/ Blog / / Blog /Last week, when I posted my Finder icon suggestion on Mastodon, I mentioned how I don’t really like spending my time talking about this kind of stuff. To clarify, I don’t like doing it when I have other things I would much rather be doing. Lately, I have an abundance of things I want to make, so spending any amount of time whining about Liquid Glass feels… bad. It just feels bad.
This is counter to the feeling that I know if I don’t post about it now, it loses all chance for making any impact whatsoever. I know Apple employees are listening. I know they’re seeing what people are posting about. I know that when I write about these kinds of things, they get passed around internally. So part of me feels an obligation to say something.
But my gosh, this is a multi-trillion dollar company that’s getting free design critique from people who love and rely on these platforms the most. For free. Absolutely nothing in return. It’s almost as if we’re all posting about it because of desperation. So many of us are hoping this really isn’t what we have to live with for the next five or ten years. Despite knowing it will take time away from the things we’d much rather be doing, we’re writing blog posts and recording podcasts and posting on social media anyway.
I’ve written two unpublished posts myself, in addition to my previously lengthy “Rose-Gold-Tinted Liquid Glasses.” And I can’t bear to finish either of these. Because I can’t be bothered to wrap it up. My list of things that bother me about this topic drag on so long that 3000 words isn’t enough.
What follows is not really shorter. It’s not really more detailed. It probably makes me sound angry when I’m not. I don’t trust this direction, but I don’t want anyone to read this thinking I’m foaming at the mouth. I just see a lot of problems.
Succinctly, I feel sour about Liquid Glass.
There are many places it’s not working well at all. There are too many examples to list. Text fields in toolbars, like search in Finder or address in Safari. Some sidebars float while others don’t. One app embraces it while another skirts around it. All Apple apps. Some apps have legacy UI paradigms that are being shoehorned into this. For example, the column browse feature in Music. Titlebars which were merged into toolbars years ago are now imperceptible. Who knows where it’s safe to drag a window around now? If you have no platform knowledge, I wouldn’t be surprised if you hadn’t the slightest clue.
App icons are all over the place. In some ways, they gained detail, in others, they lost detail. Almost every icon has an unfortunate concession to fit into this Liquid Glass model. The cover of the Contacts icon overlaps the folder tabs a little bit and blurs them, but the colors kind of abruptly end in an obvious way. The Automator icon feels sophomoric. The Chess icon is a travesty. Why is the checkerboard inset so much? Why is the knight leaning so far forward? It looks like it will fall. Dictionary has a bookmark coming out the top instead of the bottom, because icons aren’t allowed to make sense now. Freeform—which should be an exemplary icon of this style—looks muddier than the previous version. Layering blue and red makes a muddy color instead of a pleasant purple. The Mail icon places so much emphasis on the bottom flap while retaining the most absurd invisible detail, “Apple Park, California 95014” on the upper flap. Preview bucks the entire rule set for Liquid Glass, with a poor rendering of a loupe. We were once spoiled. The Preview icon has always been one of the best-rendered icons on the platform. Until now. QuickTime suggests the cross should overlap while Siri’s infinity doesn’t overlap with the circle. Tips exhibits one of the most unpleasant colors by putting a translucent gray on top of yellow.
I could probably write entire blog posts about each one. I could comp up—in Icon Composer—what I think would be better. But to what end? And why would I do it for free?
If anything, that’s my only real gripe. I don’t think Apple is without talent. I know there are good and smart people with great taste who work at Apple. But somehow, they are not the ones with the power here.
But this is not just a visual thing. It’s not just an app icon thing. It’s not just an accessibility thing. It’s just lots of bad design. Yes, there’s some good design in this release too.
But what I can’t help but notice for 12 years now is that without visual effects serving to differentiate one control from another, we’ve lost immediate recognition of different UI elements. Title bars merged with toolbars. Toolbars merged with tab bars. Is this icon an action or a tab? Will it open a menu or switch the view? It’s anybody’s guess. The conflation of basically all these UI elements with iOS 7 and a step further with Liquid Glass in the 26 release makes me think someone doesn’t understand there is a difference between these kinds of UI elements. Or maybe they don’t care about the difference.
