Apple Updated Its Human Interface Guidelines for Liquid Glass ⇥ developer.apple.com
Inspired by the depth and dimensionality of visionOS, the new design takes advantage of Apple’s powerful advances in hardware, silicon, and graphics technologies. The new material, Liquid Glass, is translucent and behaves like glass in the real world. Its colour is informed by surrounding content and intelligently adapts between light and dark environments. Born out of a close collaboration between the design and engineering teams, Liquid Glass uses real-time rendering and dynamically reacts to movement with specular highlights. This creates a lively experience that makes using iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV even more delightful.
There is guidance on using Liquid Glass in the Materials section of the updated Human Interface Guidelines, and information for designers and developers deeper in its updated documentation. Of note:
App icons take on a design that’s dynamic and expressive. Updates to the icon grid result in a standardized iconography that’s visually consistent across devices and concentric with hardware and other elements across the system. App icons now contain layers, which dynamically respond to lighting and other visual effects the system provides. iOS, iPadOS, and macOS all now offer default (light), dark, clear, and tinted appearance variants, empowering people to personalize the look and feel of their Home Screen.
Designers or developers can create these layered icons with a new app called Icon Composer.
Like every year, I have been a big dummy and have installed the iOS beta on day one on my only iPhone. This is a very stupid thing to do. But try to stop me from playing around with Notification Centre’s Liquid Glass sheet. It is tremendous fun — truly the kind of thing that is difficult to replicate or appreciate without using it directly.
Whether it fixes my biggest bugbear is an different question.