Liquid Glass
from a typography perspective

There are principles in typography that, due to their functionality, can be applied to both type design and user interface design. In this context, I want to talk about the glass material in the new macOS/iOS 26 design language. I remember watching the WWDC 2025 presentation in the summer and noting that Liquid Glass felt fruity and bold, like something I would expect from Apple. However, one thing is the impression of the presentation, and another is the personal interaction with the interface. So I recently updated my devices to version 26.3 and can finally form my own opinion.

Despite the loud discussions about the readability of text in the new interface, I personally did not encounter any such problems, which are apparently already fixed as of version 26.3. The panels and buttons floating above the content are a significant change that takes some getting used to, but at first glance it feels natural. During the first weeks of getting used to it, the glass material takes up a bit of attention, but for now I have to admit that the new approach, although not completely polished, feels really modern. I glance over the app icons and realize I forgot to put on my glasses. But wait, I didn't. So why do I think the pictograms on the new app icons look blurry?

Optical Size

Typography is not just about rules and rhythm. It is also about the optical perception of text, which, when reading, is more important than mathematically correct letterforms. It is also about the perception of text at different scales. Fonts that work great in headlines are likely to be overloaded and difficult to read in small text — because the scale of perception is important. Interface design works on the same principle of the scale of perception — small elements need rougher, simpler shapes, more contrast, less decoration. So they need to be designed with the (physical) scale in mind, at which they will be perceived by the user.

Liquid Glass looks good on panels and buttons that have enough area to reveal the qualities of the glass material, while the pictograms on the icons often have quite small elements. On the iPhone screen, some icon shapes can have an area of ​​less than a millimeter, which is not enough to perceive the material as glass, and instead the shape can lose contrast and looks blurry. This is exactly where scale and deviations from the rules are important — just like in typography.

Material operands

The glass material, in addition to panels and buttons, is also applied to all new system icons, which gives them a stylistic kinship. However, it does not look good everywhere, and some icons seem blurry. It is worth defining operands that are interconnected and together affect the perception of the surface material — these are surface area, transparency, facet, color contrast. A wider surface area can afford less color contrast and more pronounced facet, while small elements with a small area should have more contrast / less transparency / and sometimes no facet. It looks a bit complex, but this complexity in the design creates simplicity of perception for the user.

In fact, some new app icons like Weather, App Store, Preview, Passwords, Journal, Files, Health work great because their pictograms have good color contrast or simple shapes with the large surface area. But in the icons of the apps Photos, Reminders, Mail, the shapes of the pictograms get lost or become blurry. They are the ones that catch the eye.

The most pronounced sense of blurriness is in the Reminders icon, where small opaque round layers are superimposed on each other, which on the scale of normal perception looks like a radial gradient. In this case, the problem lies in the surface area size and transparency. Solution #1: It would be enough to increase the size of the outer circles by about half, and then the eye would be able to separate the layers into separate shapes instead of perceiving them as gradient gradations. Solution #2: It would be a good idea to abandon the double circles, leaving only one layer, that is, reduce the number of small elements.

The situation is more complex with the Photos app. Historically, the icon has colored petals that overlap each other, but now we add transparency and a facet. The red and blue petals still have enough contrast with the background, while the yellow and green ones are lost, and it is the facet that causes the loss of contrast. A possible solution would be to remove the light outline (the facet that reflects light) around the petals, either exclusively or completely, which would increase the contrast between the shape and the background.

Variations

The difficulty in implementing the above solutions is that in macOS the user can change the size of the Dock, thereby choosing their own scale of perception of application icons. So it cannot be said that icons are something that we see only at one fixed scale like in iOS. The simplest solution would be to create two versions of icons — detailed for large and simple for small scale. This approach is sometimes used in logo design. However, how to determine the boundary when the pictogram should change its shape, and how to do it seamlessly?

Here another typographic mechanism can come in handy — variability. Just as a variable font adapts the shape of letters depending on the optical size (font size), so pictograms on icons can adapt to the scale of the interface, varying between two states — detailed and simplified. The practical idea is to, along with reducing the size of the icon, also increase the transparency of the facet around its shapes. And this approach can indeed be implemented, because new icons consist of separate layers that are rendered in real time with material properties applied. However, the current Icon Composer (or operation system) does not work with the concept of optical size, and this is exactly where Apple should start looking at adapting the new surface material to different scales of perception.

Retrospective

Apple is known for its attention to detail, but none of their products were perfect at the time of their release. Apple rather uses the principle of sculpture, gradually polishing and honing existing things with each iteration. My first Mac was the Mac Mini in 2005, and I even traveled to Kyiv for the first iPhone in 2007. I remember the biggest changes in the design of Apple’s operating systems — Snow White, Skeuomorphism, Flat Design, Liquid Glass. Each of these transitions were perceived as a betrayal of the Human Interface Guidelines, and each time the phrase “it was better before” was heard. This is repeated every time, because people do not like to leave their comfort zone and rethink things, because “why change something that already works well”. But stagnation is the opposite of movement and risk. And by the way — Think Different. Apple systematically improves all its innovations, bringing them to practical logic. In the six months since its launch, Liquid Glass has already undergone a number of changes and has become much more adaptive to the content it interacts with. This is just the beginning of its journey, and I believe that designers will pay attention to the icons as well. Nuances are important. Just as each person needs an individual approach in communication, so design must work in a bunch of its own contexts — task, environment, scale, contrast, etc. And some things take a while to be properly seen and corrected.