Liquid Glass
12th June 2025
Apple recently announced a whole new design language for their UI across everything at WWDC25, soon to be live on a device near you in September, most likely. And in typical fashion, they term this design language something fancy and luxurious; Liquid Glass. Wow.
So what is Liquid Glass?
I’ll tell you; something that invoked a rage so livid, so deep within me that for the days after its announcement I genuinely was considering jumping ship to an Android phone.
I’m dead serious. Me. With a website like this. With projects like that.
How did I of all people not like Liquid Glass?
My reasoning was mostly this; the legibility can become Liquid Ass.
As a graphic designer I was genuinely cringing at some of the screenshots which were coming out about the UI. The nav bar on Apple Music. The transparent icons. And the worst one: the Control Centre having practically no blur on its background.
“Steve Jobs must be rolling around in his grave so much he must be a generator powering all of Apple Park”, I said to myself.
But after a few days, I didn’t look at it for a while, and decided: “Alright. Let’s try to understand why it is this way. What is the logic of their designers when they sat there and obviously spent a lot of time making this?”, and so I watched some of the WWDC videos about it, such as their intro and then a more in depth explainer.
And somehow, I changed my mind. I somehow understood it. And even respected the effort and thought put into it. The shaders and reasoning behind why everything should be smooth and transparent is commendable. I was happy with my little pop-out interaction on this website, and its things like that which make UI fun and interesting to, well, interact with.
You need a bit of fun in it. You can have regular grid based static design. It works for some things. But I think for something fluid with motion, having tactility and materiality makes it a lot better.
To be clear, I still held the judgements. They definitely need to fix those things. Maybe iOS 27 will polish it even further (I still can’t get over the naming, even though it also makes sense if you look at their logic…).
But I think, as someone somewhere said in a comment section; we have ultra beefed up computers nowadays. Why do we not have any kind of materials like in the Aero or Aqua days? Surely we can spare some for some graphics. Least of all if you have an M2 Pro in your MacBook or a Pro iPhone.
I do fear some devices will not handle the new UI as well as the latest ones, but I reckon by the time the Beta phase is over, it should probably be optimised. Hopefully. I don’t think I’m gonna chance Beta 1 though, haha.
So, what is the moral of this thought?
Change is hard. But you can accept it, if you try to understand it. Not saying swap teams and become malleable to everyone’s point of view. That’s bad. It makes you a tool for them. Yet, a lot of pain originates in the resistance to change. The more fluid you are in response to it, the less you suffer the rigidity of trying to go against it.
And appropriately, may Liquid Glass leave you with Bruce Lee’s famous line: “Be as water, my friend.”