I’ve always been a huge fan of the skeuomorphic design of the earlier iPhones, they seemed so quirky, and full of character. I loved all the little details, like how the reflections on the chrome volume slider would react and shimmer, as if light were really reflecting off as you moved the phone around. Or how the notes app had little torn pieces of paper from previous notes. I even loved the Rich Corinthian Leather™ of the calendar app, complete with the fancy stitching, it felt luxurious, especially on the first high-DPI “Retina” displays.
When iOS7 came along back in 2013 it was quite a departure from what we had become used to, with seemingly all of that personality thrown away. Gone was all the depth, texture, and character, and in its place we had super thin text, an endless sea of white backgrounds with no shadows. It felt almost “clinical”. This “flat design” has dominated the industry ever since, and although Apple did walk back some of the more extreme design choices in later software releases, I still missed some of the quirky and whimsy designs we used to see; apps that felt like they became the thing they were imitating.
There’s a great quote I read in a blog post called “The Death of Design” that captures how I feel about what we lost with the move to flat design:
We designed things just to see what they might look like. A calendar app, a music player, a weather app made of chrome and glass. Were they practical? Not always. But they were fun. And expressive. And strangely personal. We shared them on Dribbble, rebounded each other’s shots, iterated, and played.
I remember spending hours on the tiniest details of an interface element no one had asked for. Just… exploring. Pushing pixels for the sake of it.
So when rumours started circling that Apple was going to be redesigning things this year, I was excited to watch last week’s WWDC 2025 Keynote to see what they had been working on, as they unveiled this new design language for all of their operating systems.
“Liquid Glass” as they are calling it, seems to be a step in the right direction, where the user interface is composed of pieces of glass that reflect the world around them, responding to and reacting with light how it would behave in the real world.
As an example, we can see a button here reflecting the yellow of the control above it, as two objects would do in real life:
There are also some really nice playful elements, for example the way folders open and close as you hover over them, and convey their state with subtle clues in their icons, for example when you place files in an empty folder, the icon changes to show that, with a little bouncy animation. Elements feel quite expressive and organic. Liquid is the perfect term for it. It’s taking what we’ve seen from the Dynamic Island on iOS, and applying it to the whole system.
I’ve seen people referring to this new expressive era of design as “Neumorphism” or “Physicality”, and I can highly recommend reading Sebastiaan de With’s excellent blog post on the topic of Physicality, over at the Lux blog.
After watching the Keynote, I do have a couple of concerns. The first one is around text legibility. In some of the examples they gave, the text was quite hard to read, especially with busy scenes where your content is very visible through the glass UI controls. Some apps feel better than others in this regard, so I’m hoping that will improve during the betas.
The second concern is around information density, which still seems to be under attack. Apple is clearly going all-in on “consistency” across all their platforms, but I worry that we end up losing something in the process. For example, on macOS we now have iOS-style alerts which are narrow, and stack all the buttons vertically. This feels like an odd choice for a desktop OS which is used exclusively with big widescreen displays. Why not play to the strengths of each platform?
Overall though, I’m really excited to see how this all ends up coming together, especially when they’ve finished polishing it for release this autumn, and I can’t wait to try it out for myself.
ryBlog 