User Interface Guidelines

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 »
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.
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