Love it or hate it? Apple’s ‘Liquid Glass’ explained

Apple’s latest design overhaul—aptly named Liquid Glass—has been polarizing to say the least.

Some people love it, lauding the company’s bold new approach as a step toward the future.

Others hate it, highlighting that the company’s focus on transparent surfaces and flashy visuals has caused readability and usability issues.

It’s the company’s biggest redesign since the launch of iOS 7 more than 12 years ago. From the Mac and the iPad to the iPhone and the Apple Watch, all of Apple’s mainline products have been updated with the new design.

Apple is the latest company that seems to be moving away from the purely flat and minimal design practices that have been a mainstay in the technology industry for the past decade.

Instead, it is going back to its roots a bit, incorporating elements of the real world into its interfaces.

Liquid Glass was inspired by Apple’s Vision OS, the operating system of Apple’s mixed reality headset, the Vision Pro.

Transparent surfaces and glassy icons make a lot of sense for an operating system designed to be worn on your face, says Paolo Ciuccarelli, director of the Center for Design at Northeastern University. You want to be able to see what’s in front of you after all. It’s interesting, however, that we are seeing similar design cues being implemented into nearly Apple’s full lineup of projects.

He sees it as a positive sign that the company is experimenting, adding the physicalities of the real world into its software.

“It’s good on one side that we go back to some level of materiality,” he says. “It’s a new way of addressing a universal need that we have to see our technology be a part of our world.”

It harkens a bit back to the early days of the iPhone, which relied heavily on skeuomorphic design for much of its operating system.

That’s a design language that involves creating digital interfaces that look similar to real-world objects—think of the original Notepad app literally looking like a yellow legal notepad or the Voice Memos app looking like a real-life recording setup.

It’s understandable why Apple relied so heavily on that design language for the first few iPhones, Ciuccarelli explains.

“It was a new type of phone, and they needed a way of presenting these functions,” he says. “Looking back, in a way it was a bit of a shortcut to introduce as much innovation as possible, but in a way that could be understood by people who have never seen a device like that before.”

It also made sense why the company decided to go all in on flat design several years later once the iPhone and Apple’s lineup of products became more established. It was a bold new approach that certainly got a lot of attention at the time.

Also by abandoning the constraints of skeuomorphism, the company was able to play around a bit more and create a more unified and consistent experience across its range of apps and services. The Notes app no longer looked totally different from the Voice Memos app, for example.

“People knew about [the devices], so there was no need to be realistic—to mimic something that exists in reality anymore,” he says. “We could move to another level.”

But after more than 10 years, Apple’s signature flat design had become a bit stale. At the same time, advancements in computational power have opened up the possibility for more playful and graphically intense interfaces, Ciuccarelli says.

Now with this new interface type, Apple is mixing the best of worlds—not completely abandoning some flat design elements but reintroducing playful animations meant to mimic reality. For example, the lock screen app now has a cool magnifying effect when swiped up.

“We’ve overcome some of the [technical] limitations and finally are getting interfaces designed with the potentiality of the devices but with the idea of adding elements that make them feel organic and living on their own,” he says.

Apple isn’t the only company following this trend. Microsoft is doing something similar with its Fluent Design, and so is Google with its Material 3 expressive.

“There’s a little bit of a trend there, of course,” says Ciuccarelli. “As soon as the big players start doing something, there’s going to be traction.”

Of course, Ciuccarelli says these changes shouldn’t be made haphazardly. They should be made for the benefit of the end user.

“I don’t want to see animations and interactions that don’t really enable something that wasn’t possible before,” he says.

For many Apple users, Apple hasn’t done a very good job of explaining why these changes were made. For its part, Apple says Liquid Glass “brings more focus to content and a new level of vitality.”

Apple will certainly iterate on Liquid Glass in the years to come, just like it has done with all its software in the past, he explains. It’s already scaled back the glassy and transparent look a bit from the previous betas this summer.

“It’s a new world that they are opening up,” Ciuccarelli says.

This story is republished courtesy of Northeastern Global News news.northeastern.edu.