Material Design Navigation Items with NavigationView

navigation_view.xml

<android.support.design.widget.NavigationView
    android:id="@+id/navigation"
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="match_parent"
    android:layout_gravity="start"
    app:menu="@menu/navigation_drawer"
    android:theme="@style/Theme.AppTheme.NavigationDrawer"/>

NavigationDrawerViewMaterial.md

#####Problem: The NavigationView is an excellent component which simplifies much of the issues with generating a consistent and polished navigation drawer on Android. However, it does not quite follow the MD spec on how items should look

#####Solution: Create a couple of themes which sort this while maintaining backward compatibility to JB 4.2 (and further if you play around with fontFamily attribute). Note that you do need to have the support library v7 in your project for this to work without modifications - it requires the primary_text_default_material_light color from the library.

styles-v21.xml

<resources>
    <style name="Theme.AppTheme.NavDrawerItem" parent="Base.Theme.AppTheme.NavDrawerItem">
        <item name="android:fontFamily">sans-serif-medium</item>
    </style>
</resources>

styles.xml

<resources>
    <style name="Base.Theme.AppTheme.NavDrawerItem">
        <item name="android:textSize">14sp</item>
        <item name="android:textColor">@color/primary_text_default_material_light</item>
    </style>

    <style name="Theme.AppTheme.NavigationDrawer" parent="Base.Theme.AppTheme">
        <item name="textAppearanceListItem">@style/Theme.SkillTree.NavDrawerItem</item>
    </style>

    <style name="Theme.AppTheme.NavDrawerItem" parent="Base.Theme.AppTheme.NavDrawerItem">
        <item name="android:fontFamily">sans-serif</item>
        <item name="android:textStyle">bold</item>
    </style>
</resources>

What is Theme.SkillTree.NavDrawerItem?

Sorry SkillTree should be AppTheme. SkillTree is something specific to a project I've been working on. I've updated the Gist.

How to go about for changing the item height using the theme ?
Also to mention i have overridden design_navigation_separator_vertical_padding to 0dp in order to show the item selection background to appear edge to edge when tapped.

For the height, you override the listPreferredItemHeightSmall style property.