But to me, this all is a pretty major usability difference. And that’s not even getting to how messy Liquid Glass really is when you look at it. And I’ve been looking really closely at it.
Some edges are awfully sharp. Apple is hitting HDR levels with their brightness, but the clipping or masking in some apps for these buttons seems a little crunchy. The black or white gradient they set behind scrolling content areas in addition to blurring the content itself is far messier than just having a divider line and a solid color bar for the UI to sit on. Not to mention, every app seems to struggle with implementation. Some apps, the gradient stops at the sidebar. Others, it stops at the window edge. If an app has a scrolling content view and a scrolling sidebar, does it double up this gradient? Who knows? Oof.
Every time I see an issue, I ask, “What problem is this solving?” And every time, there is no answer. There is seemingly no benefit to any of this. That isn’t to say there aren’t good UI changes in this release. It’s just that some of these visual decisions are impacting the UI. Instead of working together, they seem to be at odds with each other.
“File feedback.” No. You know, I did. I did file a few feedback tickets. But I still think it’s not only a waste of my time, but it’s free labor. For Apple to be good, they need everyone in the community to point out when they’re bad? No thanks.
I mean, the path bar and status bar in Finder don’t know where to end. Are they supposed to go behind the sidebar? If so, why? If not, why not? In fact, why did they change the window construction at all? Now, the primary element is the sidebar. Instead of the toolbar, path bar, and status bar going edge-to-edge horizontally, the sidebar does, vertically. I don’t care that it does as much as I don’t understand the rationale. It feels without purpose.
I know I said this recently, but—maybe the entire thesis of “the UI should get out of the way” is fundamentally flawed. Maybe “apps should focus on content” is wrong. Perhaps apps are the UI. Like, right? Without the UI, the app does not exist. Without the content, however, the app still exists. This cannot be argued.
It’s one thing for QuickTime UI to “get out of the way.” Please, do. I’m watching a video. I don’t need a big honkin’ pause button in the middle of the window, you know? But wait a minute, why is there a big honkin’ pause button in the middle of the window anyway? That’s not how it used to be.
QuickTime play controls used to be in the frame of the UI. That made the video completely uninhibited by any UI whatsoever. In fact, it is mostly recent UI that seems to get in the way by covering up the content. This is a relatively new trend, to set play controls on top of the video, where they fade away after a second or two. I’ve got all the space in the world, why cover up the video at all? Especially on my 16:9 TV, why is there ever a black gradient dimming the paused film to expose play controls that could all fit in the margins without doing so?
To me, modern UI isn’t getting out of the way, it’s often asserting itself over the content it claims to get out of the way of.
The whole narrative here is bogus. Going back to when UI was more visually separated from something like your photos, that puts the focus on the photos, because it differentiates the content area from the UI. Whereas now, it conflates the two. When you blend, blur, and remove the line that separates them, it doesn’t make it more clear. It makes it far fuzzier. It literally is covering up the content.
Apple is so proud of having different levels of the Liquid Glass appearance, one for minor things and one that is more dramatic when the area behind it is dimmed, and their prime example is an over-the-top circular glass pause button that sits on top of a playing video.
And to get away with this effect anyway, you have to blur a lot. You have to darken or lighten a lot. You have to strengthen the edge effects. You have to do a lot of things you otherwise wouldn’t have to do with a much simpler solutions. Things we solved over a decade ago.
And that’s it. That’s the issue I’m seeing. I’m seeing repeated instances of exactly this problem. Overthinking it. Pretending this solves problems rather than creates them. Creating a narrative that supports the direction and presenting it in an overly pretentious way.
At the point when you have to blur the content area to make the UI stand out from it, how can you possibly argue that it gets out of the way? It makes no sense.
It’s not just bad taste. It’s bad judgement. It’s bad design. With the icons, with the UI, with the visual style here, there’s just an abundance of bad direction under the guise of improvement.
And yet, it’s all not that big of a deal. I know it sounds like I care a lot. I do. But I also look at this within the context of my life as a whole, and it is astoundingly unimportant.
I love where I live. I love the people around me. I love the art I make. And Apple can make bad decisions without it impacting those other things. I just resent that discussing this—which I care about—necessarily takes time away from things I care about way more than this.