I had a brief look at Google's Material Design guide today after seeing it linked by Andy Baio. It's essentially a series of guidelines about how to make an interface or product look Google-y. Much of it is good design advice for other projects. The color palettes are one such example.

When future historians want to know what 2014 looked like, this will be a fairly accurate record. I hope we (or just Google, at least) can improve on a few things; their cascading menus have always looked messy and non-intuitive to me. They just pop up all over the screen.