget Design Guidelines.

We're also providing the original artwork assets and source files that we used to create the widgets bundled with Android 1.5. If you want your widgets to match the platform in terms of appearance, use the templates that are available throughout the Widget Design Guidelines.

For more technical information around widgets, take a look at Jeff Sharkey's blog post as well as the AppWidgets documentation.

We've only just begun to scratch the surface of what's possible using widgets. We're looking forward to seeing how far you can extend our work!

One last thing: in the coming weeks, we'll be rolling out more articles and presentations that demonstrate design best practices for Android. For example, if you've ever wanted to learn how to create and be consistent with iconography on Android, stay tuned: we'll be posting sample guides and templates.

Learn about Android 1.5 and more at Google I/O. Members of the Android team will be there to give a series of in-depth technical sessions and to field your toughest questions.