Liquid Glass is a Bad Paradigm
With the new design of Apple’s OSes 26 now revealed to the world, opinions are out. My take isn’t about the details and problems of the design, those will change based on feedback as new beta versions are released over the coming months. My take is that both liquid and glass are bad choices for user interface elements that are touched.
Liquid
Humans don’t generally manipulate liquids with their hands. Not with any precision and certainly not regularly. It’s a strange, unnatural choice to have liquid be a defining characteristic of a touchable element.
Glass
Glass is used where transparency is needed or desired. The difficulty with glass is precisely that it is transparent. The front of most Apple Stores is clear glass. This is problematic to the point that Apple has needed to place dashes on the glass to prevent people from walking into it. Birds are still a problem.
Humans do touch glass every day. But it’s always as a transparent cover to something else and it’s always a compromise (ever cleaned grease off your touchscreens or Windexed the windows in your house). Sure you touch glass on your phone, but your mind believes you’re touching what under it- a button or toggle. You’re not touching something that is trying to be a piece of glass, the glass is an obscure layer necessary for structure and technical reasons.
Low Quality Glass
The coding and technical execution of the design choice cannot be argued. Beta bugs aside, the animations are smooth and the combination of blurring, distortion, and whatever other visual modifications are occurring behind the scenes, are impressive. Again, it’s the design choices that are dubious.
This screenshot shows the Liquid Glass design being pulled down over Apple’s keynote demonstrating the inspiration for Liquid Glass. The colors on the edge are what you would expect to see on low quality glass, or even plastic. It’s more of a prism effect than one of chromatic aberration, but it’s not that prismatic effect of a faceted Swarovski crystal, it’s the effect of a plastic bingo chip.
I don’t know what the person in this video is holding. I don’t own one of whatever that is. I’ve never touched one. But the digital version of it is an integral part of the OSes 26. It’s unintuitive and… it should be better.